The Joe Rogan Experience - #2319 - Rick Doblin

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit established in 1986 to advance evidence-based psychedelic therapy and end prohibition. MAPS incubated Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation) which is leading drug development of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.  Learn more about Psychedelic Science 2025, June 16–20 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, at www.psychedelicscience.org, and visit www.maps.org for information on MAPS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Quick, Tom, what a turn of events. This is absolutely incredible, Joe. Absolutely a series of unexpected things have led to this day. You were supposed to do Duncan's podcast and then Duncan and I got on the phone and he was saying, you know You're trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event. Yeah, and then Duncan said, you know, hey man, you can have them on your show and I said well, why don't you come on to it?

It'd be really fun Then this morning Duncan has a root canal like an unexpected emergency root canal So so it was a just a crazy turn of events and fortunately you're here Yeah, I just came in from Ukraine Wow Yeah, whoo, what we doing over there training therapists and psychiatrists Wow, so Ukraine has Enormous amounts of trauma and so what I'm trying to do and is to go to high trauma Areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how that could be helpful.

Nat. What is the legality of it over there? Dr. Slaughter Well, right now it's illegal. They have these terrible laws left over from when Russia was in control, and you cannot even do research with Schedule I drugs. Not with psilocybin, not with MDMA. You can't even do research. But over the last

couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their military, by other people to change that because they're aware that they have so much enormous trauma. So a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation to change the law. And so the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from throughout Ukraine. We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous area. But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens. But then they look at their phone and they see the area that the air raid sirens are supposedly about, and could be like a hundred miles square something like that so nobody seemed to care nobody moved to shelters and we just ignored these arid sirens and heard nothing but it's just it was so emotionally moving because we went to the cemetery in Lviv and they

have these in cities all over Ukraine and they have something that I've never seen before is that they have just in cities all over Ukraine. And they have something that I've never seen before, is that they have just enormous numbers of graves, terrible. They've lost about 250,000 people. But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the person that's dead, that's the person that's buried there. And I've never seen that anywhere else,

is you just, it has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures and most of them are younger and you know tragically interrupted their lives, a fair number of women, and so and they put them in the center of the cities. They're having to build new grave sites all over, and this was next to a really large, old historic cemetery. Yeah, and so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand

some of these new technologies Meaning psychedelic therapies hardly new well new to them right so they've been very much Conservative society they don't have legal marijuana. They don't have marijuana Yeah, so it was very moving to be there for their just the fact that we were there that people felt that we were willing to come to the country and be there with them, even though it's in this more safe part of the country. And so the thought that we would the next steps would all be philanthropy. So I should say that I'm here representing myself. I'm not talking on behalf of MAPS and I'm not talking on behalf of Lycos, the pharmaceutical

company that MAPS helped start a while ago. So I'm just talking for myself personally. But what we're trying to do is really respond to where the trauma is. And next week I'm going to Beirut, which is something I never thought I would be going to, but I've been invited to speak at the American University of Beirut and also a YPO sort of business group. And there's the possibility of potentially at least starting research with MDMA therapy in in Lebanon as well Do you ever get frustrated at the lack of progress? with

Legalization because it seems like so much headway has been made on the therapy made on the therapeutic front like so many people have anecdotal stories of people have anecdotal stories of like a lot of soldiers with Ibogaine in particular, MDMA in particular, that these people have had incredible experiences, turned their life around. I'm so baffled by the snail's pace of acceptance of these things. Well, I first tried MDMA in 1982, so we're talking about 43 years ago. And as soon as I experienced it, I thought this has incredible therapeutic potential. It was legal at the time. When did it become illegal?

1985. And so it had been, MDMA had been a, it had been legal but it was sort of quietly used in therapy circles from the around 1976 to the early 80s and then it started leaking out of these therapy circles and started being used as a party drug ecstasy. Wasn't a lot of that in Dallas? Yes a lot of it was at the Star Club yeah in Dallas yeah that is really where MDMA became ecstasy. Lorenzo from the psychedelic salon. I learned all about that from him.

