The Joe Rogan Experience - #1661 - Rick Doblin

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Rick Doblin is the founder and Executive Director of the non-profit psychedelic research and educational organization, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). http://maps.org/join

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day very good to see you my friend so it's so great to be here again your tireless work has not gone unnoticed i mean i'm i'm beyond thankful that MAPS are out there and that you've done this incredible job. And we were just describing the genius of first doing it with people that no one can deny need help. using psychedelics to help them get over their horrible issues, that it's one of the best ways to sort of ingratiate or let people know the powerful benefits of psychedelics and do it to people that you wouldn't expect to be connected with psychedelics ordinarily, right? Well, the most unusual people are police officers. And so we've actually had police officers in our studies. And we even have a police officer full time who's also a psychotherapist.

And he's going through our program to learn how to give MDMA therapy to other police officers. Wow. And I met his police chief several times and persuaded and told him about our full training program. And one of the steps is where we have a protocol from the FDA where therapists can volunteer to receive MDMA themselves as part of the training. And so the police chief gave his police officer permission to volunteer to take MDMA. Wow. So we're actually helping give MDMA to police officers to give it to other police officers with trauma. That would be amazing. You know what we really need to do?

Get it to prisoners. Exactly. And prison guards. Yeah. And they're also very traumatized. Oh, yeah. I can imagine. Yeah.

There was a 35-year follow-up study I did to Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard. He did the Concord Prison Experiment. to Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard. He did the Concord Prison Experiment, and that was to give psilocybin to prisoners who are getting ready to be released. And the goal was to see if they could produce pro-social experiences that would then help reduce recidivism. And the study was unfortunately, it was promoted as very, very successful. I thought I was going to do a follow-up to bring light to one of the most important psychedelic studies ever. But as I got more into it, it turned out that Timothy Leary had fudged the data. Oh, no. Yeah, it was really disappointing.

What did he do? Well, for example, the longer you're out of prison, the more likely you are to go back. So his group, on average, had been out of prison 10 months, and he compared it with a group of people that had been out of prison 24 months. And that was published in this obscure British criminology journal, and nobody had bothered to check to see if he was doing a fair comparison. And so when I started doing this follow-up, I was just like, how could he have done that? And the data that was from the prior prisoners from Concord Prison up to two years, it also showed how they were at different time points, including at the 10-month time point, and the results were the same at the 10-month time point, and the results were the

same at the 10-month point. So it's obvious if you compare people who've been out of prison longer with people who've been out of prison shorter, you know, it's just not a fair comparison. The other thing he did, not to rag on Timothy Leary, but I think he did a lot of great things. But the other thing he did was he said that a lot of these people were gone back to prison because they had minor parole violations and that they were supervised more carefully because they had done psilocybin in prison and that they were just recidivism because of minor things. And so when I got into the prison system records, it turns out that they did have their parole violated, but that's because they had committed new crimes for which they were later convicted. But what he realized is that you can't

just help people have these experiences and then let them out of prison and assume that they'll just be fine. You need aftercare. You need support groups. And so he had started to create that, and that's when he got kicked out of Harvard, and then they fell apart. So my conclusion of the follow-up study was that he had basically committed scientific fraud, and it wasn't really true what he had said, but it didn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that you can't rely over much on just the psychedelic experience. You have to have It means that you can't rely over much on just the psychedelic experience. You have to have supportive aftercare and group support.

And if you do that, I think it could potentially work. So we have been talking to various people who want to do work with prisoners or recently released. It's hard to get permission to do work inside prisons because of the question whether prisoners can give informed consent, whether there's pressure on them to do it or if they do it, they think they'll get out sooner or something. But it would be perfect when you're in prison to be doing this inner work to explore how you ended up in prison and the traumas that maybe made you commit certain kind of crimes. Yeah. I think that same argument about prisoners and psilocybin and aftercare, you could apply that maybe to a lesser extent to just the general public. One of the arguments that I've had, not the arguments I've had, but the conversations I've had with people,

the argument about psychedelics not being life-changing, people will say, well, I know a lot of people who've done psychedelics and they're basically the same person you know they have one experience and they get back to it and the way i've described it is that i think that a real profound breakthrough psychedelic experience is like pressing control alt delete for your brain and when you reboot you have a fresh desktop it's clean but you have one folder on the desktop that says, My Old Bullshit. And most people open up that folder and just get comfortable with their old bullshit. So after the experience, this thing where you sort of have to rethink how you view everything, and you have this renewed perspective,

you have this completely different view of the world but it's confusing you don't have scaffolding to travel on you don't have like a you don't have a clear pathway but it's really easy to slip into your own thing and start doing all the same dumb shit that you were doing before. And I think for prisoners, it's probably profoundly more difficult because not only are you outside, not only have you been incarcerated, which has got to be incredibly traumatic. You've been locked into a cage. They take away all your freedom.

They tell you what to do, but then you become accustomed to that way of life. And there's comfort in the fact that you are told what to do and you know what every day holds for you then you go out in the world you're out in the free world and you don't know how to get by and it's really hard to get an apartment because you're a felon it's really hard to get a job because you're a felon and then someone who you know from the old life is doing something illegal and they invite you to join in and you say, well, this is my chance to score. I can get a little bit of money. Maybe then I can get an apartment.

Maybe then I can get back on track. And the next thing you know, you're living a life of crime again. Yeah, we make it so hard for people to reintegrate into society. Yeah. And I think one of the problems from the 60s was this idea of, you know, one dose miracle cure. That's all you need. Yeah. And I think what we've come to understand is that it's not that way. Occasionally it can be,

but mostly it's not. And you need this support afterwards and you need to integrate it. And what we've also learned from neuroscience is that you're actually, neuroplasticity, that these psychedelics help you rewire your brain in new ways, but you have to reinforce that. It's just not automatic. It's not about the drug. It's about the therapy that the drug helps make more effective. And people have placed undue confidence, you could say, in the drug itself. Yeah, you need a new pathway. Once you've gotten off of your old pathway, the psychedelics jolt you into this new realm. But if you don't have a new pathway, then you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone. And if your comfort zone

is alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your life and taking pills, and you're going to go right back to that to that yeah there's one example of one person where it was like a one dose miracle cure it's really rare but I'll just explain a bit he was a veteran and had PTSD I talked about Tony Macy during my TED talk but he had this sense that he had been disabled with PTSD for years because of friends of his that had been killed, all the violence that he saw when he was in Iraq. And under the influence of MDMA, he had this realization that there was something good about the PTSD. He was getting a benefit from it, which was it was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died, that he was connected to their memory and that he was

suffering. And it was a way to be bonded still with them. But then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his friends who had died and to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life. They didn't have life anymore. They would want him to live as fully as possible. And he realized there's another way to honor his friends, which is to live. And he thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And in that moment, he cured himself of PTSD.

Then he said, I'm taking opiates for pain, but I don't really think I'm taking it for pain. I'm thinking more about it as an escape. I don't need the opiates anymore. And then he said, I don't need this MDMA anymore either. I'm done. I want to drop out of the study. This was his first of, I don't need this MDMA anymore either. I'm done. I want to drop out of the study. This was his first of what was going to be three MDMA sessions. And he dropped out. And we said, sure, it's all voluntary. But if you will just do the outcome measures, that would

help us. And he agreed to do that. And at the two-month follow-up, no PTSD. And then around 11 months, when we have the 12-month follow-up, he started thinking, well, maybe I'd like another MDMA experience. I said, well, we can't quite do that. You're out of the protocol. You've dropped out. But at least it's only for PTSD, this study. Let's see what your scores are at the 12 months and no PTSD. And that was about nine, 10 years ago.

I've been in touch with him recently. He's doing great. But it was this realization that he was able to make under the influence of one experience of MDMA that enabled him to reinterpret the way he could be loyal to his friends who had died. That's amazing. And it makes sense. It completely makes sense that that would be one of the reasons why a soldier would have PTSD. You talk to soldiers that experience combat duty, one of the things they say is there's this insane, profound connection with their fellow soldiers. And when one of them is killed and they survive, they have this survivor syndrome, this survivor's guilt, and it haunts them. And if they could honor the fallen soldiers by living their best life and not being in constant trauma, it would be better for everybody.

And that is what their brothers and sisters would want. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then they also have this sense that many of them feel like now that they've found healing with psychedelics, that they have this sense of guilt in a sense that they're so many of their comrades have not had that opportunity for healing. Yeah. So many of them now become more advocates for helping others from the military traumatized in that way, get access to psychedelics to kind of bring them all back home. That's amazing. It makes sense. I learned a lot from the one MDMA trip that I had. The one MDMA trip I had, it made me realize how insecure I am. Like, I didn't realize it. Like,

I always thought that the way, it's not that I didn't realize that I had insecurities, like everybody has insecurities, but I didn't realize how they affect every single interaction that I would have with people and that kind of everybody does. You're always wary of how someone's going to view you and how you're communicating with them. And, you know, is this like, are we safe talking to each other? Are you going to be mean to me? Am I going to be mean to you? Like there's this weird tension that human beings have when you first meet people. But these people that I met when we were doing MDMA together, like no one had any fear.

No one had any. We were all holding hands and talking. it was this bizarrely free experience where it made me realize like, wow, like most of the time we talk to people, we have these guards up, we have these walls up and you kind of have to, I guess, because some people have nefarious intentions and, you know, sometimes life can be dangerous. But it made me think, boy, if you can get this to prisoners, you think boy if you get this to prisoners you know if you get because like how many of them are products of traumatic childhoods almost all of them yes right not all of them but many of them most of them yeah that's the the argument like the determinism versus free will argument as well that we want to look at someone who's a person who's a criminal and say

oh this person's a piece of shit. They're a criminal. One of the things that happened to me as a father is seeing, you know, my children go from being babies to being, you know, little people that I'm talking to and then, you know, even young adults. It makes you realize, like, oh, these are are all babies like those people in prisons you go by a prison you see those those people that are all like trapped in that yard with barbed wire fence those are babies they're babies that stayed alive they were at one point in time someone's

beautiful innocent child and then the worst shit happened to them the worst environments the worst parenting the worst trauma maybe sexual abuse maybe assault maybe of drug abuse maybe criminal justice abuse maybe you know all sorts of chaos that can happen when you're living in these crime infested, gang ridden neighborhoods that a lot of these people come from. And all you see around you is this. This is what you're modeling. You're modeling crime and criminals. And then all of a sudden you're in jail and then people go, well, put them in jail and lock them all up forever. And you got this sort of hard line Republican way of thinking. This is like a completely non-empathetic, non-compassionate

way of looking at babies, which is what they are. They're just babies that got, look, you and I are lucky. We're babies, but we made it to this point in our lives in a pretty good state, you know, without some bumps and bruises along the way, but here are those people did not and the only way that i could think of to really reset who they are is through psychedelics i don't think there's anything else that's going to really push them into a new realm of understanding of their position in life and how they got to where they are well i think there are other therapies that are effective there are other ways good i don't think so i don't think so and i think that are effective there are other ways good I don't think so I don't I don't think so and I think that's profound when we combine them with psychedelics

yes then you get to go really deep but I social programs yes programs where they're counseled programs where someone can say hey man I've done this I used to be a thief I used to be whatever and now here I'm not I can help help you. I got out of jail. I made better of my life. We can do that with you. And we all have that capacity if we're traumatized to do things that we're not proud of, that we're ashamed of. We can all be twisted in certain ways. So I just feel so grateful for my parents, who I had very loving parents who supported me to, I had very loving parents who supported me to even when I broke their hopes for me when I was 17 years old in college and starting to do LSD. And I'm the oldest of four kids.

And in the middle of my first year of college, I called up my parents and said, I'm going to drop out of college. I want to study LSD and I want you to pay for it. What were you in college for? Well, this was 1971 that I started, and 1972 is when I had this conversation with my parents. I was studying psychology and Russian. I was very interested in the other, so I had studied Russian in high school. Actually, I had gone to Russia. My parents sent me to Russia in 1970 for the summer to learn Russian. And that's actually where I first started working in the underground, you could say. My parents gave me some prayer books because we're Jewish, and prayer books were forbidden in Russia. And they gave me these prayer books to give to these

guys at the synagogue. And when I got there, I was with about 60 high school students, and we could speak passable Russian. And so a bunch of the young Russian black market kids came up to us. Again, 1970, we had the psychedelic revolution in America, and they just had repression. And so they wanted to buy our shirts, our clothes, blue jeans, anything that looked like America. They would pay rubles. And rubles were worthless outside of Russia because they wanted to block anybody from escaping. You'd have to escape with no money. So we made, me and two other guys gathered all the stuff from all these other high school students. And we made thousands and thousands, thousands of rubles. And we knew that we couldn't take it home or anything. And so I went to go

meet this guy at the synagogue to give him these books in Moscow. And he said, we're being watched. Don't do it here, but let me meet you at a subway station at this amount of time at this station. And I said, I also got all these rubles to give you. And so we had this meeting and I was just 16. And I was like, hey, if they catch me, you me, I'm a dumb kid, they'll just send me home. So I was kind of fearless in that way. And we made this transfer, and I gave him this bunch of rubles and the prayer books. But it was my parents kind of that sent me on this mission, and that was my first underground activity was against the Russians, against the communists. And it was

very enlightening. But one of the things that was most enlightening for me was I took a walk on the beach with a Russian girl who worked at the school that we were going to. And I just had this conversation with her, you know, primitive because I wasn't that great in Russian. But I was just like, you don't want to kill me. I don't want to kill you. What does, you know, because this was the height of the Cold War and all of these, could we destroy the world? Not all that long after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I just thought, you know, you're just a person. I'm just, you know, our governments might be in conflict.

But I had this image that all the Russians are horrible and hateful and they all want to kill us. And it was extremely eye-opening in terms of who's the other. Right, right. And I found the other was me, was just like me. I had this other experience I just wanted to share about. This was a DMT experience where I realized that we all have the capacity for evil if we aren't careful, in a sense. So the DMT kind of dissolved my ego very quickly. It was the first time I ever did DMT. It was sitting in a circle with a group of people at Esalen. This was Terrence McKenna. You did DMT with Terrence McKenna? Yeah. Yeah. And Ralph Metzner from Harvard.

And we would, there was about eight of us and we would, each of us, it takes about 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes. So we, one person would do it, would then sort of close their eyes, lie down, and come back after 15 minutes or so, and then tell the story about what happened, and then we'd pass the pipe to the next person. And this was like a whole evening of DMT stories. So my DMT experience was this. I saw this horizontal line, then I saw a vertical line then I saw color it turned red then it turned into cubes

like squares and then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting that was just and then I was gone and it was just it didn't make sense then I was gone

and then I just had this insight that in the deepest recesses of who I think I am in this inner voice that's kind of always talking to you that I was using English and I didn't invent English it's all the always talking to you, that I was using English. And I didn't invent English.

It's all the product of all these people that came before me. So even in my most inner private self, I'm intermixed with everybody else and everything that came before me. And I had this beautiful experience of going back to the Big Bang and all of this kind of sweep of evolutionary history. And I'm part of everything and everything's part of me and it was all this beautiful stuff. And then I realized this sort of logical part of my mind was like, well, if everything's part of you and you're part of everything, then Hitler is part of you too. It's inner. And that was very shattering for me. That was in the DMT experience. That was in the DMT. Did you see Hitler in the experience? I did. Like a million golden Hitlers floating around you? Well, that we all have that

capacity that if we want to claim that we're connected with everything, that it's not just the evil out there, that it's potentially in me. And it was very shattering. And the next day, we did ketamine. And so this is where I did more see Hitler. So this is actually an experience that has helped me with my political strategy in a way of what MAPS is doing. It's both drug development and drug policy reform. So under this experience, the next, it was very depressing and shattering to realize that I couldn't just say all the evils out there, that I have this capacity, that Hitler's inside me. So the next day under ketamine, I was hovering above and behind Hitler as he's giving one of

these speeches, like the Nuremberg rally kind of things. And the ketamine gave me a bit of remove so I didn't freak out. I was there, but I was not there. So I didn't feel vulnerable in that way. And I saw him doing this speech, and I'm thinking, how do I get into his head? How do I help him not want to murder and kill? And, you know, what can we do to, you know, undo this evil? And then I saw this, the Heil Hitler salute near the end of his speech. And he would go, you know, put up his hand like that. And then everybody in the crowd would do it back to him.

And I felt like it was the one pushing out this energy and then the many pushing it back to him and giving him – and they would go back and forth and the intensity was kind of increasing. And at that point, I was just realizing there's no way to get into his head, that he's – it has to be voluntary and that he was getting so much from it that he wouldn't. And I felt this panic rising above me, and I felt that if I were to panic, I would never be able to be effective in the world, that I would just turn away from that. And then with ketamine, you can still breathe. And so I realized that if I just breathe, that might help me deal with this fear.

breathe. And so I realized that if I just breathe, that might help me deal with this fear. And I started deep breathing. And then came this idea that, ironically, rather than trying to change the mind of the one, we need to change the mind of the many, and that they don't get as much out of it as Hitler did, that they're giving away their power to him. And so that's where we need mass mental health. So you hear a lot of people, I had a chance to talk to Steve Jobs for an hour a long time ago, but he was like stuck in the 60s in a way. He was like, God, if we could just give all these politicians LSD. And I think, yeah, that might be good, but they might resist it. But really we have to base this new compassion and spirituality in the masses, in millions, tens of millions of people.

This Hitler thing, can I ask you, like, when, I've never done ketamine, so when you're having this experience, what is, what is it like? Do you realize that you are in a psychedelic experience, that you're in some sort of a hallucination, or does it actually feel like you are there? Like, what is... It felt like I was there, but I had this sense that I was somehow or other also not there and removed. But you knew that you were tripping at the time, do you think? I lost that for a while, and as the panic kind of built up, I had this thought, I can breathe. So I did have that sense that I was on a drug and that if I were just to modulate my breathing and that would help relax me. So I had that thought, but I felt like I was really there.

And it was way, you know, I've seen movies of World War II and I've seen movies of Hitler giving speeches, but I was never as emotionally connected to it and in the moment as I was during this ketamine experience. So it was kind of a dual situation where I was there, but a part of me felt removed and safe. And this thought like, okay, just breathe. But I never had that insight before about the Heil Hitler salute and how this energy exchange between and how the rallies were very dramatic. And that's where he cemented his power through these rallies. Well, you know, Hitler was on all kinds of drugs. Yes. Yeah.

Um, there was, God, I keep forgetting who told us that story, Jamie, but there was a story about Hitler convincing Mussolini. Do you remember? I've tried,

I've tried to look it up and find it. I can't, I can't find it. It might not have even happened on a podcast. That's the problem. I have so many conversations and my memory is just so full. There's no room. I got folders stuffed all over the place.

I don't know where anything is. But the story was that Hitler was in the middle of campaigning and he was completely exhausted and he was supposed to meet Mussolini and he was going to not meet Mussoligning and he was completely exhausted and he was supposed to meet Mussolini and he was going to not meet Mussolini because he was so exhausted. But then they shot him up with testosterone and liquid cocaine. And when they did that, he was just bouncing off the walls and he cornered Mussolini and talked to him for five hours and convinced him him for five hours and convinced him not to leave the effort, not to leave the war effort. And he sort of, one of the things that this story was basically pointing to was that much of Hitler's mania and much of this rabid attack that he had put on the rest of the Western

world was fueled by amphetamines and cocaine and testosterone, and that they just kept injecting him with all this shit that gave him this insane confidence and insane maniacal aggression. And it completely makes sense if you think about what he did. And then we also know that the kamikazes were on amphetamines and many of the Nazi soldiers were on amphetamines. Well, the blitzkrieg, how they would do that, this kind of they were days and days on amphetamines. And then that promotes aggression as well.

And just psychotic delusions. Yeah. And he had this delusion of creating this master race, which is and that's the most cocaine idea of all time right like this idea like we're gonna engineer the greatest human race ever and you know and and to be able to look at that idea from this cocaine fueled or amphetamine fueled perspective to the point where you're willing to commit genocide in order to accomplish your goal. Yeah, drugs were a big factor in the Third Reich. Yeah. Very much so.

Also, we know that John Kennedy was given amphetamines. That's Dr. Feelgood, right? Yeah. Dr. Feelgood was a legitimate doctor that would run around and give people amphetamines. I found it. What did you find there, buddy? The story? Oh, where is this from?

Historyhit.com. Did Hitler's drug problem change the course of history? He got a shot of this stuff called Eucadol. Okay. Hitler took Eucadol for the first time before the dreaded meeting. His mood changed immediately. Everyone was very happy that the Fuhrer was back in the game. His enthusiasm was such that on the way to the airport to fly to his meeting with Mussolini,

he demanded a second shot. The first shot had been administered subcutaneously, but the second was intravenous. It was even better. During the meeting with Mussolini, Hitler was so energized that he pretty much just shouted for three hours. There are several reports from that meeting, including an American intelligence report, to the embarrassment of everyone in attendance. Hitler didn't stop talking throughout the entire duration of the meeting. Mussolini couldn't get a word in edgeways, meaning he wasn't able to voice his concerns

about the war effort and perhaps raise the prospect of Italy leaving. So Italy stayed. At the end of the day, Hitler told Morel, the success of today is totally yours. Wow. So Morel must have been the doctor. Yes. Eucadil. Find out what that shit is. Okay. Eucadil is similar to heroin. In fact, it's stronger than heroin. It also has an effect that heroin doesn't have. It makes you euphoric. But I think they shot him up with some other stuff, too. The word was that I'd read cocaine and oxycodone. I just hit Google, and that's what comes up. Oh, interesting.

But I had heard- And cocaine, it says there, 5 milligrams of cocaine, too. Where does it say that? Under DIX Wikipedia there. Oh, is that what's in there? It's meth and coke mixed together. Oh, so that's what Eucadil is. Okay. That makes sense. So Eucadil is five milligrams of cocaine and three milligrams of methamphetamine. Wow. So DIX, it's a methamphetamine-based experimental performance enhancer developed by Nazi Germany.

Wow. So that's the stuff. Yeah, so maybe we can do the other with MDMA and certain kind of psychedelics to help people feel that there's other ways than violence to try to achieve their goals. Well, I just think he was – I don't – you know, I think – what does it say here, Jim? He could march 90 kilometers a day without rest. What is that? Using.

How many miles is that? So 100 miles is 60, 100 kilometers is 60 miles? Wow. That's a lot. So, like, a human being is essentially the product of all the chemicals that are running through your veins. It's your neurochemistry, your biochemistry, all of the nutrients you've eaten, food, water, and an imbalance of any of those things can severely change the way you think or behave. Our brain is a drug factory.

People talk about a world without drugs. Our brain is a drug factory. Yeah. And the people that talk about no drugs, you know, generally they enjoy some drugs. Oh, tobacco, alcohol. Yeah. Yeah. Carl Hart is one of my favorite people to talk to.

Do you know that Carl Hart, we've invited him to join the board of directors of MAPS. Amazing. He's going through this six-month process of getting to know us and we're getting to know him. He's going to come to our board of directors meeting in a couple weeks. Yeah, Carl Hart is fantastic. He's amazing. He's a perfect example of someone who had a certain perspective before he became a research scientist and thought of drugs as being all negative connotations, thought of them as being addictive, terrible for you, but then through actual rigorous study like actually understanding and studying the effects of drugs then became to change his

perspective based on data and then realize like oh no no no this is this is most of what we think about drugs is incorrect or is propaganda and to have the courage to be a professor right and to be a legitimate scholar and have the courage to say that he enjoys heroin. And then he likes to sniff heroin and it helps relationships with his wife and it helps his friendships. And I was like, that is, because he's just being honest, you know?

He's being courageous, incredibly courageous. Incredibly courageous and honest. And also he's so fucking smart that when he says it, you realize like, okay, this is not some crackpot perspective this is an actual scholar who's telling you how this stuff works and you should probably listen because he's got the courage to do this in the face of all of the propaganda and the current cultural narrative which is that drugs ruin lives and he's saying no no they don't ruin, they don't ruin

lives. They don't ruin my life. And you look at his life, his life is great. He's not getting ruined by drugs. He's using them responsibly. He's using them like an adult. Yeah. One of the things I talked before is this dual strategy of maps, the drug development, the pharmaceutical drug development and drug policy reform. And so Carl is one of the leading advocates for drug policy reform. And that's why we're trying to see if he'll come join the board. And one of the things that he asked us to do is to look at our employee manual, our handbook. We've got about 120 people now in the MAPS. And then we also have the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, which is our for-profit, but benefit maximizing, not profit maximizing. And he said, because we don't do drug testing,

it might not be surprising to anybody, but we don't do drug testing for employees. It's all about performance. It's not about what drugs you take. And so Carl wanted us to take a look at how we described that. And we just emphasized that even more, that even if for cause, we'll never drug test people. It's about their performance. And then we put in there that some of the things that I really like to do, I just wanted to be there, that we call them smokable tasks. So we permit people to smoke pot or do things during work. Some people like to microdose. Some people like to do different things. And we just say, if it enhances your performance, fine. If it makes you unable to do your work, that's not good,

but it's not about what you do. And then one of my favorite things, actually, and we put this in the employee manual, is that one of the smokable tasks for me is strategizing, is getting high and meeting with MAPS staff. And some of us will get high, some of us won't, but then we'll just strategize. So we put that in the employee handbook, that it's okay to smoke pot at work if you're doing strategizing or other kind of things. And Carl was really a big factor in sort of articulating that even more clearly. It would be very disappointing if you guys did drug tests. Wouldn't it be terrible? Can you imagine if MAPS is drugged? Piss in the cup, Wilson.

What? I thought I was working at MAPS. And we will let people work with us who don't do drugs. Right. But you don't want people just showing up drunk either. Unless they think somehow or other that enhances their performance. I mean, again, it's not about responsibility. It's about responsibility and it's about what particular tasks. Like some people can really do spreadsheets better when they're high because it helps them focus. Some people, they would just lose track of all the numbers. Right. That's me. But writing jokes, I feel like marijuana is a superpower. I feel like it gives you these new ideas that I don't know where ideas come from.

They come from the ether, right? You're pulling them out of cultural references. You're pulling them out of life experiences, creativity. There's so many different. And then a jolt of marijuana puts you in a completely different realm of experiences and ideas. It puts you in this different place. And I always feel like other ideas are accessible when you're on marijuana that aren't anywhere else. Carl Sagan shared that perspective. Yes, yes, he was a daily pot smoker.

And he had to hide that because he was worried he wouldn't be part of the space program if it was clear that he was smoking pot all the time. Yes, yes. And wasn't there like something that he was, there was something where he was denied something because of his use of marijuana, because his stated use of marijuana? I forget what it was about. I'm not sure. One of his best friends was a Dr. Lester Grinspoon, who was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. And so Lester was kind of a mentor of mine. He recently died.

And Lester had a book of stories about people who had used marijuana for different purposes. But for Carl, he had him, but he hid his name. It was an anonymous report because he was worried about what would happen if he was so out about it. But yeah, that statement that he made about the use of marijuana was through a pseudonym, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Through pseudonym. But it's so well written, like the way he described it and that these experiences are available through cannabis that wouldn't be available to him. Yeah. There's a line of research called semantic priming. And what that means is that if I say night, you're normally going to say day. There's certain number of kind of associations that we normally have to a word. So semantic is like a

word and you prime somebody and then you see how they respond. And so there's been research done with psilocybin when people are under the influence of psilocybin. And then you give them a certain word. And what they found is that people have a wider range of associations to that word when they're under the influence of psilocybin. And the same would be true for marijuana. So that you have access to a broader sense of connections. It's not your normal pathways. And that's where I think creativity can come from. It's not your normal pathways.

And that's where I think creativity can come from because you're able to look at things in a new way. And the old patterns that are so reinforced, the psilocybin or the cannabis or other things, make broader range of semantic priming. Interesting. Semantic priming. Yeah. And what is the discipline of semantic priming? Is this like clearly? Well, it's like cognitive neuroscience. Right.

You know, how do our brains process information? And normally, you know, we have certain kind of go-to associations with things. And then under the influence of these psychedelics or cannabis, you have just a wider range of associations. psychedelics or cannabis, you have just a wider range of associations. And also you're not seeing from the normal perspective. And that promotes new ideas. And not all of new ideas are great, but if we're stuck in the same old ideas, you're not going to be able to filter new ideas to see which ones are really gems. Yeah, it really brings to light this idea that you can't be as balanced a person as you can be

or to sort of try to optimize your perspective on things. You need to have a lot of things in line. Like you need to have your personal relationships in line. You need to have your career goals or at least your path in line. You need to have your physical health in line. Your diet should be in line. The way you view the world, like how you choose to interact with people, you should have sort of an ethic and a scaffolding for that. All these different things. Now, when you add psychedelics to those things, that's when I, at least in my opinion, like from my personal perspective, when I've had the best results is when I've had other things in a good place. or the angst with my current state of my career or life or relationships, instead of looking at it that way,

I've already sort of done work to keep myself in a good place with all those things, and then the psychedelics will sort of reveal more perspective that's available. Yeah. Now, on the other side of that coin is we do psychedelic therapy with people whose lives are in shambles. Yes. And who are traumatized, who are disabled from trauma or who are alcoholics or substance abusers who've lost relationships. And so in those circumstances, they have difficult experiences, but they can process a lot of the pain and the suffering that they're running away from. So I would say that when you say your best experiences, those are like the most enjoyable or the most insightful. in a safe, supportive context with preparation and with the integration that is often overlooked, then they can make major steps to get healthier.

So they can do, it can help them put all those pieces in line in terms of their personal relationships, their career goals, their health goals. Get yourself in a good place that way from these uncomfortable situations that the psychedelics put you in, where you recognize all the things you're doing incorrectly, all the things you're doing that are flawed. Yeah. Now, the way you just described that the MDMA helped you see your insecurities. Yeah. So on the one hand, they bring up the insecurities. They bring up things that would make you normally uncomfortable.

But with MDMA in particular, it reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of the brain. So you have this sense of self-acceptance so that you can see more critical information without it being so painful. Your sense of self, your self-compassion is increased. And so things where you've not done as well as you would have liked, which normally people run away from, you can see that. And also traumatic memories that have been overwhelming for people. That's where people have PTSD. These memories are so traumatic and they feel overwhelming that they can never really fully move past them. It's like the trauma is always about to happen.

They see the whole world through this filter of trauma. They hear noises that remind them of the trauma they triggered. And so this sense of safety in yourself that MDMA can give helps you to deal with these problems. And there was a study that was recently done in England with MDMA for alcohol use disorder. And what it turned out to be a study of helping people deal with their traumas. And that's what led them to run away from these traumas into alcohol, that these emotions were so overwhelming that they couldn't process them. So they thought, I'll drown them out with alcohol. But with the MDMA, they're able, through this reduction

of activity in the amygdala, through this promotion of release of oxytocin, which is the hormone of nursing mothers of love and connection, that you have this sense of safety, self-compassion, as I said, and then you can move into these troubled areas. psychedelics will produce a certain kind of experience for people that have their lives in order, and you can sort of expand. There's others that have their lives in complete disorder, and it's a way to help them to try to get their lives back in order. I've talked to so many people that have gotten their lives in order through step by step. Like one psychedelic experience sort of illuminated all the problems that they have in their life and then they sort of took steps to eventually have more psychedelic experiences and have better choices in their life.

But for the most part, there's not a clear cut, disciplined pathway that exists for people where they can like if you're going to college you take courses you know you have to do your thesis there's all these different things that are kind of laid out to let you know that this is how you get an education when you're trying to get a psychedelic education it's roughshod it's all wild it's you don't know what you're doing you you're taking advice from a bunch of stoners everybody's got their own methods you know you might listen to some great alan watts recording or you know listen to timothy leary or mckenna and you gotta kind of get an idea of maybe how i should oh set and setting okay i'm gonna do it this way. But it would be so beneficial if there were

places where legitimate professionals who have an expertise in psychedelics and perhaps psychology had these psychedelic centers where you could go and have these curated experiences where you're safe. There's a medical staff on hand. You don't have to worry about overdosing. They do the right dose per your body weight and your experience. And if there was a structure in terms of allowing people the space to maybe talk to counselors afterwards and process what that psychedelic experience is

like, and then maybe have someone who could help you devise a strategy to optimize your life based on this newfound information that you've gotten from that experience. Yeah. Now, if we were to do a podcast 10 years from now, my prediction is, we can see if it comes true, is that there's going to be about 5,000 or 6,000 of these centers throughout the United States. And that there's already hundreds and hundreds of ketamine centers, and that's legal for depression. The ketamine therapists are interested in being cross-trained in MDMA, psilocybin. We think by the end of 2023 that we'll have FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. 2023 that we will have FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. By 2024, 2025,

there should be FDA approval for psilocybin, for depression, potentially for alcohol use disorder, other indications, and they'll be administered in these exact kind of centers. And that's our long-term goal is to have these thousands and thousands of psychedelic centers. And there'll be not just an MDMA center or psilocybin center or ketamine center thousands of psychedelic centers. And there'll be not just an MDMA center or psilocybin center or ketamine center, but psychedelic centers. The therapists will be cross-trained in all these modalities. And that's the vision that we're trying to establish. But I would say about schools, and you talked about your kids, that we overemphasize cognitive education and underemphasize emotional education. And schools don't really prepare people for that. So when kids are hyperactive and stuff, we just give them Adderall or something. We're not really

looking at the whole human. And there's been a lot of discussion about different kind of intelligences. Emotional intelligence, EQ, is super important. But in schools, we just emphasize cognitive, and we leave so much untouched. And that causes so many problems. So we really need to reform how we think of education. We need to educate citizens. One of the quotes that I thought was from Albert Einstein, but then I checked it out and it wasn't really, but I thought for a long time it was. But still, it's a great quote, and it is that our technology has exceeded our humanity. Who is that quote? I thought it was Einstein, too.

I never could actually track it down to Einstein. Jamie will track it down. Okay. There's another quote from Einstein that is from Einstein that is, the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking. And what is that new mode of thinking that Einstein was talking about? And I think it's a more universal, spiritual, we're all in this together.

was talking about. And I think it's a more universal, spiritual, we're all in this together. We're not primarily defined by how we're different from people, but we're primarily defined by how we're the same from other people. And also the same as animals and the same as the environment, that we're all part of this planet Earth, life on Earth. And that if we can have that sense of connection like that, we're not likely to bomb people into oblivion or to commit genocide or to be racist or throw masses of people in prison for mass incarceration. So I think that that kind of spiritual and emotional education along with cognitive is what we need. We have technology that's miraculous. I mean, just think how many people can be watching this podcast or how many people survived on Zoom during the pandemic. Yeah. It's miraculous. I mean, just think how many people can be watching this podcast or how many people survived on Zoom during the pandemic. It's miraculous.