Yeah. A fellow named Michael Caine is working on a movie about the Star Club. Oh, wow. There's an incredible story because Larry Hagman, who is the star of Dallas, frequented this nightclub with a bunch of the people from the cast and they had the police had decided to bust it because they knew that there was all these experiences. They busted J.R. Ewing? No, no, they had to, they were all prepared to bust the star club that night and

unexpectedly J.R. Ewing, Larry Hagman, showed up and they canceled the bus because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him and they busted it another time. He was on CNN once and he was talking about how he's not afraid of death because he had an incredible LSD experience. Did you ever see that? I did, yeah.

And the reason- You were like, what? Well, he did LSD therapy in the 60s. The reason that I even knew that is my mother-in-law read his autobiography. And he talks about doing LSD therapy in the 60s. And so my mother-in-law said, you might wanna try to contact this guy

because maybe he's got overlapping interests and he'll half out. And it took me a couple of years to get to him, but eventually I did. One funny story is that I got to know him pretty well and I would stay over at his house a bunch of times in Santa Monica and but he was also in I Dream of Genie. Oh yeah. So I Dream of Genie is about this genie that comes out of this bottle. He's an astronaut. And a friend of his had made a bong out of the genie bottle. And they wanted to market it.

And Larry said, no way. So there was only two versions of this genie bong. And I had one of my more humorous moments was smoking pot with Larry Hagman on Jeannie Bong. That's hilarious. It's so funny when a guy plays this like straight laced, greedy kind of psycho on a television show, a soap opera show and then in real life he's a stoner. Oh, he's incredible.

Yeah. Isn't that interesting though? It's like, cause you would never guess that from the JR you in character. Oh, right. No, he was very much Pro-psychedelic and had multiple experiences during the 60s and the CNN interview was wild though because they were there I remember watching it go. Oh you guys weren't ready for this It's what he said that they're like what you're saying acids good It's like literally the opposite of the Bill Hicks joke You know the Bill Hicks joke like you never hear like a good drug story

Yeah, it's always young man on ass and thinks he can fly like dies. Yeah, it's like but that was the one time The positive drug story from a like a beloved Star of a beloved show. Yeah, it was the most popular TV show in the world at some point. Yeah. But about your question about frustration, yes, the answer is yes, but it's important not to be

overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration. It's just to continue plotting along. We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th. I had, 1986 is when I started MAPS. And when I started MAPS, I didn't really know that it would ever succeed, that we would ever make MDMA into medicine. It was the height of Nancy Reagan and just saying no,

and the escalation of the drug war. The worst times. And I realized that it was worth doing, working towards bringing psychedelics forward, whether it worked or not. And that's what really gave me the the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the frustration by how many obstacles there's been. Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing we need this access to these experiences and it's been a tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides for example that are happening every year and if the Drug Enforcement Administration when they made MDMA

illegal in 1985 they did that on an emergency basis. We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an administrative law judge lawsuit, and we were challenging this arguments for making it into a schedule one drug. And we actually won the case. Wow. The the judge said it should be schedule three, which means it should be available as a medicine, but it should be illegal otherwise for recreational use. But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're working in. They don't compel. You have to get out of that into the civil courts. So the judge had schedule three and the Drug Enforcement Administration said no

way we're not going to do that and their rationale was so wrong so we sued them in the appeals court. What they said initially was that only the FDA could make a drug into a medicine not the DEA but the law was clear that it could be the Attorney General could do that. So the appeals court, when they review agencies' decisions, they don't tell them what to do. They say, you did something wrong, now rethink it. So then the DEA said, okay, we're gonna rethink it. And then they came up with a new reason why they were against it, and this was this eight-part standard that was essentially the same as the FDA. So then we sued them again

the second time, and we won again in the appeals courts. And so they went back to the DEA and said, you have to come up with another rationale. This one doesn't work either. Oh my God. And then they came up with a five part standard that was sufficiently different but still had phase three studies.

So it's essentially the same as FDA approval. And finally the courts upheld that. And that's during this process, it was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as a medicine, that we would have to go through the FDA. And that's where MAPS began as a nonprofit psychedelic pharmaceutical company focused entirely on donations, and the intention was to turn it into a generic drug. Because MDMA had been invented by Merck in 1912 it was in the public domain. It was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it and

Then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was itself Illegal it turned out that the Congress had given illegal. It turned out that the Congress had given the Attorney General the power to emergency schedule drugs, but the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA. So they didn't have the authority to do that. So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their lawyers figured this out. So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say. Wow. But we're stuck. And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many

people's lives would have been saved? How many people would have been able to benefit from psychedelics? It's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference, the 16th to the 20th in June in Denver. We have over 500 speakers. We had over 1,500 applications. There's an enormous amount of research taking place with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with ibogaine, with MDMA, with 5-MeO DMT, with a whole host. And the healing potential of these are incredible and yet they've been kept away from people by these prohibitionist laws and so

It's enormously frustrating and tragic and yet If we let that overwhelm us then we're not going to work as hard to make it happen So I've had to learn how to deal with that frustration. It's just a gross distortion of the legal system You know, there's no reason why they should be illegal as long as you have whiskey and You can get Adderall easily on a prescription like an oxycodone is readily prescribed like this is crazy Well, it's counterproductive. Yes, it's not even you know like

Stopping a lot of the benefits. It's actually creating more harms. Just as one example, my father was a pediatrician. He's no longer alive. But he worked on the first study with crack babies. He and his partners did the pediatric evaluation. And you remember this in the 80s. This idea was that there's going to be this whole generation

of super predators. And these women that were pregnant withs this idea was that there's going to be this whole generation of super predators and these Women that were pregnant with crack were having babies that were addicted and they were going to be Mentally deficient and prone to violence in this whole scenario that Reagan amplified right and what my father and his partners found out was that That really these kids could recover that they could do better that it was mostly malnutrition poverty it's not like fetal alcohol syndrome that it was really not this direct connection between the crack cocaine and the problems with these kids but what he found was that the women that were

pregnant and were addicted were driven away from... The fucking phone is dinging again, man. Just put it on do not disturb. Let me just turn it off. All you boomers and your god damn gadgets. But he found that these women were dissuaded from seeking treatment. Why? Because they were worried that they would have their babies taken away from them because they were worried that they would have their babies taken away from them because they were worried they were gonna go to jail.

So the drug war is counterproductive in that the people that need the help the most are driven away from seeking it because of the stigma and shame and criminality. But then they screw up sometimes and do like what Portland did where they just go, everybody just do whatever you want. And then unfortunately, you've already set a culture we've allowed

people to do fentanyl in the street and meth and whatever else they want and then then the laws pass where you decriminalize everything and sort of it's legal free for all yeah and then unfortunately you have chaos and then they pulled back the law because it was just too much people were going there just so they could get high well that's the important point what you just said, people were going there. So what that means is that, and we saw this in Zurich, so there was a place in Zurich multiple decades ago called Needle Park where they decided to provide access to health care, access to safe injection

sites, things like this for heroin addicts and others in Zurich. And it was working because when you treat people as humans like that, they will often seek other treatment. And then if they're not necessarily criminals, but then people come from all over and overwhelm the capacity because it's this one humane site. And then it became an open air drug market. Just people from all over Europe started coming and then they had the backlash Yeah, so I think it's something somewhat similar in Portland where you try some of these things on a local basis But then it attracts people from all over and then it turns into the opposite of what they'd hoped right Yeah, and it's just I just think also they had gone through the whole defund the police thing. Yeah

They were just overwhelmed by yeses and the part that just had a fucking out of control It was a lovely place a few years ago. Just a lovely place ten years ago. Portland was amazing It's all about just sweethearts and hippies They were like so calm and they get something happened and people got radicalized and then the tents the people the camping on the street Yeah, once that happened and you tolerated people just putting tents up in the middle of the city It's like can't don't ignore these people like either help them out or tell them they have to move or do something You can't just clog up your city with mentally ill drug addicts. We're in tents. That's crazy It is and it's hard to have these local solutions

because it attracts those people. Exactly. People probably got on trains to go to Portland and get high. They did. So these kind of solutions, I think people take the wrong idea from them, that the solution itself was the wrong idea. But I think it's when you do it on a local basis like that and not have it widely distributed. So basically the idea is that you have people that have problems with substance abuse of all kinds. We don't criminalize people who are alcoholics. They can go to AA, they can go to other things. They're not stigmatized and they're not worried that they're gonna be arrested. And yet they can go for help and you have a lot of