Well, also, let's look at it this way. We're talking about an education outside of traditional education when you're talking about these psychedelic centers that you plan on having open in 10 years. Look at physical education. Look at the physical education you get from high school and look at how many people leave school and take yoga and start going to CrossFit gyms and take martial arts. And there is a mass movement of incredibly physically healthy, physically healthy, super aware people that are taking care of their body through no, there was no education about this in high school. They didn't get this from college.

They got this from pursuing it. So many people who have degrees and careers in completely non-related fields are very physically active and very tuned into their bodies because they've recognized the benefits of that through external sources outside of the traditional education system. We could have that same type of movement with mental health and psychedelics and with learning outside of these traditional radically underfunded places. Like when you look at how much a high school teacher makes, it's embarrassing and it's no wonder why they're under motivated. No wonder why they're depressed and not enthusiastic about this job.

And also, how the fuck do you connect one-on-one with 50 people when you have them for 45 minutes or whatever it is, a class is an hour or whatever. It's not possible. So you can't do it. And that, that is one of the reasons why so much emphasis is paid to forcing these children to sit still and pay attention. I don't know if I have ADHD, and pay attention. I don't know if I have ADHD, but I know that if I was in school today, and if I think about how I was when I was a child, and if I had parents that were so inclined, I would 100% be medicated, 100%. But it wasn't because I always thought there was something wrong with me, but it wasn't that there's something wrong with me. He said, I was bored. I was not interested at all in what they me he said I was bored I was not

interested at all in what they were teaching I was interested in comic books and I was interested in you know martial arts and I was interested in space travel and I was interested in if you if you talk to me about something that was interesting to me then I was locked in and tuned in but if you're talking to me about some boring shit I was just staring at the sky and looking at my fingernails and I just couldn't pay attention. But it wasn't because my mind was incapable or my mind needed medication. It's because I wasn't interested in what they were talking about. And that turns out to be very valuable in life. If you're a person who finds what you're interested in and ignores the things you're not interested in.

Because you can really get far just paying attention to what you're interested in and focusing on that obsessively. Some of the most successful people in this world are that type of person. And as a child, they're taking those people and stifling them and forcing them to be a square peg. They're taking their roundness of whoever they are and they're compressing it and shoving them into this square hole with medication. And it to a college when I was 17 in 1971, and it was an experimental college. It should be kind of the way all colleges are. But what it said was the principles of this college called New College. It's in Sarasota, Florida. It's the Honors College of the state of Florida. But when I went to it, it was private. curiosity is the most important thing and that they weren't going to put anything in the way of that curiosity. So there was no distribution requirements. You could just do general studies. If you wanted to major, you had to do a certain number of classes, but you didn't have to major. A lot of schools say you got to do a language, you got to do this, you got to do that. This was the student's curiosity is the most important thing, and we will do everything to

foster that. There was no grades, all written evaluations. Everybody had to do a senior thesis, a big project. And so this school, when I started, now this was sort of, people say the 60s really continued into the early 70s. And so it was very much like that. But the school had this tradition of all-night dance parties with psychedelics till the sunrise. They didn't put that in the brochure, but they also had this unusual situation where there was a woman who had actually a professor who had studied with Carl Jung, and her husband was wealthy. They donated this big Olympic sized swimming pool to the college, and it had turned into a nudist colony for

the students and the faculty. And so here I was, a shy guy. I come to this school with this tradition of psychedelics, with this tradition of sort of bringing sex and drugs into the open from being suppressed, this nudist colony at the pool, and I started doing a lot of psychedelics. But I wasn't prepared. My education up to that point had been so cognitive. I was really emotionally stunted. My bar mitzvah didn't turn me into a man. The traditional rituals didn't work. And when I first started doing psychedelics, I thought this is the – it's helping me answer existential questions or at least ask them, not answer them, but ask them.

I said this is what my bar mitzvah should have been. But I was jumbled up, and I went to the guidance counselor at school. And today, if this happens, you know, you'd be in big trouble. But I went to the guidance counselor and I said, I need help with my. And this is now more important to me than my studies because I'm unbalanced. I'm overdeveloped intellectually, underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. And the guidance counselor took me seriously. Really? Did the guidance counselor have psychedelic experiences to draw upon? Well, he didn't share that, but I was just so lucky. But he said to me, there's a book that I would like you to read. And he gave me this book,

and it was by Stanislav Grof, who's the world's leading LSD researcher, one of the co-founders of transpersonal psychology. And the book was his first book that he ever wrote. It was Realms of the Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research. And the book was not actually published until 1975, but my guidance counselor had a copy of it in 1972, a manuscript copy of it. And it was reading that book that made me devote my life to psychedelics when I was 18, because it was this science. I wasn't so comfortable with religion. I knew that there's a lot of dogma and religion. I kind of knew that Jews are the chosen people, but that's not really true. I mean, we're all the chosen people.

But it felt to me that it was science looking at the range of experiences that we can have. One group that he called was biographical, Freudian, just what happens in our life and how that affects us. The other is birth trauma, how the process of being birth, where we're being born, where we feel that we might die. And so it was science that also had this political implications because I was thinking, yeah, if you can feel connected to everything, that's the antidote to war and genocide. But it had a reality check, which was therapy. Can we use these states of mind and these experiences to help people have richer lives, to get out of being drug addicts or out of being alcoholics or out of being scared of dying if you've got cancer or things like that. And so this book changed my life. And the

guidance counselor, after he gave me the book, he said that he was in touch with Stan. And I said, great, I would like to write him a letter. So I'm this confused 18-year-old writing to this MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins, leading psychedelic research, which was being squashed because 1970 is when Nixon and the Controlled Substance Act came in and all these drugs are criminalized and psychedelic research is being squashed. And I'm just so lucky. I wrote Stan a letter and he actually wrote me back. And he said, I'm giving a workshop later this summer out in California, and you're invited to come. I'm really glad you liked my book. Our research is winding down, but come to this workshop if you'd like to. So I hitchhiked across America back when people would hitchhike. I went to the first Rainbow

Festival that was in Colorado. I didn't know about it, but I just saw signs as I was hitchhiking. But I did this workshop with Stan and Joan Halifax, who we was married to at the time, who's now very much into Buddhism and meditation. And I did primal therapy. I did a three-week primal therapy intensive where you scream your birth trauma out. And my therapist permitted me to do LSD one time during this primal therapy. And then I sat for him and I did a month long encounter group. Meanwhile, of course, got my parents. You sat for your therapist while they did acid. Yeah, we switched that. And actually that was kind of, um, a little bit scary because

he was so used to letting his feelings out. We were in a soundproof padded room. We'd go in there. I was isolated for, um, the day except for like one hour of therapy every day and trying to get it. The only thing I could do is have a dream journal. And so, but I couldn't read books. I couldn't write anything. I was just there to get in touch with a sort of primal trauma of being born. And, but this therapist that I was sitting for, he kind of lost the distinction between what's inside and what's outside. And he took off the classic story. He took off his clothes and he wants to like run outside. And I had to like wrestle him down to try to keep him in the room. It was really a bit scary. But at the end of all of this work, I did a month long encounter group. My parents paid for

all of this, which was really kind of them. But I wasn't where I wanted to be because I had this mistaken idea, which was the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve. And it's about the quantity of drugs. And I completely had missed the idea. It's about the integration. It's about you don't need to do it many times, sometimes only once. You can learn an enormous amount, and it can enrich you for months or years to try to integrate it. So I just was super confused after all this. I tried the strongest things, and I'd seen the idealism of the 60s crash and burn. And now we've got the Vietnam War still, and we've got Nixon and psychedelic researchers shut down. And so I went home, and I lived

back home. I'm the oldest of four kids, so I was a terrible example for my siblings, sent off to college and do drugs and drop out. But that's where I got the sense that I needed to do integration work, that I was unbalanced. And my parents actually had a house built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright's, designed it. It was this exquisite structure and it influenced me a lot. And so I was playing handball. I was in high school. It was one of the few high schools that had handball courts.

And so I was really good at handball. So I thought this new college, I'll go back to be with my friends and I'll build this handball court. I'll get into the physical world and that's how I'll get integrated. I was super confused and my parents were willing to buy 3,000 concrete blocks and support me while I built this building, and the school needed facilities, and they let me have some land to build on it. And it was right next to John Ringling's house, which is now a state museum, and Charles Ringling gave the building for the library. And this other people, the Capels, who built the New York Railroad and sold the land to the Ringlings,

they gave this mansion to New College when Mrs. Capels died. And I was asked to be the security guard at this mansion on the beach on the Sarasota Bay while I was building this handball court. And that led to a career of 10 years in construction. And it was during that time that as I got more fluid with the outer world, I would trip every now and again, and I would get a little bit better at letting out the emotions and seeing what was happening. So I had this 10-year period of not doing psychedelics directly, but occasionally and being in the construction business. And that was what it took. It took a whole decade of dropping out of college to get balanced. And then in 1982, I went back to school.

And the very first semester, I went to the same school, to New College. And the very first semester, I went to Esalen in Big Sur and did a month-long workshop with Stan Groff again. And it was on the mystical quest. And that's when I learned about MDMA. And that's what changed things because I learned about LSD after the backlash. But now I learned about MDMA before the backlash. But it was called ADAM as an underground, it was legal, but it was called Adam as an underground it was legal but it was kept quiet as an underground therapy drug and it was gentler than the classic psychedelics it had incredible therapeutic potential but it had escaped from those circles and it was being used as ecstasy as well so it was very clear that it was doomed this was during Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and escalation of the drug war.

And so that's where I said, I got to get political and I can start introducing MDMA to various people who would take it, like Lester Grinspoon. He and his wife had had a tragedy of a son die of cancer when I think he was about 13 years old. 13 years old. And they took MDMA together and said that they're, Lester said that they were able to talk about the loss of their child in ways that they had never been able to talk about with each other before. And then he later became one of the witnesses when the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, finally moved to criminalize MDMA in 84. Actually, I'll just say Terrence McKenna was a big part of this effort because Terrence had this mistaken idea that if it's a plant, it's good. If it's from the lab, it's bad. We had this meeting at Esalen and he was going on and on about this. And I said,

that's so ridiculous. We need a safety study with MDMA. And it was because Terrence going on and on about how plants were good and stuff from the lab is bad that we did the first safety study with MDMA. And it was because Terrence going on and on about how plants were good and stuff from the lab is bad that we did the first safety study with MDMA to prepare for this DEA crackdown, which happened later that summer in 84. And that sort of led to where I'm at now. Why do you think Terrence had that rigid perspective? It's a really good question because you think about psychedelics as supposedly to break down rigidity. Yeah. I mean, I think there's some good things to say, which is plants have been used for thousands of years. We have all this historical evidence about it. We know that in

the Western culture, when we think about the origins of the Western culture, we think about the Greeks and that's where the origins of democracy. And the longest running mystery ceremony in the history of the world was the Eleusinian Mysteries, and it ran from like 1600 BC to 396 AD, and it involved the plants that were psychedelic. Yeah, we had Brian Murrow-Rescue on the podcast. His book, The Immortality Key, is amazing. And now they're doing studies because of that book in Harvard. Yeah, yeah. About the Eleusinian mysteries. Yeah, at the Harvard Divinity School. Yeah.

They're really interested in this. Incredible. And, you know, he proved in that book and the research for that book that there were like ergot-like compounds that were in these wine vessels. So for sure these people were taking some kind of psychedelic mixed in with the wine. And what do we know about ergot and about the use of ergot in terms of psychedelic properties? Well, LSD is not exactly an ergot, but ergot is the starter material that Albert Hoffman used, ergotamine, in order to modify it to develop LSD. Okay.

And so we talk about different times in the Middle Ages when whole villages would sort of go crazy. And it's from a mold on wheat and barley. The Salem witch trials, it came from that. It came from ergot poisoning, right? It could have been. I believe that's what they think happened. They think that that was because of an early frost. They've nailed the time period of all these witch trials

to an early frost which coincides with ergot poisoning of wheat. And I'm sure they, you know, not just made bread with the wheat, but did other things with the wheat. And probably, does ergot grow on other things other than wheat? I'm not sure. I think barley, it may grow on barley. So maybe they had beer, and maybe that was tainted with it as well. So they were involuntarily having these LSD-like experiences.

Of course you would think that there's witches. Of course you would think you were bewitched and that there was like magic going on. Yeah. Well, and what Brian had reached out to me when he was sort of a normal career, when he wanted to get more involved with marijuana and psychedelics. So the first thing that he did was a group trying to collect doctors who were going to be supporting medical marijuana. And then he moved into writing the immortality key. So I've known him for quite a while and he's very respectable and sober and- Sober, completely sober. That's what's interesting, right?

Yeah. He's decided not to take psychedelic. I think eventually he may do that, but he wanted, he didn't want people to say you're biased, that somehow other you, you know, take these drugs. They would question his research. how all of these ancient enlightened people had created these ceremonies to get together and they worked out democracy they worked out so many different principles of modern religions and and schools of thought and it all came out of these rituals where they engaged in psychedelics so this guy is just looking at this all from this like sober historical perspective and just wait, just wait. The first time he just gets blown through the membrane into the other dimension and realizes like this is not people that are delusional. This is not some cult perspective. This is the real thing.

Again, and when you experience it, it's so beyond your imagination or what you could have possibly anticipated that when you do break through, you'll never look at regular reality the same way again. That's one thing I can guarantee. Just knowing, particularly like the DMT experience, Just knowing, particularly the DMT experience, knowing that you can get to that place in 40 seconds, that you can take three giant hits and then 30, 40 seconds in, you're gone. You're gone. And then you're experiencing entities in some brightly illuminated world that's far more real feeling than the world we live in right now. Far more vivid, far more aware. They seem to understand exactly how you're thinking. They're communicating with you with no words and they're infinite and they're all around you all the time. And they seem to know what fucks with you. Brian has a lot to look forward to. Oh my God, he does.

you. Brian has a lot to look forward to. Oh my God, he does. He's owed it. His work has been amazingly helpful because of the fact that he is sober and because of the fact that he is a legitimate scholar. I mean, everything about the way he's done this is perfect. Yeah, there is a way a little bit, one historical parallel to what Brian is going to be looking forward to, and that's Walter Pankey. So I described at the very beginning this Concord Prison experiment that Leary did when he was at Harvard. But the experiment that he did before was called the Good Friday experiment, and that was in 1962. And it was designed to see if religiously inclined people in a religious setting taking psilocybin would have a mystical experience.

And so Walter Pankey was a doctor and a minister and working on a PhD. And Timothy Leary became his faculty sponsor. There was also a fellow named Reverend Howard Thurman, who was the Reverend at the Boston Marsh Chapel at Boston University, but he was Martin Luther King's mentor. So Martin Luther King had got a PhD at Boston University in the 50s. And Reverend Howard Thurman had studied with Gandhi and had studied nonviolence and was kind of the main influence on having the civil rights movement be focused on nonviolence. And like we know with

John Lewis and getting beaten up on the bridge when they're trying to get voting rights, that they didn't respond. And that was very effective, this nonviolent approach. So Reverend Howard Thurman was really interested in this relationship between the mystical experience and political action. And so he agreed to be the minister for this Good Friday service. And if people are interested, we have the actual sermon from Reverend Howard Thurman several hours on our website under the Good Friday experiment. And it took 20 divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary into church on Good Friday in the basement chapel, and half got psilocybin, half got a placebo. Ten experimenters, Houston Smith, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner, Walter Houston Clark,

others that were very involved in sort of the science of religion, were the helpers. They were divided into groups of four, five groups of four students. Half would get psilocybin, half would get the placebo. And then two of the experimenters were with them, and one of the experimenters would also get psilocybin, and one would get the placebo. experience, and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin. And this experiment was considered to be, and still is, one of the best experiments ever in the history of the study of psychedelics and spirituality. And the questionnaire of what is a mystical experience that Walter Pankey developed for this is still being used in the research today. It's called the mystical experience questionnaire. But Walter Pankey decided that he didn't want to take psilocybin until after the study was over for fear that people would say that he was biased. Brilliant. And then he went with Bill Richards, who's the longest living psychedelic therapist right now.

He's sort of the center of the Johns Hopkins psychedelic research. And he's trained a lot of other groups, they're researchers with psilocybin. He's actually going to go through our training now to learn about MDMA, as Bill Richards is, but he was in Germany studying, and Walter Pankey went to visit with him, and that's where Walter Pankey had his first psilocybin experience

after the experiment was over and published and had this illuminating psychedelics mystical experience. His first of his life. First of his life after he'd done the experiment. Now, when I did at New College, I said, you have to do this senior thesis. And so this was during the 80s and I wanted to do something with psychedelics, but there was no legal permission. It was all shut down. And I realized that in the mystical research, the most important thing is called the fruits test. So you can describe an experience, and that's what they do initially, but what are the fruits of the experience? and mystical experience, it will make you feel connected. It will make you feel there's love woven into the universe. It will have certain kind of long-term benefits. And that's the way that people evaluate the validity of the experience. So Walter Pankey, unfortunately,

died in 1971 in a scuba diving accident. Oh, wow. His body was never found. What? And it was like he dissolved into the ocean of consciousness almost. Or fish ate him. More likely fish ate him. Something, yes, something happened. Stan Groff actually said that Walter was a little bit cheap and he might have bought secondhand equipment or something that didn't work.