people that actually do that. And I think that's kind of humane approach. But that's where we should be leaning. Yeah, as a society. That's a healthy intelligence society. And also, we should be paying attention to the people that report great benefits. Like there's just too many. Well, luckily, we have guys like Rick Perry, Rick Perry, and Rick Perry, who was the Republican governor of Texas is now and really in full support of this Ibogaine initiative. It's wonderful. Yes well Rick Perry will be speaking at the conference. Fantastic. As will Brian Hubbard. So the work that you did to have Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard on your show and how much

that brought attention to the Ibogaine possibilities was incredible. Well it's my feeling is if a guy like Rick Perry who's this like straight nose conservative you know right wing kind of a guy if he can open up his eyes to that and open up his heart to that it's available for everybody and there's this very binary position that people take in regards to their Their thoughts on psychedelics. It's either it's for losers and people that want to escape reality Or you know if you're on the side of the people that have experienced it you don't get any of that Which is what it's which is so weird for me So the the people that think that it's for losers and it's all just a bunch of people just trying to escape reality and they're lazy and none of those people

saying that have ever done it. So if you can get just a few of them to do it and tell their friends, you know, if we had like legitimate therapy centers, because everybody needs a little help. I'm not saying you need to get off heroin. You know, like I'm not saying you're coming back from Afghanistan. I'm not saying anything crazy, but like everybody could use just a little therapeutic help to give you a fresh perspective. And I think if that was available to a lot of people that are just generally depressed,

I think we could change the tone of the country. I really do. Because one of the things that bums me out the most about, especially the interactions that people have on social media, is like it's all negative. It's all negative. You're living in these rare moments. You have a finite amount of time.

100 years is so quick. It goes by so fast. And you're wasting it, yelling at people on Twitter. For what? For what? Like commenting on things all day long in anger and disgust and look where this country is. Like what are you talking about?

Everyone's perspective needs a little help, needs a little pick me upup just a little something to go You know, I think we're okay. I think we're gonna be okay I think that there are so many possible benefits from having Psychedelic clinics all over all over. Yeah, I mean we're talking about right now. There's several thousand ketamine clinics but one of the issues with ketamine clinics. But one of the issues with ketamine clinics is that many of them provide ketamine without therapy.

Whoops. So I've. I've. Yeah, I've met a lot of those people. Yeah, yes. So I think the key point is that when we talk about psychedelics, when we talk about the clinics,

it's not here, take this pill. Right. It's here, take this pill in It's here take this pill in a therapeutic context with therapists there to help you process the emotions. With an expert, someone who's experienced it themselves who can help you. Yeah and then with the therapy afterwards, which we call the integration process. So it's not just the experience itself, it's the preparation to be open to whatever happens, it's the experience. And then I just was the other day with a woman, Gull Dolan, who is a neuroscientist.

And what she's talked about and what she's discovered is that psychedelics are these rare substances that have the open up what they call the critical periods. So it's neuroplasticity. It's this ability to rewire your brain that stays for sometimes weeks or longer. With Ibogaine it can be several months after you have the experience. So that the therapy that happens afterwards, the work that you do to integrate it, has special potential to make long-term changes in your behavior and your brain circuitry. And so psychedelics are unique among substances. People are trying to develop non psychedel so psychedelics are unique among substances. People are

trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics that do have this neuroplasticity property. But they open up this potential for long-term change if you do the therapy afterwards. If you focus on trying to what the insights that you had during the experience and then try to make them into permanent behavior patterns. That's really fascinating. It's also so typically human that we try to develop non-psychedelic versions of the same thing.

Like, we can do better than nature. God was onto something, but he had an early plan. It wasn't really fleshed out yet. Right. Well, one of the things that was really impactful for Rick Perry was Morgan Littrell, who is now a member of Congress. And so Morgan had very terrible trauma from his military service and eventually was

able to experience Ibogaine. And from that, he was able to get a lot better. And there's a researcher, Nolan Williams, who will also be at the conference, who's done work with Ibogaine and a lot of the Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico, and he's done studies of their brains with traumatic brain injury, and has shown before and after that some of them actually do have this recovery from traumatic brain injury. Yeah, it's pretty phenomenal.