Scuba equipment? Yeah. You want to have the stuff that works the best. So when I wanted to do a thesis, a project, I realized that Walter Pankey, if he would have been alive, he would have done this long-term follow-up study. Yeah. But I could do that now. And it turned out that Timothy Leary Ram Dass, they'd lost the names. They had no idea who was in the study. All I knew was that they were Andover Newton Theological Seminary students. And so I went to the Andover Newton

School, and I said, could you put a notice in your alumni newsletter if anybody was in this experiment? This is 1986, all these years later, 24 years later, and they refused to do it. They said they had nothing to do with this research. Again, this is during the time of Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan. So I went to their library, and I thought, okay, there must be some books about it. They must have this thesis. They must have some books about it. They had nothing. And I just wandered more through the library,

and what I saw was they had a section of alumni handbooks, and one of them had the list of who was in school during that year and their names and addresses. And so I photocopied all of that and I sent out 350 or so letters to people and said, if you were in this experiment or know anybody, you know, I'm trying to do a follow-up. And that led me to three people. And over the time, I ended up getting 19 out of the 20 identified. And I administered the same questionnaire, the mystical experience questionnaire. And they held up that the results were almost the same as they were before. And people said that this mystical experience that they'd had, they'd had other non-drug

mystical experiences, many of them afterwards, that they said helped them consider that the one that they had with the psilocybin was legitimate. It was similar to the non-drug. They generally preferred the non-drug mystical experiences. How do you define a non-drug mystical experience? Oh, you're walking in nature, or you're making love, or you just have this, they call it gratuitous grace. This feeling just comes over you. It's the same as basically as this drug experience. And they described how this was not only considered valid, but also it had motivated them to work on the environmental movement, the women's rights movement, the anti-war movement. So for me, I found in some ways the keys to the 60s in this follow up study, because the sad part is I discovered that Reverend Howard Thurman was this incredible orator, and part of his Good Friday service was you have to tell people there's a man on the

cross. You have to tell people of this story. And one of the students said, oh okay, I should do that right now, under the influence of psilocybin. And so he went, they thought he was going to go to the bathroom, and he burst out the door and he started running down the road. And in his mind, he had thought, I'll tell the president if I'm going to tell anybody, I should tell the president. And then he's like, oh, the president is somewhere else, but I'll tell the president of the university. And so Timothy Leary and Houston Smith went after him to help him not get killed by a car or something. And they finally caught up to him to bring him back, and he didn't want to come back inside. And so they gave him a shot of

Thorazine to calm him down. That's what they thought at the time is somebody's having a difficult LSD experience, you know, bring him down with Thorazine, which is a major tranquilizer for psychotics. But they never mentioned that. So I discovered during this follow-up study that there was a really important part of the experiment that they had hidden, which was this sort of difficult reaction this person had and his refusal to come in. So what I saw from Leary is that they had underestimated the risks, that they hadn't reported this. If we do research now under FDA regulations, you have to report adverse events. You can't just brush them under the rug like they didn't really happen. So the core thesis that psychedelic psilocybin, in this case,

could produce a mystical experience, that was confirmed. The fact that it had long-term benefits, that was confirmed. But Leary and others had, over time, said everybody that had the psilocybin had the mystical experience. That was not true. So they exaggerated the benefits, and they had minimized the risks by hiding the story of this person that had the Thorazine. Now how many people had the psilocybin experience

and didn't have a mystical experience? Two. And one of them was, some of them, you know, again, it's not like it's automatic that you take this drug and this kind of experience is what you had. Were there any similarities in their experiences and were they on any kind of medication? No, they weren't. They just, they didn't let themselves open or it or it just didn't have the same effect for them. What was the dosage? The dosage was pretty big.

It was like, well, it was synthetic psilocybin, so I think it was 25 milligrams, which is a major trip. I'd say it's equivalent to like five or six grams of mushrooms. So it was a major experience. It's crazy that they didn't have an experience. Well, they had experiences, but they didn't score on this questionnaire to be above the threshold. And the beautiful thing about what Walter Pankey did was that this questionnaire about a mystical experience, even though it was with Christian ministry students in Good Friday

service, it didn't have a word about Jesus. He surveyed the literature of mysticism throughout the world and all these different religions, and he kind of made what is the sort of common themes, you know, a deeply felt positive mood, a sense of sacredness, a transcendence of time and space, a sense of ineffability that you can't put it into words, a sense of transcendence of time and space, and a sense of unity. Those are the elements. And so it's something from people from every different kind of religion could respond to this. So it took out all the cultural symbols, every reference to Jesus. And that's why it's being used today at Johns Hopkins and all the research that's being done, a lot of it with LSD, with psilocybin, even with MDMA. We use this same questionnaire that's only a tiny bit modified.

And so it was a sense that this experiment really validated for me my theory of change, that if we can help people, more people have these psychedelic experiences and support them and help them integrate it, it may build compassion. It may reduce prejudice. It may help people want to protect the environment. And so that's what really motivated me when I was 18 to devote my life to psychedelics, that this potential, this political potential. move through the pain of their lives and to really see the world more clearly, to see people that they might have been scared of, to see that more of their humanity. And so I think this kind of mystical experience and the therapeutic going together is where I think there's a lot of hope for the future. And what I was able to sort of recognize is that there's value in these things. And that we talked about the Eleusinian mysteries. What we're talking about now is mainstreaming

psychedelics. And a lot of people have this idea that it's never been done before, but it's actually been done thousands of years ago in the heart of Western culture. And it was wiped out by the Catholic Church because they wanted to be the intermediary between people and spirituality. It was a power play. It wasn't a religious spiritual. It was a power play by the church to be this intermediary. And so then throughout the Middle Ages, all of this was suppressed, you know, with the witches, with all of this. And then when the conquistadors and others come to the Western world and they see these traditions of mushrooms that are used in Mexico and peyote that's used by the Native American church and by the Indians in Mexico, and they came to South

America where we have ayahuasca, their main thing was kill these people, kill the leaders, kill the shamans, you know, because they're a source of power for their cultures. And so that was suppressed. And it was only around in the late 1950s when Western people discovered the mushrooms. And that was Gordon Wasson. trip with Gordon Lawson was a CIA agent as well, that they were looking for mind control drugs. And that's the whole MKUltra and this whole nefarious use of psychedelics to, they called them non-lethal incapacitants. Huh. That's an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah. They thought it was humane in a way. If you can like, you know, spray LSD in the air on a group of soldiers and then they go all in circles, you could come and just pick up their weapons.

You kind of could. In some way, yeah. They did try aerial spraying of LSD. It didn't actually work. How much LSD would you – You'd need a lot of it. It seems like you could wreck people. Well, that was partially their goal.

Or you could slip it to people when they were about to give a talk and they would make a fool of themselves, something like that. But yeah, so where we're at now with the military, just to say with veterans and others, is that it seems like we're trying to reintroduce psychedelics for trauma, but in a more humane way. And so I'm not really sure. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Group, they've just given $25 million to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics. They're not really interested, as far as we can tell, in the war implications of psychedelics. We also have- What does that mean, non-psychedelic psychedelics? Well, like Ibogaine. There's a drug called Ibogaine, which is very psychedelic. But then you modify the molecule, and there's one called 18MC. And you take it, and it's not psychedelic.

So you take the core molecule. You figure out what atoms you can add to it. And it has a lot of the basic properties, but you try to take out the psychedelic properties. For what purpose? Well, they think somehow maybe that's like therapeutic. A lot of them, they see the psychedelic part as a negative side effect. So if you can promote neuroplasticity or- Doesn't it seem that you just need to get a hold of these people and give them psychedelics?

It does. Stop, stop, stop. You're doing it all wrong. That's like saying you want to do martial arts, but you don't want to touch anybody. Exactly. I want to do no-touch martial arts. Yeah, that might be. Okay.

Yeah. Now, maybe they'll find a way that biologically something can happen. But the meaning, maybe they think, well, one of the costs of psychedelic therapy is, of course, the therapists. And if you could just take a pill and you didn't need therapists, but people get meaning from the experience. Yeah. And we're clearly establishing that it's probably a good idea to have someone guide you through these things. Very much so. It's always been the goal of the shaman and the role of the shaman and that these people who have experience in these realms and understand how to have a psychedelic ceremony and do it correctly, that there's a way to do this.

And this is a very valuable piece of information, and that to just ignore that and say we just need, you know, maybe we could just do it in a pill and you don't need a therapist. Well, one of the things that's so frustrating that DARPA would give $25 million to study non-psychedelic psychedelics is there's a million, more than a million veterans disabled with PTSD. And the VA spends around $17 billion a year on disability payments. But we've not gotten any funds from the VA for research. But things are changing. So actually, we're working with Congressman Dan Crenshaw.

And he's working with Congressman Tim Ryan from Ohio. So we've got a very strong Democrat, a very strong Republican working together on two different bills. One would give money to the Department of Defense to do psychedelic research for PTSD. And one would give – well, we're not sure the amounts. We're thinking one would give some amount of money also to the VA. And by psychedelic research, we're saying it should be limited to Ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocybin, and MDMA. And so we don't know that this will pass through Congress, but we have bipartisan support. So it's trying to get the military to look at the healing potential of psychedelic psychedelics.

And it's because a lot of the Navy SEALs, Dan Crenshaw is a former Navy SEAL, have spoken to him about their work going down to Mexico for Ibogaine and 5-MeO or their work with MDMA for PTSD. I actually had an hour conversation with him a few months ago. Dan's great. He was very open to it. He's a young, healthy guy. He's healthy in terms of his perspective on things. He looks at things as objectively as he can. He's clearly a Republican, but he's open to entertaining all sorts of ideas.

I found him to be very compassionate. I mean, when he heard about the healing potential and he's heard stories. Well, one of the things about SEALs and about many of the people in the military is their number one goal is to help the people that are their brothers and sisters that are also in the military and that are suffering. And they abandon dogma if they find an effective treatment. Whereas if you're just politically motivated or if you just have these very rigid ideas about what's good and what's bad in terms of psychedelics, bad, you know, pharmaceutical drugs, good, you know, counseling, good, acid, bad. Acid, bad. These sort of rigid dogmas, they get in the way of finding the truth because we really don't have a longstanding history of treating people with psychedelics

who have post-traumatic stress disorder. It's fairly recently, but it's very promising. And the people that have gone through the anecdotal evidence and the anecdotal experiences that they can relay to fellow soldiers are incredibly valuable. Because these people, guys like Dan Crenshaw, who are, you know, he's a congressman, he's in a real position of power and influence. He can shape and change the way the rest of Congress and the Senate and just government in total looks at these potential strategies and say, listen, this is something we're ignoring and it might be the most effective thing we've ever found for this. Yeah. And the fact that he's willing to partner with someone that's very

on the other political spectrum, Tim Ryan, is terrific. And it comes from this place of compassion for people that are suffering. Now, the very first use of psychedelics for PTSD began in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was a Dr. Jan Bastians in the Netherlands, and he pioneered the use of LSD for what they called concentration camp syndrome. And they worked with people that were in the camps that were tremendously traumatized. And a lot of them were Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, others, but also some of them were Dutch resistance fighters. He was a Dutch psychiatrist and so they later, the Dutch resistance fighters, later became, you know, part of the government and Dr.

Bastiaans was the last person in the world that still had legal permission to use LSD till the late 70s, early 80s. And there's an incredible book called Shaviti, A Vision, by an LSD, by a Holocaust survivor. How do you spell that? S-H-I-V-I-T-T-I. It's by an Israeli Holocaust survivor who was a writer who went to the Netherlands for LSD therapy, and he's describing what he went through during his LSD therapy. And it's horrific. My Israeli

relatives knew him before and after and said that it helped them a lot, although he still was somewhat tormented just from what he had gone through. But with the LSD, there's not the reduction of fear, the reduction of activity in the amygdala, the way that you get with MDMA. And so we're trying to globalize the MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. And we're working in the Netherlands with Dr. Eric Vermetten, who's the chief psychiatrist for the Dutch military. And he has the Bastastian's Chair at the University of Leiden, and he's leading our effort for MDMA. So it's only been a very short time, really, that people have understood the role that psychedelics can play in the treatment of trauma and PTSD. And LSD can be helpful. Ayahuasca

can be helpful. Ibogaine can be helpful. Mushrooms can be helpful. And MDMA, all in different ways. I think that MDMA has the chance to be the most helpful because of the reduction of fear, the sense that you can bring traumas to the surface easier. I've actually worked with people with trauma, both with MDMA and with LSD. And in one case, I also talked about this in my TED Talk, this woman who, the LSD brought, you know, horrible rape and almost murdered, you know, to the surface. But it was too paralyzing. She's kind of frozen and then gave half a dose of MDMA. This is now in 1984. And that was the breakthrough. The MDMA softened it, made it so that the emotions could be released, and it was a really breakthrough. And so I saw in 1984 the value of MDMA for PTSD. And I just think of all the people that have—soldiers and others that have committed suicide from PTSD since then, more died that way than in the war and in different wars. And if the DEA hadn't

criminalized MDMA in 85, so many lives would have been saved, so much. But now we're trying to bring it back as quickly as we can. It's just taken a long time. MAPS has been at it for 35 years, since 1986, when I started MAPS. But the world is changing now. I mean, for somebody like Congressman Crenshaw to be supporting research in this area and for so many Navy SEALs to have spoken to him, this is where Marcus and Amber Capone from Vets, they've led lots and lots of Vets to Mexico for Ibogaine. And they have a group that supports the expenses for people to get this treatment. Hundreds of Navy SEALs. Actually, the Navy SEAL Foundation gave us a donation to MAPS of $50,000 because they heard from so many

Navy SEALs that what they were getting from the VA wasn't enough and that they needed more and that they were seeking out psychedelics. And so the board of directors of the Navy SEAL Foundation had a meeting and they changed their mission. Their mission was only to support treatments, but not research. And so they changed it so they could also support research. They limited it to 150,000 per year, and the Most Anyone Project would get 50,000. And so the very first project was our phase three study with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So even the Navy SEAL Foundation is coming. We're working with a psychiatrist, Bob Kaufman, at Walter Reed, who is an expert in PTSD.

He's a military psychiatrist, retired now 32 years, but he still does work at Walter Reed. And we've had about 40 or more veterans have been through our studies. And most of them, not all, but most have gotten a lot of relief. But we've not once had an active duty soldier. So that's going to be the next big breakthrough. Because the idea here is that we want to treat people the closer to the trauma. And then maybe the treatment is less expensive, not as long because you haven't let it fester. You haven't let these patterns go on for longer. But there are some concerns about will the DOD permit

active duty soldiers to get this. But the amount of money that they spend to train a Navy SEAL is enormous. And when you think about if they're disabled from PTSD, what if you can help them not get over it? So we think eventually that'll be a big breakthrough. Just today, I got an email. We're doing research for phase three for MDMA for PTSD in Israel, Canada, and the United States. So the Ministry of Defense in Israel has just invited us to set up a clinic for soldiers, for active duty Israeli soldiers who are traumatized. And now because of the recent war with Gaza and the missiles, you know, it's just so clear that the whole populations are traumatized on both sides. So we've been starting it. It's in the very early stages, but it's with the survivors of torture. It's for the treatment of survivors with torture. And it's in Ramallah. It's in the West Bank. And they're interested in MDMA for therapy. So we're trying to train some of their therapists. We're going to try to see if we can get approval from the Palestinian Authority to bring MDMA in there because it's a Schedule I drug. It'll have to come through Israel.

But we want to treat people on both sides of all the different conflicts. And we see that Sir General Nick Carter, who's the Secretary of Defense equivalent in England, We're working with a group in England, which is supporting wounded veterans. And Nick Carter is on their board of directors. And so he's come out in favor of MDMA research. Essentially, the Secretary of Defense, in charge of all the British militaries endorsed MDMA research. So we're hoping that we'll have that in the United States, that the Department of Defense will get involved as well. And this bills that we're trying to get with Representative Crenshaw and Ryan would kind of encourage that to try to start that. And as we talked before about prisoners and prison guards

and police officers, we even have, you know, a police officer, you know, that we're training. So we really need to mainstream this. And when we think about it, as we talked about the Ellisonian mysteries, it's kind of reintroducing into Western culture, but it's this thousands of years of history and trying to bring psychedelics back to where we can sort of spiritualize the population in a way and reduce trauma as we face incredible challenges that humanity has never faced before in terms of what we're doing to the environment and the power of the weapons that we have. And so that's the kind of vision that animates the motivation for why what we're doing. Well, I think we have to re-engineer the cultural narrative, right?

Because for so long it's been drugs are bad. Just say no. Like the, even if you do drugs, you do drugs because you're being silly. You want recreation. You want some chaos in your life. Like I did all my work. I'm going to do some Coke, you know, and they, they do something and they feel, ah, but I got to stop doing that.

That was bad. And they, they have these negative associations or non-beneficial associations with drugs. And I think one of the things that, obviously, I have a very limited experience with MDMA because I only had one experience, but that one experience was so positive. And the next day, though, terrible. I couldn't read. Like, I remember- Yeah, we tell people it's a two-day experience. You must rest the next day. Yeah, and take 5-HTP, right, and take something that's going to rebuild your serotonin. That could be, or just rest.

I mean, so when we worked with the FDA, they said don't add supplements until we see what just the MDMA does. And we find that when you give it to people during the day and they rest the next day, yeah, supplements can be helpful. But we don't administer them, and people don't use them. Or they can if they want to. They can be helpful, but really what you need is rest on top for sure. And the integration. That's the idea. You think about it.

You don't rush into your daily activities. But just as a kind of funny story about the cultural narrative. So as a parent, when my daughter, my youngest daughter Ellie, went to college, I thought I would give her – You're going to give her acid? I gave her marijuana. So I gave her 10 pre-rolled medical marijuana joints that she could do with her friends because she was going to college. Had she experienced marijuana before this? Yeah, she had.