It also helps people with other neurological disorders, like it's helped people with Parkinson's, right? Yes, and that is where it could make sense in certain ways to have non-psychedelic psychedelics. Right, but also why not, if Ibogaine's working, get them on that. You already have Parkinson's. What, are you scared? Scared of them? Well, and then you get the insights though as well. Yes. with Ibegaine's work and just get him on that. You already have Parkinson's. What, are you scared? Scared of him?

Yeah, and then you get the insights though as well. Yes, yes. But there's people that might not want that. It's difficult. But why do they not want it? They don't want it because of propaganda. They don't want it because someone, there's the stories of like Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd,

or you know what I mean? Like the stories of people losing their mind. That's what people are terrified of. I think with some people, honestly, that's a valid point now that you're saying that. There's a bunch of people that are very psychologically vulnerable, and maybe a profound psychedelic experience wouldn't be tenable. They wouldn't be able to handle it. That's possible. There's a bunch of people that they're in a bad state. Maybe they're on a ton of medication just keeping them stable

They can't do psychedelics Maybe them a non psychedelic version of that that rewired their brain would be beneficial now that I think about yeah There is actually a situation with cluster headaches. So cluster headaches are like suicide headaches. They're worse than migraines. And there was, this is now back around 2003, a bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches,

which are terrible. And so they contacted me and they formed this group called Cluster Busters. And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore. We would like to study this. Can you help us study this? And I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School. And I approached them, and I said, would you want to study these people with cluster headaches?

And they said, sure, this is really interesting. So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case, that psilocybin and LSD blocked cluster headache cycle and postponed the next cycle. And so we did all this research. And then the next step would have

been to actually give LSD or psilocybin to people with cholesterol headaches and the people at Harvard like, oh, Timothy Leary, he was here, we don't want to do this. You know? Damn it, MKUltra. All of that. They ruined it for everybody. Well, we're trying to get over that, but they did.

But then the people at Harvard said, well, we will do this LSD or psilocybin, but only if it's the last resort, only if everything else fails. So the scientists, Torsten Passi and John Halpern, decided that they would use a non-psychedelic version of LSD called bromo-LSD. And the plan was that they would give this bromo-LSD to a bunch of people with cholesterol headaches.

It would not work. And then they would give this bromo LSD to a bunch of people with cluster headaches. It would not work. And then they would come back and say, hey, we need to do this LSD and psilocybin research. So I said, okay, that makes sense. We have no idea why LSD or psilocybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it. And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany.

And I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results, and they wouldn't, I heard nothing. And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the Bromo LSD works even better than the LSD and the psilocybin. Because with LSD, it's effective in micrograms. For psilocybin, you take 25 milligrams

for a major major trip but with bromo LSD you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high and whatever it does it's still a mystery what it does in the brain but it works better you just flood the brain so that's actually a good example of a non psychedelic psychedelic for a physiological problem that could make sense as a medicine. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense with the dose especially.

Yeah. But that's great though. At least that way, like, we found something out. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, when I, you know, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know, I'm interested in psychedelic therapy. If I'm also what's best

for patients. So that if this bromelasty is best for patients, that's great. It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing, and I'm interested in the therapy part of it. And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating, talk about being frustrating. Kerry Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make bromolysty into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that. And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder

that was identified over about 20 years ago, and it's still not been made into a medicine. And so those are the things that are frustrating because it's not even psychedelic. Right, that's crazy. It's just too close to psychedelic. Yeah. It's too related by association.

Yeah, so Morgan Drell was a big example to educate Rick Perry. Morgan will be at the conference. Congressman Jack Bergman, who's leading an effort in Washington to have a group that's trying to collect a lot of support, bipartisan support to make psychedelics into medicines, will be there. I think the military aspect of it is very important because they're generally very right-wing guys and women. They serve their country, they're hard-nosed, disciplined people.

If they can't experience it, they can realize. I've always said that I try to act as a bridge between the meatheads and the potheads. Because- You are a good bridge for that. I'm the bridge. Here I am. I'm from-

You know what Timothy Leary said, which is phenomenal? And tell me if this is true for you., he said if you want to be a bridge you have to get used to being stepped on. Oh, that's for sure Yeah, I'm pretty used to being stepped on. Yeah, but I mean not necessarily for those positions because the idea of pot and A lot of these other things is that it makes you lazy and you'd have a really hard time Convincing anybody that I'm lazy. And you'd have a really hard time convincing anybody that I'm lazy. That's very hard.