Yeah, she had. And so I said, you know, this Pennsylvania is where she went to school, Dickinson College. And, you know, it wasn't legal there. So I just said, they got busted by the campus police. And it was a terrible thing. They're like, you're ruining your life and, you know, your permanent record. You're never going to get into graduate school. And then she had to go through education and she had to meet with a counselor. And the counselor, the first meeting they had, the counselor said, why do you hate yourself no no you know why are you using marijuana you must hate yourself to escape that's a lot of the cultural attitudes that people have wow it was it was terrible and and she really got uh convinced of how negative drug education is so warped why do you hate yourself wow i mean but counseling is like everything else. There's people that suck at it, right? There's people that I'm sure they're fully invested and really tuned in to what the person needs.

And they're dedicated and they're very well educated. And then there's people that are just not good at it because they're, for whatever reason, they carry their own biases, weird perspectives, and they don't know what they're talking about. Why would you hate yourself? Yeah. Later, right before the lockdown and COVID, I got invited to give a talk at Dickinson at the college. And it was very well attended and it was all about psychedelics. And it was really, well, the faculty were there. Full circle. It was full circle. It was just about psychedelics. That's funny. And it was really, well, the faculty were there. Full circle. It was full circle.

It was just a beautiful experience. What I was going to get to is that even though I have a limited experience with MDMA, it was very positive in terms of the actual trip itself. But are there bad trips? Do people experience? Because it seems like what it is is about, you know, the reason why it's called ecstasy. It's love and happiness and everyone's affectionate well the first thing we want to say is that there's a distinction between

difficult and bad right all right and so what bad is is more resisting it and so to give a good example of this there is actually um this is about 15 years ago, but two women contacted us within the same week with similar but different stories. Both of them had taken MDMA at a rave with their friends, had taken ecstasy for party setting. And one of them said that prior sexual abuse came to her mind, again, because this reduction of fear in the amygdala, difficult things can come to the surface. You can look at it more. But she was with a bunch of friends who just wanted to party. And she felt that she couldn't talk to them about it.

And she stuffed the feelings down. And she contacted us months afterwards and said she was feeling worse, that the MDMA had actually made her feel worse because it brought it to the surface, but she didn't deal with it. This other woman said a similar story, that she took MDMA at a rave. Memories of prior sexual abuse came to the surface and she went off to a corner with a girlfriend and talked about it. And after an hour, worked a lot through it and then went back and had a party and danced. And now she felt better and thought maybe MDMA could be great for PTSD. So there are bad trips, but bad, I think,

is primarily about resistance of not being open to it. And difficult can be productive, very productive, if you're supported through it. You know, there's an incredible movie called Trip of Compassion that's about three of our Israeli PTSD patients. It's the most patient-centered documentary ever made about MDMA-assisted therapy. And you can see people having very difficult experiences. You know, there was one woman that was kidnapped when she was traveling in Peru. You know, a lot of Israelis after the army to de-stress, they travel around the world. And this was a young woman with a girlfriend, then they got kidnapped. And she spends a lot of Israelis after the army to de-stress. They travel around the world. And this was a young woman with a girlfriend, and they got kidnapped.

And she spends a lot of time just shaking, letting it out, letting out the stress. So it's difficult, but supported. She ended up having a lot of healing afterwards, and it really changed her. So I'd say that not everybody gets better. Some people it just doesn't work for. Some people didn't have a mystical experience with the psilocybin. Some people, when they take it, particularly if they're taking it in unsupported settings, they don't know exactly that it's pure drugs.

They don't know that if you open up to the difficult emotions, that that's the pathway through. And so they resist it, and people can end up worse off from that this is it was a very small study group about the people that didn't get mystical experiences you're talking about two out of how many ten two out of ten yeah um it would be really interesting if you did at large scale and you find out what are the similarities between the people that don't have those experiences because well is it a biodiversity thing like is it some people do they react I know some people apparently DMT doesn't work for is that

correct well people can resist it but also I've heard it doesn't work in terms of it doesn't give them the visual experience there are like my there are some people that are more visual than others and some people that are more emotional than others and some people that are more emotional than others and some people, yeah, that it may not work. But I would think that that has to do with resistance rather than it just doesn't have... I think so.

But Jamie doesn't get high off edibles. Edibles don't work on him. Yeah, well... Like, no, I mean, he can eat like 1,000 milligrams. Wow, wow. That's what i'm saying yeah well and i've seen it people metabolize differently and he's like yeah it just doesn't work like it doesn't work on him yeah um i mean we are different biochemically i i stay away from edibles but that's why i'm asking because i don't know anybody like jamie right so there's this guy

that i know that I'm very close with that can take 1,000 milligrams of edibles. So if you were telling me about your friend, I'd be like, that guy's full of shit. Maybe he needs to get some good stuff. I know what he's done. What about when you smoke? Yeah, I mean, I get high when I smoke, sure.

Instantly, I can tell, you know, not high. High. Edibles, I have gotten high off of them but in general if i would try anything people i'm with people all the time that take like a little 10 milligram and they're like i'm gonna i'm gonna go crazy tonight let's like everybody calm down have a cool night and i'm like what why are you wasting your time eating that gummy that's like it's nothing and they can't take the amount of bong hits or joint hits or blunt hits or anything that I can take.

I don't know. It's very strange. I've tried to overdose on it. It's the way that I look at it, and I can't. Maybe you were high when you put those shoes on. The fuck are those things? What's wrong with these? They're very comfortable.

You know, story about edibles. My mother-in-law had pain, and my wife was thinking maybe THC or CBD would be good for her. So my wife thought she'd try it first. So she took this CBD, didn't do much. She gave it to her mom, didn't do much. chocolate edible and was thinking she would try it out to see her mom liked it but it was a horrible experience and she got 10 milligrams she got she totally got so deep into her body in a way her thinking that she thought that she might forget to breathe and she was just terrified and you and then it lasts edibles last a long time and. And so my own wife has PTSD from edibles. I had a conversation with this couple the other day. Me and my wife were out with them, and I was asking them what Beverly Hills is like right now. Because I know people that live in Beverly Hills that talked about the spike in home invasions and crimes, and they were saying, no, the police there are amazing because there's so much money in Beverly Hills. The police react very quickly. I said, huh. I go,

that's interesting. And they go, yeah, well, we had to call the police one time. And I'm thinking, I'm going to hear this story about maybe there was a guy trying to break into your house or steal your car. No. This lady, she didn't realize that the CBD she was taking had THC as well. And she took multiple droppers full of it. And she thought she was dying. She thought her heart was going to stop. She was freaking the fuck out. Whatever it was, she couldn't handle it.

And she called the police. And the police were there instantly. So this was their story of the police is that this lady had too many edibles. She just, it's edible weed. It's the same thing, right? No, it's not. It's not. It's metabolized differently in your liver. So it's actually a different. Yeah. But I'm saying edible weed, but yeah, it's the same thing. It's 11 hydroxy metabolite. I know that, but I'm saying this is no different. The droppers is no different than edible weed. Yes, exactly. So she's taking this THC laced CBD.

Apparently for some people, I've talked to some athletes and they tell me that CBD with THC is the most effective for them in terms of alleviating inflammation and pain. And they like it the most but some people don't recognize like like this kill cliff has 25 milligrams of cbd in it but it's non-psychoactive yeah but some cbd that you get is got psychoactive thc in it as well that's what this lady did and so when she did it she was just black she has no idea how much she took. She might've took a couple hundred milligrams. So this poor lady who weighs like, you know, 130 pounds was fucking gone, you know, and literally thought she was dying. And the cops are like, yeah, we're just going to have to ride this out. They get calls like that all the time,

which is really hilarious. Yeah. Now, as long as we're talking about marijuana, I just want to say that we've made some big breakthroughs with marijuana. And one of them has been that there's been a federal government monopoly on the supply of DEA federally legal marijuana. And this has been since 1968. It's grown at the University of Mississippi. It's sold to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They provide it to researchers, but it's only for research, not commercial use. It can't be used in phase three.

Is it good? It's terrible. The good weed? It's terrible weed. We used to always think that that was the good weed. That was the thing. Back in the day, in the 90s, when weed was hard to get by, people called the government weed.

Bro, I got some of that. G13. Yeah. I got some of that government weed. Like, whoa, this is going to really take us off. It's not good, huh? It's terrible. It's terrible.

So since 2000, we've been trying to end this monopoly on marijuana that the federal government has in order to promote marijuana research to make it into a medicine. And so in 2001, I spent a year trying to find the Rosa Parks of medical marijuana production, a political, who would be the most good plaintiff in a way for this effort. And so Lyle Craker was a professor at UMass Amherst, expert in plants. He'd worked in secure facilities to try to develop herbicides for coca plants. He was an expert in plants. He'd worked in secure facilities to try to develop herbicides for coca plants. He was an expert in plant medicines, and he agreed that he would work with us to try to get a license from the DEA to grow marijuana. So we submitted his application in 2001. I call back a couple months later to the DEA and say, hey, what's going on? And they say we don't have any record,

or Lyle called. He said they don't have any record of his application. And he says, that's weird. You know, I know I sent it. And so he goes to the university. They have copies of everything. They photocopy it, and they send in this new application. And then he waits a couple months and calls them. And then the DEA says, sorry, we can't accept the application because it's not an original signature. You sent us this photocopy, which is a bogus thing. So then he says, OK, I'll send it again with my written thing. Then he sends it in and they do nothing for three and a half years. And then we sue them for unreasonable delay under the Administrative Procedures Act. And we get the judge says it's not unreasonable delay, but DEA, at least you better explain why you're taking so long.

So they realized they should reject. So they rejected the application. Then we could sue them on their rationale, which was bogus, that they couldn't do this international treaties and all. So then we had a DEA administrative law judge hearing that was eight days of testimony inside DEA headquarters. You have to get security clearance just to go to the courtroom. And we won the case and the judge said, the marijuana, it's in the public interest for Lyle to get this license. And then the DEA rejects the recommendation. They wait two years actually and they waited until six days

before Obama got inaugurated in order to reject the recommendation. They wait two years, actually, and they waited until six days before Obama got inaugurated in order to reject the recommendation. So he couldn't come to it fresh. And then Obama does nothing for eight years. And then near the end of his term, the DEA under Obama says, finally, we're going to give this, we're going to issue these licenses. And they put something in, I think it was August 2016, in the Federal Register, around 30 people apply. Then Trump gets elected, and Sessions is against marijuana, and they squashed it all. Then we're working with Dr. Sue Sisley in Arizona, in Phoenix, and she had submitted one of the licenses. She sued the DEA to try to reveal, you know, who applied. They didn't even, and they

finally gave the list of who applied, but they didn't want to give any of the licenses still. And so what just happened about two weeks ago was that finally the DEA has given licenses for domestic production of marijuana federally so that people can grow to make it into a medicine. Since 1968 has been this federal monopoly. There's been a company, GW Pharmaceuticals in England, that got a license from the home office in 1998 to grow marijuana, and they grew CBD marijuana. And they just were sold for $7 billion to Jazz Pharmaceuticals. They made Epidiolex, which is for childhood epilepsy, CBD for childhood epilepsy. They had a drug Sativex also. So now we've ended this monopoly on the production of marijuana. And also the state of Michigan, when they legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, it was friends of ours at the Marijuana Policy Project that put it in there.

And they wrote the initiative language. And they had a paragraph that says, of the money that they're going to make from the taxes, they have to put $20 million a year for two years into studying cannabis for veterans' health and to reduce veteran suicides, and the money can only go to nonprofit organizations or academic researchers. And they just put out the request for proposals June 1, just a few days ago, and we have been preparing for this. So we have a protocol that we've already submitted to FDA, and we've already got some comments back to study in around 300 veterans with PTSD, cannabis. We're going to go for a $10 million grant from the state of Michigan. And we've previously gotten a $2.2 million grant from the state of Colorado to do a marijuana study that we did with Sue Sisley. It was 76 veterans.

And we had one group got THC, one group got THC-CBD combination, one group got CBD, and one group got placebo, where they take marijuana and they wash it with alcohol and you wash out the terpenes and the cannabinoids. And the study took us seven years to get approval because the government didn't want to supply us the marijuana. But we had FDA approval, seven years to get approval because the government didn't want to supply us the marijuana. But we had FDA approval, seven years to get permission, three years to do the study, several years to write up the research. We just published it recently. And we demonstrated safety. But the problem was, and I'll illustrate it by one person, was that there was one person who did great and

his PTSD symptoms were reduced. And he was really excited about that. But more importantly, he was on opiates for pain and he was able to get off the opiates and to use the product that he had been given. And so he wanted to become a public spokesperson for the study. He spoke to the media a bunch of times. When the study was over, we uncovered the blind and it turned out he'd gotten the placebo. It was super embarrassing. So what we found in this study, unfortunately, was that the group that did the best had the THC. The group that did the next best was the placebo, which would completely befuddled us. And then the group that got lesser benefits was the THC-CBD combination.

And the group that got the least benefits had CBD only. Really? Yeah. Wow. And you think of CBD as anti-anxiety and all. It's weird that it's less than placebo. Less than placebo. That's bizarre.

Yeah. So while it was crummy marijuana from the government, that's one of our explanations. Yeah. Dry, harsh. They only used half on average about what we gave them per day. So now we're going to refuse to use the night of marijuana. We're going to import from either Israel, Canada, or Australia. Import marijuana in America?

That seems gross. Well, we have to use federally legal marijuana. Oh, God. That's so nuts. Why can't they make an exemption and use that California weed? California weed is so good. It's the best. A lot of it is great. It's the one thing California does best. Well, it depends if you're from British Columbia. They'll say they got better. BC Bud is- We have better scientists here. Well, and then the Colorado people are starting to be pretty proud of their stuff. They're pretty goddamn good in Colorado, too.

It's not much difference between Colorado and California. And also Seattle. The Pacific Northwest people, they don't fuck around either. They know what they're doing. They make some real shit. But we can't use any of it because FDA is federally regulated. That's one of the questions that I had for you. is federally regulated. That's one of the questions that I had for you. What progress,

if any, has been made on the push to get the federal government to release marijuana from Schedule 1? Quite a lot. But I think my current prediction is 2025 is when we will have federally, a law will be passed like the end of alcohol prohibition that says there's no federal penalties for marijuana. It's up to the states. And soition, that says there's no federal penalties for marijuana, it's up to the states. And so I think that that will happen in 2025. We need, in presidential years are when these initiatives tend to pass. More young people come out, more people come out to vote in the presidential elections. And so we need a few more medical marijuana and marijuana legalization states. We'll get maybe potentially more in 2022, more in 2024. And so I think in 2025, there's a good chance that we will have the federal government will move to end prohibition on marijuana.

You know, society has not collapsed in Colorado or Seattle or Oregon or California or Massachusetts. in Colorado or Seattle or Oregon or California or Massachusetts. The economy is booming in those places where they have legal marijuana because it's enhanced the economy. It's been incredible. Especially in Colorado. Yeah. Real estate has gone through the roof. Particularly for warehouses.

Yes. For production facilities. Yeah. And I don't know how long you think it'll be before Texas comes along. I don't know. You know, the thing about Austin is they don't arrest you for it. It's like fairly low on the rung of their concerns.

It's about as low as it can get. They don't arrest you for it. It's decriminalized in the city. It's not like you can buy it everywhere, but you can buy this weird stuff called Delta 8. You know what that is? Have you experienced it? No, I have not. I've had friends who've experienced it no i i have i've had friends

who've experienced it and they say it's like a cousin of being high it's like being high's neighbor it's like it's like weird they're like it's not terrible but it's strange but you know jamie and i were used to los angeles marijuana like real shit and you. And if you want to bring that here, you're risking federal law. I mean, even if it's legal here or at least decriminalized here in the city of Austin, it's not in the state of Texas. What is your prediction for how long it'll take for Texas to come along in either medical marijuana or legalization? Well, Texas is supposed to be all about freedom. So it should have happened a long time ago. The misconceptions are what part of the problem is.

The misconception is that marijuana people are lazy losers. And that drives me crazy. As a person who has three fucking jobs and works all day and works out constantly, you guys are out of your mind. You don't even know what you're talking about. It's a bunch of people that don't understand the effects of marijuana and they're the ones who are making decisions about marijuana

and it's foolishness because I feel the exact opposite about marijuana. I think marijuana, it makes me work harder because it makes me aware of, you know, some people say paranoia. I don't necessarily get paranoid, but I do get hyper aware. And when I get hyper aware, I'm hyper aware of flaws in my thinking and behavior and reasoning and the things that drive me crazy. And one of the things that drive me crazy about myself

is any perceived lack of discipline. So I work harder because of marijuana. It makes me more tuned in. Yeah, you know, I ran the New York Marathon. I've only run the marathon once, but right before the marathon started, sorry. The marijuana marathon. Right before the marathon started,

I ducked into a porta potty and smoked a joint. Yeah. And then I'd never run that far. I'd only run about 18 miles before, and I wasn't sure if I was going to make it. And so I was realizing that if I define success as succeeding to run the entire marathon, then the whole time that I'm running, I'm going to be carrying this anxiety. I might be a failure. I might be a failure. And this marijuana helped me think differently. And I realized that I should define success as trying and that if I could be happy for every step that I took, that was a success. However far I got, that I was trying something I'd never done before.

And that made a big, big difference. But then in the middle of the marathon, I got tired. I ducked into another port-a-potty, smoked another joint, and made it the whole way. And it was, so for me, I- Did you get revived from the second joint? I totally did. There was a bit of time where I had to walk. I got so tired a little bit.

But I made it the whole way, and I kept running even after the finish line. But I love, one of my favorite things is to, I'm from Boston, one of my favorite things is to get high and shovel snow. It's very meditative. But I also think in terms of work that we now, I talked about smokable tasks for strategizing. But now we have a pattern, and I'm not scared to say this, but before we submit documents to the government, to the FDA, I get high and I edit the documents with some of our other staff. And you get very attuned to every word you're using, what the implications are, where your arguments are strong, where they're weak, what you're missing. Makes you very sensitive, right?

Yeah. So we do the final editing is me getting high before we submit stuff to the FDA. I love it. I like it. And it's been really FDA. I like it. I like it. And it's been really helpful. I think it's very wise. And that's using marijuana as a tool. And again, you're talking to someone who's a regular marijuana user,

so I'm aware of the benefits of it, the pros. So someone listening to this, they might be, you know, if they don't smoke marijuana or they don't have any experience with it, they might be like, listen to these idiots talk about how good it is to smoke weed before you review something important. But to someone like me, you saying that, I'm like, absolutely. Yes, I get it. I understand. Well, you know, your invitation for me to come here for this podcast in Austin has now led for some meetings yesterday. We're going to try to make Austin one of the sites for giving marijuana to veterans

with PTSD for our application to the state of Michigan. So we're going to try to have multiple sites in Michigan to make sure that we get the local people involved. But we'd like to have some in non-medical marijuana states, which would be Florida and also Texas. That's great. Florida is a bit of a medical marijuana, but it's not marijuana legalization. Well, they have medical marijuana here, but it's very rigid. You have to have some serious illness. You can't just have headaches. California has got some.

Before it became legal in 2016, we had some really bogus requirements. You just have to my feet hurt really have to have a real problem when you're talking about marijuana and marathons I wanted to know are you aware of the connection with marijuana and jiu-jitsu no no okay this is interesting because jiu-jitsu which jiu-jitsu is a very misunderstood martial art because when people think about it, they think of like just meatheads and people just squeezing each other's necks and getting, which there's a lot of that for sure.

But there's also a lot of nerd assassins is the way we describe them. Like really super intelligent people that if you looked at them on paper, you would never think that this guy is a jujitsu wizard. You would think that this guy is, uh, he's like a computer programmer or something like, but a lot of jujitsu practitioners smoke marijuana a lot. And a lot of them smoke marijuana before they train. And I always found that I had my best training sessions when I was high and that I could literally get like one step better at jiu-jitsu when I was high. It wasn't necessarily good for learning technique though. I would only like it when I was rolling.

So like say if someone was trying to teach me a particular move, I would want to be sober when learning the move because jiu-jitsu moves are super complicated like you know like a leg lock or a heel hook or something like that you have to have this foot here and you're pinching your legs here and this foot is here and then when the guy turns this way you're framing off with your shin to block his movement and you want to have the toes clamped in your armpits. There's a lot of things you have to think about, right? And I don't think marijuana is necessarily conducive to learning all those. Because you just get too drifty.

But for what you already know, applying that in sparring marijuana is insanely helpful. I'm much better when I'm high when I roll I mean much better like like quite a bit and to the point where there's actually competitions where people get high and then compete high rollers Brazilian Jiu Jitsu there's a Wow yeah There's a company called High Rollers BJJ and High Rollers Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu puts on competitions and they televise them. And these elite athletes smoke marijuana. Look, they get gifted giant buckets of marijuana when they win. Guys like Jake Shields. Jake Shields, who is a multiple champion and multiple different mixed martial arts organizations and an elite Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.

And they get high. And then, here, play one of these. And you can see, as these guys go out there to compete, see if it shows them smoke the weed first, because usually it does. Yeah, see? These guys smoke weed and then go out there and roll. And so they have these highlight reels. So these guys doing jiu-jitsu right here are all high as fuck. And look, see all the smoke in the room? I mean, the room is completely filled with pot smoke.

Look at there. Wow. All stoners, and they're all nerd assassins and they're all doing jujitsu. So what jujitsu is, is a really complicated game that you're playing with your body, with leverage and positions and technique and also cardio and muscle strength and knowledge. strength and knowledge. And when you're high on marijuana, it gives you a sort of clarity of perspective in pursuing it that is very unique. And so there's a long history of some of the greatest jujitsu artists who are all potheads. So that's why it flies in the face to a person like me. Yeah. When someone says

marijuana makes you lazy, I'm like, you don't know what you're talking about. You think you're just lazy. Like if you're lazy because of marijuana, you're just lazy. It's just marijuana just happened to get there while you were being lazy. But if you're a super motivated person, I don't believe that marijuana is going to make you lazy. But I do believe that many young kids with the wrong influences and the wrong activities in their life that they do together as a group could lose their way by just getting high all the time and escaping reality. And I think that's a function of not having good structure in your life, not having good goals in terms of the things you're trying to do and good friends that push you

and, and that, that all work together towards things that you're trying to accomplish in your life. And then talk to each other about the benefits of accomplishing things. And, oh man, I didn't think I was going to make it like you talking about the marathon, but when I made it, I realized like, wow, I can do it. I did it. And then you, I didn't think I was going to make it. Like you talking about the marathon. But when I made it, I realized like, wow, I can do it. I did it. And then you start thinking, wow, I want to do something like that too,

where I push myself and I expand my own personal boundaries and enhance my own personal potential for all future endeavors. Because if you can do that in one thing, you can do it in other things. Or you can just be that person that sits around and plays video games and gets nothing done.

That's possible too. But I think it's a structure issue. I don't think it's an issue in marijuana itself. So that's why I take umbrage with that. When someone says, marijuana makes you lazy. I'm like, no, you're just lazy. Yeah. Well, you talked about motivation. Yeah. I think the best way to understand these drugs, marijuana, psychedelics, is they're just tools and how you use them. You could give somebody a hammer and if they could smash their finger and be screaming or they could build a house. That's literally a bit my act. I go, if I give you, it's like a tool. I give you a hammer, you could build a house with it or you could hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. in the dick if you're fucking crazy. Yeah, that's how we should understand it. And that's what you bring to it. The fundamental problem with the drug war is that we've made certain things good drugs and bad drugs, and we've lost the point about the relationship that you have with it. It's about the relationship and what you do with it. The best example from the FDA point of view is thalidomide.

Thalidomide, we know, was given to women for morning sickness and caused horrible birth defects with deformed limbs. But that was the quintessential bad drug. The only person that ever won at FDA, that ever won the Presidential Medal of Honor, was this woman, Frances Kelsey, who blocked thalidomide from coming into the U.S. because she was worried about safety. But thalidomide is now medicine. It's a medicine for certain cancers and leprosies. And so it's not a good drug or a bad drug. It's how you use it, what you use it for, how you're preparing, how you're careful. They're just tools. And we've tried to personify these are good or evil things. And I think that that's a complete misunderstanding.

The same way ecstasy can be a party drug or it can be a therapy drug. And some of the vets in our studies and others have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. Because it helps them go through painful emotions. And they don't associate it with a party drug. Even when we train therapists and even patients, we let people into our studies if they've done MDMA up to, I think, five times. So they couldn't have done it that way, but we don't want if they've done a whole lot. But if they've done it up to five times, and those people that have done it that way have done it in party settings. And when they do it in a therapy setting, they say it's a completely different experience.

Can I ask you why you choose five? Well, it's just we... What if somebody had six? Well, that's the thing about clinical research is you have to be arbitrary about certain things. You have to be, you know, that's why some therapists are reluctant to work on clinical research. You can't modify according to the needs of the moment, which we will be able to do post-approval. But five, we just chose as an arbitrary number.

People have talked about how there's diminishing returns sometimes over time for MDMA. For me, it happened after about 40 or 50 times I was really made for MDMA. And it's still— 40 or 50 times you had diminishing returns? Well, no. 40 or 50 times was no diminishing returns. But once you hit over 50? Well, I still use it.

My wife and I like to try to do it once a year. It's really great for our relationship. It's still really powerful, but it's not quite the same as the first experiences. So that's why we made a limit. We didn't want people to have done it a whole lot. Right. And we wanted to have them come at it fresh in a way. So we just picked five. We could have picked six or seven, but there's this, I think it maybe is even six. I can't remember exactly. But, you know, you have to have inclusion and exclusion criteria and you have to set it up that way. And so that's what we chose. And it's not like that with marijuana. I mean, you can use marijuana thousands of times and if you,

you do get a tolerance for it, but if you stop for a day or so or a couple of days, you smoke it again, it's like you're getting high, the same way you did before. But there is something about MDMA that's different than psilocybin or LSD, where a lot of people do report that it's not quite as deep and profound as it was the first initial bunch of times. And where that number is varies with different people. But I think, you know, and in the research with MDMA, we're also saying it's a tool. We're using it in this particular way. You know, we've now succeeded with our first phase three study. So in the 35 years of MAPS's history, we've raised over $110 million in donations. And so we now have the MAPS.

And now because we think we're about to succeed, we've started in 2014 the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. And that's our pharmaceutical arm. It's led by Amy Emerson and Bara Yazar-Klusinski. It's led by Amy Emerson and Bara Yazar-Klusinski, and there's about 80 people in this public benefit corporation, about 40 or so in the nonprofit. People donate to the nonprofit, get tax deductions. The nonprofit transfers the money to the benefit corp. The benefit corp does the research and will eventually sell MDMA by prescription if we get approval. And so we have now realized that there's – when I first started MAPS, I thought that it was invented by Merck in 1912. So it's not patentable. It's in the public domain.

In the 80s, when I started MAPS in 86, another group started a for-profit company to develop Ibogaine for opiate addiction. And they called it NDA for New Drug Application International. But then I saw a lot of the researchers starting to sue each other for intellectual property about Ibogaine. And it just was so destructive that it sort of killed the field for a long time. Those patents, original patents, have now expired. But I hired a patent attorney that did the Ibogaine use patents to develop an anti-patent strategy so nobody could patent, not us, not anybody could patent a lot of the uses of MDMA. So I thought when we made MDMA into a medicine, it would just become generic. And I thought when we made MDMA into a medicine, it would just become generic. And I thought that was fine. We're doing this as a public service. People should have

it. But there's so many different uses of MDMA that it's hard to do all of this with philanthropy. And then I realized, accidentally in a way, I discovered from another patent attorney that in 2013, I learned that there was actually incentives that the FDA had developed for promoting research into drugs that were off patent. And Ronald Reagan, in 1984, signed this law that provided these incentives. And what they're called is data exclusivity. And what that means is that if you make a drug that's never been made into a medicine before, and there's no patent protection, no one can use your data to market a generic for five years in the U.S., and it's 10 years in Europe. Not only that, but if we succeed in adults, the FDA is requiring us to do studies in adolescents that are traumatized,

12 to 17-year-olds. And we've actually already had to submit a pediatric plan. And you get six months additional data exclusivity for working in pediatric populations. And it blocks a generic competitor from applying to be a generic competitor until the five and a half years is over. And it takes FDA around six months or so to evaluate their application. So we'll have six years of data exclusivity. It's different from a patent in that another company, if they wanted to, could generate their own data. So we don't block anybody, but it'll take them five or six years. So then I realized that we could tell a different story to our donors, that if you can help us reach this point of sustainability, that we can sell MDMA for a profit and we can use the profits for more research. But I didn't want it to be like a traditional for-profit pharma company where you maximize profits.

There's a modification of capitalism called the benefit corporation. And there's thousands of these benefit corporations now. They are for profit, but you maximize public benefit, not profit. So if there are minority shareholders, they can't sue the management because they're not maximizing profits. Now we have all these hostile takeovers, things that if shareholders think that the management is not maximizing profits, they can try to change the management. So in a benefit corp, you maximize public benefit. And I think when we talk about health care, the profit motive has really warped things in America in a terrible way so that we have the highest per capita expenditures on health care than any country in the world, but our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 in the

countries when you look at your average outcomes. So we wanted to model not just something new, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, but we also wanted to model a new way to market medicines. So we created in December 2014 the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. And that's our pharmaceutical arm, and that will end up, we hope, by the end of 2023, getting permission to sell. And we will sell not to maximize profits, but to maximize benefits. And so we think that we will reach sustainability in the middle of 2024. Now, our ambitions have been expanding. We have this one successful phase three study that we just published in Nature Medicine. And we had New York Times articles, front page even about psychedelics. And we're in the middle of the second phase three

study, but we also want to globalize. And so we're now starting research in Europe. It'll cost us like another 30 or a million or so to bring research and obtain approval from the European Medicines Agency. It's so much less expensive than in the U.S. because the Europeans will accept all our U.S. data. And so we only have to do one phase three study in Europe. And we're working to try to start MDMA research in South Africa, in Rwanda, where they had the horrible genocides, in Somaliland, Armenia, and Bosnia, people all over the world, Palestine. People have contacted us where there's lots and lots of trauma, not necessarily lots and lots of money, but we want to globalize. So that'll be... Now, we've also hired the Boston Consultant Group, which is – helps businesses figure out their strategy.

BCG is what they're called. And we've hired them to help us plot our commercialization strategy. So my PhD at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard was on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana. So I have expertise in that. And we've hired a lot of people from pharma who know drug development. And that's how we've built the benefit court. But we don't have expertise in commercialization. So this BCG report was to help us understand what is the path to commercialize.

And so when you have a pharmaceutical company, you need all sorts of new functions to do commercialization. Government affairs, you need to have pharmacovigilance, you need to track how everything is going, you need to, we'll need to reschedule in all the states. So for example, when FDA says a drug is a medicine, the DEA must reschedule out of Schedule 1, but where it goes is up for discussion. But then the states have to reschedule, and different states have different procedures for that. So in California, you actually need a whole new law to pass the legislature and signed into law by the governor to make a Schedule I drug into a medicine. And there's a bill now going through the legislature just passed the state

Senate in California that would decriminalize psychedelics, and it's got a provision to automatically reschedule once the FDA and DEA say a drug is a medicine. And Amber and Marcus Capone from Vets were very helpful in talking to various senators, state senators in California, to get them to change their minds and support this law because they told stories of how psychedelics have been helpful to them. In Texas here, it's an automatic rescheduling unless the commissioner of public health objects. health objects. And so with Rick Perry and the efforts that have been here in Texas, there was just a law passed that would support psilocybin research. And it also directs the commissioner of public health to do a study of the literature on MDMA to acquaint them what's going on. So that if we make MDMA into a medicine, we think Texas will reschedule automatically, and we think that the Commissioner of Public Health will not object to that,

although we don't know, but we're already trying to educate them. So in any case, we need to do this in all 50 states. There needs to be a lot of government affairs relations, and so BCG report has estimated that it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million to do the commercialization, and they say we need to prepare starting for that now. The BCG report has estimated that it could be somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million to do the commercialization. And they say we need to prepare starting for that now. And because we have one successful phase three study, there's a good chance we're actually

going to succeed. So where we're at is a very challenging situation. There's now hundreds and hundreds of psychedelic for-profit psychedelic companies. When I started MAPS in 86, now again, 35 years ago, I'd say for the first 31, 32 years, I could never even imagine that there would be for-profit psychedelic companies, that there would only be nonprofit donations. But we've cleared out the regulatory obstacles. We've helped change public opinion. We've demonstrated through the FDA that it works. And now there's several for-profit companies with psychedelics that have market caps over a billion dollars. any of them. We're the only group in phase three. We have one successful phase three study. So in a sense, we've taken around $110 million and 35 years of work. And if MAPS were a public company, we'd be worth well over a billion dollars because we have this potential to market MDMA.

And what I told to the New York Times is that this BCG report suggests that during this period of data exclusivity, depending on where we set the price, depending on how many therapists we've trained, Shannon Carlin is leading our therapy training program. We're right now, at this very moment, we have 300 therapists in our training program. We've got another one starting in September. We hope to have more 500 therapists. We've already trained about 1,000 therapists. We want to get tens and tens, tens of thousands of therapists for all these thousands of psychedelic clinics. But the estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of $750 million or more in profits

during this period of data exclusivity just from the U.S. And we're also working in Canada and Israel. But the challenge that we face is that now we think we're going to fully globalize, to commercialize, complete everything that we're doing. We're going to need to raise about $150 million more, about $50 million a year for three years. But that will make MDMA available in much of the world. We'll hit this sustainability point. We'll get this income from the sale of MDMA. We'll be able to complete globalization, complete commercialization.

And you will be the only ones that are able to sell this MDMA? During this period of data exclusivity, unless another company decides to do their own research? So the answer is probably yes, because it will take people at least five or six years to do that. Can you meet demand, though? Well, here's where it gets a little bit more complicated, because the demand, the way we say this, it's not the drug. It's the therapy that the drug makes more effective. And so we will not be able to meet that demand. There's about eight or nine million PTSD patients just in the United States, 350 million throughout the world or more, and just so many other people traumatized.

So it's going to... And the way we our negotiating with FDA and DEA is that the only way that this becomes a medicine is that the only people that can prescribe it have been through a training program, so they understand the safety of MDMA, and the only therapists that can actually work with the patients have been through our training program. So there's two ways that we need to work on to meet the demand. The first is to train as many therapists as we can. The second is to start exploring group therapy. And when you train these therapists, do they have to have experiences themselves with MDMA?

We don't want to ever require that people try MDMA, but we think that they would be better therapists if they do. MDMA, but we think that they would be better therapists if they do. So we have, about 10 years ago, we negotiated with FDA and we got approval for a protocol where it's personality changes, various things with MDMA, and it's limited to therapists in our training program. So the only way we can give legally therapist MDMA is in the context of a protocol because it's a Schedule I drug. So we've given around over 90 people. I've mentioned the police officer. We gave him MDMA in this protocol.

Now two years ago, we wanted to get another protocol approved that would make it less expensive to give MDMA to therapists. So the first protocol is four days long and and people either get MDMA or placebo, and then a day of integration, and then the crossover, whatever they didn't get the first day, and then a fourth day of integration. And that was good when we're training people to work for research, where half of their people will get placebo, will get therapy without MDMA, compared to therapy with MDMA. But now we wanted to do two days where everybody gets MDMA and just a day of integration

afterwards. And so about two years ago, we applied to the FDA, and they put the protocol on clinical hold, which means that we couldn't do it. They said the risks were too great to have healthy people get MDMA. What risks? Did they cite those risks? They didn't really. There was one person that had suicidal ideation, meaning that she... Pre-existing? Yes, she had attempted self-harm before. And it was resolved successfully during the MDMA session, and she told it it was beneficial to her. But what's happened now is this bureaucratic self-protectionism. The FDA realizes that now it might work, and it might become a medicine. And if something goes wrong, they're going to be blamed for it. And

it's the same group at the FDA, not the same structure, but the same organization that 25 years ago under a different group name, but the group that regulated psychedelics back then also regulated OxyContin. And so they're the ones that approved OxyContin for long-term use. And that's been a big scandal. It's helped produce the op opioid epidemic. And so all of their documents have been released to the public. And so the FDA, even though it's different people now, they're a little bit worried about what happens if they let psychedelics out and something goes wrong. So they've become more conservative in certain ways. And so they said, no, we're not going to give you permission to give MD-Meta therapists. And of our two-person therapy team, which is male-female usually, two-person team, the lead person needs to be licensed to do therapy, and the second person doesn't need

to be licensed. It can be in a student to get a license or someone with 1,000 hours of behavioral health experience. But in this new protocol, the FDA said the lead person needs to be an MD or a PhD. And they said every clinic needs to have a doctor on site. I mean, this protocol, you need a doctor on site. Right now, we have approval in phase three. The lead person is just a licensed therapist, not MD, PhD. And the doctor does the screening and is on call, but is not on site. So these are like poison pills for rolling it out to meet the demand because it

would increase the costs of the therapy tremendously to have a doctor on site. Many therapists have private practice offices. If they had to pay for a doctor on site the whole time, it would be way too expensive. So we've been through a two-year process, and we decided that we needed to fight this. And so we actually hired attorneys with expertise in challenging FDA in what's called the formal dispute resolution process. And that's where you appeal to higher levels of the FDA. So the division of psychiatry products is regulated by the Office of Neuroscience. And so we've spent over a quarter million dollars on lawyers' fees. It's kind of a mixture of law and science.

And we went to challenge the FDA. And we said that, first off, it's not too risky to have therapists volunteer for this. So we did a survey of the 90 therapists that had been through it, and they uniformly almost said very high average scores. It was very helpful to them professionally to learn how to understand what MDMA does. It helped them to be better therapists. And personally, they got a lot out of it, and the harms were very, very minimal or virtually nonexistent. We got letters from expert therapists and academics and said 20, over 20 letters saying MD or PhD doesn't make sense, that licensed therapists can do just as well or better because they practice therapy. MDs don't even know what therapy is.

Even psychiatrists a lot of times are trained to sort of be arm of the pharmaceutical industry. And psychopharmacology, they don't even have to do therapy themselves to be a psychiatrist. PhDs in psychology are often trained to do measures. They're not necessarily therapists either. It's just from the FDA, they don't regulate psychotherapy. That's what's so challenging for them. This is the first time that the FDA is not looking just at drugs. So the way ketamine was approved, and there's a ketamine clinic here in Texas, the way in Austin, I mean, and hundreds of ketamine clinics, it was approved just as a pharmacological treatment without any kind of therapy with it. But we think therapy is part of it. So this is the first time FDA is trying to regulate

therapy. And we also said that we don't need a doctor on site, that the safety issues are, you're making them up. We looked at all the phase three sites where some of them we have doctor on site, some not. Some we have MD, PhDs, the lead therapist, some not. And there were no differences really in efficacy or safety. So the good news is that just two weeks ago or three weeks ago, we won this formal dispute resolution. All right. Yeah, it was great. So the FDA, now we have permission for this study to give MDMA to therapists again. It'll be less expensive. MD-PhD is out the window and doctor on site

is out the window. Where is the MDMA coming from now? Well, in 1985, I had some made at Purdue University by Dr. Dave Nichols. 85? 1985. And we're still- You had some 36-year-old MDMA laying around? It's incredibly stable molecule. Now, it's not used in phase three. So I'll just say, so at that point, I paid him $4,000 for a kilogram of MDMA. Whoa, what's that worth on the street?

A lot, a lot. And I will say that I have never done this MDMA. It's the purest in the world. What? It was done in a university lab. Why haven't you done it then? Because the legal and the illegal are separate. Oh. So, you know, yes. Sure. I can't. No, totally true.

Wink. No, no, totally true. I've never done it. Oh, for sure. I wish I could have. But Dave actually got a good yield. It was a kilogram and a half. So the reason I share this is just to say it's

an extremely stable molecule. We are still using it in non-phase three studies because it's not quote GMP, good manufacturing practices. It's just as pure, but there's not all the data about it. It's not made at scale, but it's just great. So we've had to find new suppliers for MDMA. It's just great. So we've had to find new suppliers for MDMA. So to answer your question. Dealers. Producers.

Producers. And there are multiple companies in the U.S., Canada, Netherlands, England, Switzerland that we got bids from to manufacture our medical-grade MDMA. Wow. That is interesting. Yeah. So we're like a drug company. A lot of drug companies contract out to research labs to make their drugs. Well, they must also be very aware that with MAPS, it's such a legitimate organization with such a long history of success that you guys are basically opening up the door for this industry. Yes.

And they'd like to get in on it as quickly as possible and have an established foot through the door. Yeah, and they think that this could go very big. Yeah, it absolutely could. Yeah, so it very well could. And eventually, I think 2035, after a decade of clinics, I think we'll have licensed legalization and people will be legally able to buy psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, all these drugs. Well, I love the fact that you're planning this far ahead.

It's a bummer that here we are in 2021, and we have to think in terms of 14 years from now, it being legal, something that should be legal right now. But I do love the fact that your strategy is so, you guys are patient and calculated, and you're doing it right. Yeah. Yeah, well, to say the first medical marijuana states

were California and Arizona in 1996. That. Yeah. Well, to say the first medical marijuana states were California and Arizona in 1996. That's 25 years ago. And we still don't have federal legalization of marijuana. People are motivated by stories. They need to hear stories. That's what Congressman Crenshaw, what motivated him was hearing stories from other Navy SEALs. It wasn't so much data. It was stories that the people that said. So we think that the FDA needs data. They don't want to hear stories. They need data.

But once they make it into a medicine and then we roll out these thousands of clinics, we and others, I mean, and there'll be psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA clinics, and maybe 5-MeO-DMT and Ibogaine and other clinics. But there'll be trained therapists, be cross-trained. There'll be psychedelic therapists. But then there'll be stories and stories and stories of people that have gotten benefits from psychedelics. And that's what will change public opinion to move to licensed legalization in 2035. But just backtrack for a second.

licensed legalization in 2035. But to just backtrack for a second, the MDMA that's manufactured now for us in England, it's a company that also makes LSD and psilocybin, and they make MDMA for us. What a daring company. They're really, really good. What are they called? Onyx is the name of the company. But they make what's called the active pharmaceutical ingredient. That's called API, the active pharmaceutical ingredient. That's like the powder, you know, whatever. But that's not the dosage form. So then there's another company that we have to send it to in order to put it into capsules. And you would think that that should be pretty damn easy, to just stick this stuff into capsules.

But they have to do it at large scale, automated. They mix it with mannitol, you know, other different things to make it all weigh the same, all the capsules, because for research too, we have to have all the capsules weigh the same, even though they have different amounts of MDMA in them, so supposedly for double-blind purposes. But we have a second company now that is making it into capsules, and it's cost us so far almost $6 million just to get our new supply,

whereas I got one kilogram and a half, actually, from Dave Nichols in 85 for $4,000. Now we've got about 14 kilograms, but it's done in a way where it's done at scale. You pressure test everything, what can go wrong, what are the impurities. You have to get really very clear understanding. And then you have to get uniformity, blend uniformity to put it into the capsules. That's also really expensive. So now what we're doing is scaling up to make it, and we hope that we'll have enough MDMA. The question is, will we have enough therapists? What's an effective dose?

Well, we did a study in veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and we tested 30 milligrams, 75 milligrams, and 125 milligrams. And we thought that the effective dose was 125 milligrams, and we thought that 30 and the 75 would not do quite as well. Now, just to say what we do, not do quite as well. Now, just to say what we do, we do believe that longer is better in the therapeutic session. So two hours after this initial administration of whatever it is, we give half the initial amount. So 125 with 62 and a half milligrams, 75 with 37 and a half, or 30 and 15 milligrams. And that extends this plateau that's called the optimal arousal zone. So when people have PTSD, one of the common responses is they become emotionally numb. You know, just it's too painful or people are hyperactive, hypervigilant, and

they're constantly on edge. But in neither of those conditions are people really able to do therapeutic work to process the trauma. They're either too numb or too reactive. So the MDMA brings people into this optimal arousal zone where they can feel safe and process the trauma. So what we discovered in this study, to our surprise, was that the 75 milligram group actually did great, even a slightly better than the 125 in this one particular study, although there were other differences. The groups, when you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything is equal. It's random. And so what we showed is that the PTSD symptoms were pretty much equal in these different groups, but depression was

a lot higher in the 125 milligram group than in the 75 milligram group. But in any case, the 75 milligram group did great. And we've tested 0 milligrams, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150, all with half the initial amounts. So our phase three studies now are designed, there's three MDMA sessions one month apart, and there's 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions, three before the first MDMA session for preparation, and then three after each MDMA session for integration. So the first one in phase three is now going to be 80 milligrams followed by 40 milligrams. And then the second session, it could stay 80 or 40, but generally

almost everybody will go up to 120 and then get 60. And then the third MDMA session also is negotiable, but it's almost always, again, 120 over 60. The reason it's not 75 and 125 but it's almost always again 120 over 60 the reason it's not 75 and 125 is it's so expensive millions to make a new dosage form that we felt that we we needed to save money so we make only 40 milligram capsules or 60 milligram capsules mm-hmm and so 60 you take two of them you get 120 and then you've got the 60 for the half. 40 milligrams will give you 80, and half of that is 40, or the 340s can give you the 120. And so we only have two different sizes, 40 milligrams and 60 milligrams. But we've found that the 80 milligrams can be quite effective,

and it's a good way to start for a lot of people. Where it's not overwhelming? Yeah, it's not overwhelming. And then the next day is not overwhelming as well, right? Yeah. Does it have an equal impact in terms of how much time you need to recover? So it's like 30, do you have to recover less than you would with 120? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't take near as much out of you. But still, we have the second day with no obligations and people are resting, and then we have the integrative psychotherapy the very next day. So what we have modified our program based on

what we found to be a lower effective dose than we thought, but what made it complicated is that it's important to, the goal is to try to do double-blind studies, randomized placebo-controlled double-blind studies, so people don't know what dose they're getting, so that then you can say it's due not to their expectations, if there are differences between the two groups, it's just due to the dose. And so what we are trying to do is find out what dose of MDMA is high enough to cause confusion. People aren't quite sure, but not so high that it's so therapeutic that you can't tell a difference between the two groups. And to our surprise, as I said, the 75 milligram group in that study was effective. So it was a

lower effective dose than we thought. But the 25, 30, 40, and 50 milligrams made people uncomfortable. It was like turbulence when you take off from an airplane. You have to get up above the 25, 30, 40, and 50 milligrams made people uncomfortable. It was like turbulence when you take off from an airplane. You have to get up above the clouds and it's smooth sailing. But if you're in this kind of turbulent phase, it can make you uncomfortable. Stuff comes to the surface. You're supposed to talk about your trauma. You've been burdened by your trauma for a very long time, but you don't have enough fear reduction. So what we showed is that people all got better, but the people that got, if we gave people therapy without any MDMA at all, they did better than the people that got therapy that got 25, 30, or 40 milligrams. Interesting.

And so that meant that my dissertation was wrong. I had thought I'd solved the problem of how do you do a successful double-blind study, and it was going to be therapy plus low-dose of whatever it is, low-dose psilocybin, low-dose MDMA, low-dose, you know, therapy plus low-dose versus therapy plus full-dose. Now, with MDMA, what we discovered is that if we use low doses, 25, 30, 40 milligrams, that we can produce enough confusion that the FDA would consider it successful blinding, but that it will make it easier for us to find a difference between MDMA with low-dose MDMA than therapy with low-dose MDMA, I mean, or therapy with no MDMA at all. So the real question is, if you can do the work with therapy, why bother at a drug?

So when we went to the FDA, we said, we can give you blinding with low-dose MDMA with therapy, but it's going to make it easier for us to find a difference between the two groups and that we suggest that we do therapy with inactive placebo versus therapy with full dose MDMA. And most people, almost everybody will be able to tell whether they've got MDMA or not, and the therapist will be able to tell. But that's the fair test. Can we do this? And so that's the fair test. You know, can we do this? And so that's what the FDA, there's a fellow named Bob Temple, like the old wise man of the FDA. He's been there since 1972. He was in charge of the Office of Science Policy. They brought him into the final meeting where we discussed our design of Phase 3. And he was part of the group that said, yes, we can do therapy with inactive placebo.

of the group that said, yes, we can do therapy with inactive placebo. And he said there's two main ways then to, or he didn't say, but the FDA was, there's two main ways to reduce experimental bias when the double blind doesn't work. One is called random assignment. You have everybody pass the same screening, the same inclusion criteria. They're all similarly motivated. They're all willing to get the full dose MDMA, but then some do and some don't. Then the other part of it is, how do you evaluate whether the treatment was successful? You can't have the therapists evaluate or give measures to the patients because they're biased. They might think they know who got the MDMA, who not. So we need a very robust system of independent raters that are trained by the Boston VA. We have over 20 of these. They're inter-rater reliability. They do an hour interview. It's

called the CAPS, the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale. It was developed by the Boston VA. And so they're randomly assigned on telemedicine to evaluate the patient, the next patient that comes in. And so one rater doesn't follow the patient through the study. And so that's how the FDA said that we can do the studies. And we have a signed agreement in what's called the special protocol assessment process. And so once we present the data to the FDA, they can't say, we don't like your methodology. If we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and no new safety problems arise, then they must approve the drug. And then when we went to the European Medicines Agency and we said to them, we would like to bring this to Europe. We would like to globalize. Here's the same issue. How do we do a double-blind study?

Here's what the FDA said. The EMA, the European Medicines Agency, agreed with the FDA, and they said, we have to do one phase three study of 70 people in Europe. Again, therapy with inactive placebo versus therapy with full-dose MDMA. And the European Medicines Agency also said that they want us to work with refugees and migrants. They want us to enroll some refugees and migrants in the phase three study because there's so many Syrian refugees and North African refugees in Europe, and there are a lot of them horribly traumatized from becoming a refugee and trying to cross these borders and traffickers and all of that. So we're going to try to include some refugees and migrants. But that's basically the design of the studies.

And so the active dose will also be in Europe, starting with 80 milligrams, followed by 40. And then the second and third, there's almost always 120, followed by 60. And you'll be interviewing these people. And what's the protocol for establishing success in terms of like how the study went, how the experience went for these people? Yeah. Luckily for us, there is a gold standard measure of PTSD symptoms. And it is this measure developed by the Boston VA called the CAPS, Clinician Administrative PTSD Scale. And this is number five. This is the fifth version of it. So CAPS-5. And so that's administered to people at baseline.

And then we administer it throughout the study. And then two months after the last experimental session. So to give you a sense of how our phase three study went, the one that we just got published in Nature Medicine and why we think we have a real good chance of succeeding, is that now we work with severe chronic PTSD patients and we felt that we have to work with the hardest patients. And what that means is that if they have attempted suicide in the past, we will still include them. They can't be actively suicidal, but they can have tried to kill themselves in the past. And many PTSD studies think that that group is too dangerous to use, that they exclude people who have tried to kill themselves before. But we think we have to include them. So what we showed at the two-month follow-up was that those people that got therapy without MDMA, 32%

no longer had PTSD, which is pretty amazing. People had PTSD on average of 14 years. We had one-third of people had PTSD over 20 years. Can I stop you for a second? So 32% of people that just had therapy with no MDMA. Now, obviously, there's a different therapist with different skill levels and different levels of intuition and the ability to navigate emotional problems. Was that taken into consideration? Like, we were looking at the 30%. What was the ones that were effective?

What traits did they have in common? What about those therapy sessions and what about the people that were initially suffering from PTSD? What did they have in common? Well, you're asking one of the most important questions and we don't know the answer. You know, we are not sure how to predict ahead of time who's going to respond and who's not going to respond. Well, also because because you're dealing with different therapists, you're also dealing with different personalities and different bedside manners, different people that have a different skill level in terms of emotional skill

or rather emotional intelligence, being able to navigate conversations with people. That's true, although we train all the therapists. Right, but they're individual human beings. You could train people all day long. If you train seven people how to be a computer coder, there's going to be varying skill levels. Well, one of the things that the FDA required us to do was to look if there were site-to-site variations in the results. Site-to-site in terms of geographic locations? Well, yeah. So we have 15 sites for phase three. Right. But do you do what I'm saying by geographic?

Like some places will have good weather. Some places have terrible weather. Well, this is more just about the therapists. Okay. So are the therapists at these different sites? Got it. Okay. So we had two sites in Israel, two in Canada, and 11 throughout the United States.

That's a big difference geographically, right? Yeah, geographically, but, you know, in different languages. But the CAPS-5 is translated into multiple languages. So it's the same measure all over the world that we use. The same train, we train raters in the different countries that... But it's, again, it's subjective, right? You're just subjectively trying to analyze how people feel. Well, you could say it's subjective. It's an hour-long interview of the patients reporting how they're feeling. Right. Yeah. So in that sense- But it has to be subjective, right? Well, we don't know biological markers either. That's the other part. I mean, we have done some fMRI tests before and after and showed reduction of

activity in the amygdala. Interesting. So that people are having brain changes. This is through therapy, just therapy. Or therapy withdala. Interesting. So that people are having brain changes. This is through therapy, just therapy. Or therapy with MDMA. Okay. Yeah. So what we found though, when we analyzed the data, was that there were no site to site differences that were statistically significant. So what that means is that there are these individual variations in the different skills of the therapists, but that we think that the effectiveness of the MDMA is, in a way, equalizes, like a great equalizer. Right, because it's so potent. And our method is to empower people to heal themselves. So it's not like we're thinking, okay, great therapist, you're doing this healing work.

So of the eight-hour session, roughly half the time, in no specific order, people's eyes are closed. They're listening to music through headphones. They're having this own internal experience that's very poetic, metaphorical. MDMA is not visual like LSD or psilocybin, but it promotes this imagination. It's like inner storytelling, very metaphorical. I mean, one of the veterans was like the warrior part of himself that he came back from Iraq with that he couldn't trust. He locked up in a cage inside him. And this warrior would reach out of the cage and try to—this gorilla would reach out of the cage, stab him in the side. And then he realized that there's a book, Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, about this particular veteran. And it's about our work.

So Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal. It's about Michael Mithofer, our lead psychiatrist, my story, and the vets, and Nick Blackston, and how we all interacted in our lives. But it's this sort of people tell themselves stories. And it was how Nick realized that this gorilla part that he had locked up because he couldn't trust because of what he had done in Iraq, he would explode in rage and sometimes with his wife, that he was only making it worse by keeping this gorilla in a cage. And so in his imagination, while his eyes are closed, you know, and he unlocks the cage. He pulls the knife out of his side.

He unlocks the cage. And these evil red eyes of this gorilla melt and they hug each other. And he never – this was his first MDMA session. Sounds like some weird anime. It sounds like that, yeah. And it was 75 milligrams. And he never had rage after that first session. Never?

Not in that same way. His emotions were more under control in that raging kind of way. This is an extraordinarily beneficial session for him. Extremely, yeah. And so of the eight hours, roughly half the time people are having their own experiences. And then the other times they come out and they share with the therapists what's been happening. And there's some dialogue there. And then they go back inner and outer. And we have no script. It's not a it's we call it inner directed therapy. And there's this inner wisdom for what emerges. And so a lot of times people will talk about traumas that they've not talked about to anybody before, even that they've not really fully acknowledged themselves that didn't come up in the prior discussions because they're feeling safe. That's the same kind of reduction of anxiety,

reduction of fear, self-acceptance, more complex things come up. So we do think that the MDMA is very therapeutic, potentially in the right supportive setting. The therapists make a big difference, but that we do feel that through the data analysis that there were no site-to-site variations, meaning that the results were more or less equivalent across all these about almost 80 therapists in these 15 different sites. So that gives us confidence that we can scale it, that we can find tens of thousands of therapists. Now, some therapists could be really bad and they can make it worse. You know, we'll try to identify them during the training. So what we do is we have right now this hundred hours of training virtual. Then we have an opportunity for some of the people to volunteer to receive MDMA as a patient themselves to understand from the inside out

what it does. And then we supervise the therapists as they work with their first patient. And we have our treatment manual, which is also up on the MAPS website if anybody wants to know our therapeutic approach. And then we have operationalized it in what's called adherence criteria. Like, are the therapists supporting people's inner experience? Are they intervening too much? Are they, you know, talking too much? Are they letting the patients have their own experience? Are they creating a safe, supportive environment? Are they answering their questions about safety? Are they, you know, encouraging them to express rather than suppress whatever's happening? Again, this difference between a bad and a difficult trip. So we have a team of adherence raters that evaluate the videotapes and give feedback back to the therapists.

Are they adhering to our method? So we do try to kind of have a standardized approach that leaves room for individual variability. Therapists can say different things. They can do different kind of things. But generally, we have this method called the interdirected therapy in our treatment manual. And it seems like we will be able to scale this and that the MDMA really helps people to process and will give them the time in this safe space for them to work through their own issues. Like the MDMA experience that you described,

you know, you came to a lot of things on your own. You know, you were able to do that, but it wasn't that the people with you produced those insights. You figured it out yourself. And so that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to empower the patients to heal themselves. And even though these are chronic, severe, some had attempted suicide before, they tried other drugs, they tried therapies, 32% were able to, at the two-month follow-up, no longer have PTSD, which is really good for therapy. But you said 32% with just therapy. Just therapy, yes. Just therapy. Yes. Yes. The group that got therapy plus MDMA was 68%. Wow. That's significant. Yeah. And of the one third that

more or less that still had PTSD, most of them had what are called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms. Their lives were better. They had fewer symptoms, although they still had PTSD. But if we could have given them a fourth session... You think you could have nipped it in the bud? For many of them. Now, because this is labor intensive and it's very expensive, the big issue for scaling for us is going to be not only the number of therapists that we train, but is it covered by insurance? And so for the insurance companies, what they want to see is, is it durable? Is it lasting? So in our phase two studies, and in also this phase three study, we're going to check again at 12 months. We're not at that point yet for this first phase three study. But in our phase two studies, what we showed is that in phase two, at the two-month follow-up, we had 56% no longer had PTSD with the MDMA plus therapy at the two months. So the phase three results are even slightly better than phase two.

But at the 12-month follow-up for phase two, people kept getting better. Now two-thirds no longer had PTSD at the one-year follow-up. So it took long for the lessons to sort of sink in. Yes. And people, once you learn how to sort of, you don't need to suppress. You can process it. People can keep getting better on their own without more drugs. So this is fundamentally different than, here, take a drug to correct a biochemical problem

like an SSRI. You're going to need this every day, and you could need it for years or months. What we're saying is we do in-depth work to try to make it so we get to the core of the problem so that then we free people of the need for drugs. Now, the thing about marijuana, we talked about marijuana for PTSD. That's more palliative than curative, meaning that it reduces symptoms. It'll help people sleep at night, but it doesn't help them process the core trauma. It just suppresses the symptoms.

And there are many people that may not want to do this difficult work. It's painful and it's emotional, and you have to really look at this trauma and it's difficult. So we think that there's quite a number of group of people that would rather just use the marijuana for PTSD if we can show if it's effective. Go back to the prison thing because I think that's a place where I think there's a lot of room for beneficial therapy. I mean, if you think about how many of these people that are in prison have never really gotten

any kind of real helpful counseling or real moments like something that could be provided from an MDMA experience where they really get a chance to let go of a lot. I think so. I think that- Has there been a thought about how to implement this? Oh, yeah. Well, it's a little bit difficult to get permission to do research, or it's very

difficult to get permission to do research inside prisons because the question is informed consent. Are people in some way pressured to do this? But we've got therapists that have worked at San Quentin, that have worked at Folsom Prison, others that there are wardens that are now interested in this. But what we think we're probably going to have to start with is recently paroled people and then work with them outside of prison and help them address their traumas and then provide, again, group support. And try to limit recidivism. We wanted to get, I mean, prison in a way is a perfect opportunity for people to confront these

issues. Now, my son Eden lives in Philadelphia and he lives right next to the Eastern State Penitentiary. And so this was the first major penitentiary where the word penitentiary came from. It was all set up hundreds of years ago. It was for people to be meditating on their crimes. So it's individual cells, sort of like they pioneered, you know, isolation. But they tried to make it so people would use the time in prison to reform themselves and make themselves. They found that it actually was very cruel punishment to be so isolated like this, and they didn't provide therapy support. But I think prisons would be an ideal environment to do this kind of deep work. And that's where we want to get to one day. And we do think that you need to have compassion. A lot of these people have been deeply wounded in their lives, in their early lives. do it. They want to find a way not to be in prison. Even for people that are in prison for the rest of their lives that have life sentences, this could be very helpful to help them have a better internal environment, a better quality of life. So I think that that will be in the future,

but we have to go step by step. Chances are we'll start with parolees, provide support, step. Chances are we'll start with parolees, provide support, see if we can reduce recidivism, and then eventually hopefully get permission to do work inside prison. The other thing is prison guards. I mean, it's a brutalizing environment for everybody that's there, not just for the prisoners, but also for the guards. And because they're traumatized, they act in more violent ways towards the prisoners. And so we think that we want to be working with the same way with police officers. They have exposure to the worst of humanity. They see all these crimes. They see murders. They see horrible things. Just imagine how much better the world would be if MDMA was readily available.

That's what kept us going this whole time. People could just sort of make decisions based on the same decisions they make based on whether or not they want to have alcohol or whether, you know. There are so many different things that you do that you're allowed to make these decisions with that are more harmful than MDMA. Yeah. Now, we have another project, which is for political reconciliation. So it turns out that there are some Israelis and Palestinians that have been doing ayahuasca and MDMA together. Oh boy. Where? Well there are underground psychedelic therapists in Palestine. Wow. And ayahuasca is used throughout Israel. So with Lior Roseman

and Robin Card Harris who are at Imperial College, Lior is a neuroscientist, but an Israeli, and Natalie Ginsberg on our staff, who is head of our policy and advocacy team, we are trying to study how you can use psychedelics in this Israeli Palestinian context. Now, again, they're not the hardcore haters. They are the people that are more open to being in these mixed spaces. We've understanding that the Palestinians, they have MDMA first on their own to try to work through some of their traumas. Then they go into these mixed spaces where they use ayahuasca. So the first year of this study, and this was funded by Christian Angermeyer, who's the

lead, started to tie the lead investor in Compass. But this was, he said, he's not all about money, he's also about peace. And so the first year was interviews of these Israelis and Palestinians, why they did it, and what were their experiences. And so we were just recently publishing a paper that Lior wrote about that. I mean, one of the beautiful moments was this person said that an Israeli, that whenever he heard Arabic music, that it made him tense up. It reminded him of the quote, the enemy. But during an ayahuasca experience, they played Islamic music from prayer music. And he could hear the beauty in it. And he said, in this state of mind, in this ayahuasca state of mind, that there's no Israelis, there's no Palestinians, there's just human. And I could see the beauty of

this Arabic music. And so what we like to joke, but it's not so much of a joke, is that we're going to work on the easy case of Israelis and Palestinians. And then if it works, we're going to come to America to work with Republicans and Democrats. Hilarious. But we need, so the psychedelics have so many different potential uses. And so when you have these traumatized populations, that's why in Rwanda, we've been approached by people who want to bring MDMA to Rwanda

where the Hutus and the Tutsis did massive genocide. Again, again. Oh, sorry. That's a hilarious ringer. Sorry for that. I turned that off. Oops. It's hilariously at the three-minute mark, the three-hour mark, too.

Like right about to wrap this up. It's like a timer went off. That's funny. Yeah, so we do have this idealistic hope in a way that psychedelics can help people to see through their traumas, to see people that they're scared of as humans. The same way you're talking about with criminals. Yeah. People demonize the criminals. You know, if there's some way that we can see them as humans as have been wounded, if we can have compassion for them, if we can have compassion for people that have different political views.

Well, it's remarkable that there actually are compounds that promote empathy and that these are illegal. Well, did you hear about the octopus study? No. Okay. So there's a neuroscientist, Gould Dolan, at Johns Hopkins. So the Oscars gave this best documentary to the My Octopus Teacher, which is an incredible movie. But it's about a guy who has a relationship with this octopus. But octopuses are solitary creatures, and they stay away from other octopuses unless it's mating season, which is very rare.

And they live alone. it's a mating season, which is very rare, and they live alone. But around 560 million years or more ago, humans and octopuses diverged. But octopuses still process serotonin. Their brains still process serotonin. And so Gould was interested to know, what does MDMA do to an octopus? So there's, you know, neuroscientists do a lot of animal studies. So they have an experimental procedure where there's an octopus in a container, and there's two doors. One goes to an inanimate object that's kind of put in a birdcage kind of thing so it can't move. The other door leads to another octopus that's also in this birdcage that it can't move. And so the octopus that's put in this chamber can go either way. And no matter how you switch the genders, the octopus will spend way more time with the inanimate object. It will stay away from

the other octopus. But when it's with the other octopus, it's around the perimeter. It doesn't really engage with the other octopus. So it took a while for a girl to figure this out, but how much MDMA? We sent them the MDMA. That's a goal. But she puts the MDMA in the water, She puts the MDMA in the water, soaks the octopus in this water, and the octopus absorbs the MDMA. And then you put the octopus back in this chamber, and now they spend way more time with the other octopus. And when they're there, they're touching the tentacles and they're engaging with this other octopus. So what she felt it does is, we know that kids, when you're young, you can learn languages easier.

You also learn more social skills. So what she said, what Gold thinks is happening is that MDMA opens up a critical reward period for social reward learning, that you now can become more social. And that, I think, is what we see also in humans. So MDMA has this ability to promote connection and to promote empathy and to promote interest and understanding. Some people said ecstasy is not the right word for

MDMA. It should be called empathy. Now, Gould also did work with mice, and she gives mice a bunch of MDMA. And what she showed then is, and mice, she'll then chop them up afterwards and look at their brains. But MDMA releases oxytocin, which is this hormone love, connection. And then it produces new neural connections. So there's the new connections with other neurons in prosocial areas of the brain. So you are actually rewiring your brain. And there is this way where you process memories differently. And that can account for this neuroplasticity can account for the long-term benefits from MDMA. Now, there's also work that's been done with psilocybin about neuroplasticity, that psilocybin also can promote neural connections. And neural growth.

Neural growth, yeah. So Mike Tyson, you had on, he talked about how psychedelics have changed him. And neural growth. And the Stanley Cup a couple times. But he's working also affiliated in a way with Mike Tyson. He's got a company called Wisana, which is going to try to develop psilocybin with cannabinoids and potentially adding MDMA for traumatic brain injury. So fighters and people that have been in the wars,, people have been blast exposure. So it looks like there's a good chance that there can be recovery from TBI. So there was this documentary, HBO Sports, and they had about MDMA, but Daniel was also about this concoction of psilocybin microdosing and cannabinoid CBD and other things. And so it does seem like other psychedelics also have this way to rewire the brain. And it may be helpful for TBI, for traumatic brain injury, as well as PTSD. And a lot of the vets and others have both. You have TBI and PTSD. So as we are thinking about how do we raise this roughly $150 million, $50 million a year for three years, we've got several basic ways. We want to do it through philanthropy. We want to be able to still prioritize public benefit. We're concerned if we take loans or investments that that would, then we'd have to give returns. It would change our approach. You know, where would we work?

Would we work with people that have large amounts of trauma, but not large amounts of money like all around the world? But we may partner with other companies that want to develop other indications for MDMA. So there's one company we saw is interested in partnering with us and we're just in the early stages of exploring. Well, what if people just want to donate? What's the best way to do that? Maps.org. Maps.org. And it's very clearly laid out there. They can just go and donate. Yeah.

And that's obviously very beneficial. Yeah. So we should encourage people to do that. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. And if they want to donate a fair amount, don't do it through the website because- There it is. Yeah. So we should encourage people to do that. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. And if they want to donate a fair amount, don't do it through the website because there it is. Yeah. Support psychedelic science. Thank you. Don't do it through the website?

What do you mean? Well, only because if you do it through a credit card, you know, the credit card people take a bunch of the money. So, you know, mail in a check. Or if you want to donate stocks or something like that, it's all on the website how to do that. Okay. But we are trying to build our base too. So we're trying to have more monthly members. The t-shirt that you've got is for MAPS staff. That's a very limited edition, but we have special things for members.

So we want to have eventually thousands of members. Well, I'm going to encourage people to go there and I got to wrap this up, but we've already done three hours, believe it or not. Wow. Now't that crazy? Now, I do have one question, if you're open to this question, is the last two times we did this, we smoked pot before. Yeah. And we didn't do that this morning. We didn't, no. So I'm wondering, is that because we're in Texas? No.

No, we just started talking. No, there's a pot right here. Oh, okay. We just decided to just talk. Okay, I was wondering if it was Texas. I think it's good to be sober occasionally. There's nothing wrong with it. Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. That's the only reason why. Okay. No, we've been... The first few episodes we didn't, though. We got a little nervous. We're like, maybe we should go beat good neighbors, you know, since it's not totally legal here.

We abandoned that pretty quickly. I'm glad to hear that. Well, thank you very much, Rick. It's always a pleasure to see you. And I think what you're doing and the work you've done is really amazing and inspiring and so beneficial. And so I'm very thankful, very thankful for you guys. Yeah. And whatever I can do to help.

Well, yes, thank you very much. And maybe if we come back in five or ten years, we can see how many psychedelic clinics there are. Yes, ten years from now. If we come back in five or ten years, we can see how many psychedelic clinics there are. Ten years from now. Let's think about a June of 2031, and then there'll be a shitload of them. And maybe the world will be a better place. I hope so, and that's our plan.

Yes, and you're doing an amazing job with it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay. Bye, everybody. Thank you.