I'm pretty disciplined. I don't believe that's the case. I don't think it's just, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Like you have to have either discipline or be able to enjoy expanding your consciousness. I think, in fact fact it enhances your perspective which enhances your the understanding of the value of discipline and hard work and of

Honesty and of like doing things the right way like you do things the right way you Genuinely genuinely feel better and if you ever have trips like whatever even in the century deprivation tank like sober getting in there Though they're better when you live the right way trips, like whatever, even in the century deprivation tank, like sober getting in there, they're better when you live the right way. You don't have any demons or as many, you don't have any regrets. Do the right thing. Be a good person. It's not that hard to do.

And the fact that it's been conflated with laziness and ne'er-do-wells and all that stuff, like that's nonsense. Some of the most ambitious people I know smoke weed. Some of the most hardworking, interesting, creative people I know smoke weed. They enjoy it. Well, one of the best examples is Carl Sagan. Yes, one of the best examples. And he had to hide that though for decades because he was worried he would lose his security

clearances. I was trying to tell that to someone who was a scientist once off air and they didn't believe me. I'm like, how do you not know? How do you not know Carl Sagan was a huge pot smoker? Right. Well, Lester Grinspoon was the doctor at Harvard Medical School, who was one of my mentors, and he was close personal friends with Carl Sagan.

And Lester was an expert on medical marijuana. And he had a book about experiences with marijuana. Carl Sagan had to tell his story under a pseudonym because he didn't really want to be known for that. Well it's a different time period and that's why guys like him are so brave you know just to talk about it at all you could risk everything. He was the guy explaining science and astronomy to everybody and explaining the cosmos. We found out that guy's a stoner. Like, oh, it's all out the window now.

Oh, yeah. And his wife, Andrea, was on the board of directors of the normal to legalize marijuana, the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws. It's just, it's very frustrating for me because when I was a young man, I remember thinking that Eventually all this will be worked out and you know by the time I'm 35 or something like that There won't be any more drug laws about things that are beneficial. I really did believe that I'm now in 57 I'm like, oh my god, it's not changing. Oh my god. It's it's this shit's taken forever It's been decades of everyone knowing decades of the Internet I'm like, oh my God, it's not changing. Oh my God, this shit's taken forever.

It's been decades of everyone knowing, decades of the internet. Before the internet, you could kind of, well, propaganda was very effective, the reef madness stuff and all that craziness that they pumped into people's heads. That was the 1930s, man, and that's still effective today. There's still people today that believe all that stuff.

Well, you just shared with me before we started talking about the Texas law that's trying to...if you could maybe share a bit about that. Yeah. Ken Paxton, who I've met, I like him, very nice guy. I don't know why he did this, but Austin had decriminalized marijuana. So apparently the Attorney General's office sued Austin and What is the ruling on that? I? Don't know if they even have acted on this or if they're going to appeal or what it is, but like Here's the thing about Something that's not fully legal and I've talked about this before so I apologize anybody's heard this who's heard this. John Norris, who's a friend of mine, who's been on

the podcast, who was a game warden in California. And he found a diverted stream. And they were trying to figure out what's going on. They figured some farmer fucked up and like, what's going on here and like fish were dead. And so he's a game warden. So they have to track down what happened with this stream finds this huge grow up in the middle of the national forest run by the cartel and then his entire operation in the decades future becomes a tactical force with bulletproof vests and dogs and guns fighting the cartel in the forest forest, in national forest. Because they were growing it all in America and then just selling it like 90 percent, I believe he said 90 percent of the marijuana

that was sold in states where it's illegal was coming from California. And they were using very dangerous pesticides and herbicides, stuff that's completely illegal if you were growing it naturally, if you were growing it normally. And because it's illegal, you have organized crime that's providing it to people. If it was legal, we could only buy it from, like you buy your fucking groceries, you buy organic fruit, right? You buy organic vegetables, you buy organic marijuana. You would know the people who are growing it. You could meet the farmers just like you can meet people from white oak pastures.

You'd meet people from fucking the happy green farm and you would know where you're getting your stuff. You know, there's no fentanyl in it, which is apparently they're talking about that now. Yeah. You're not helping anybody. You're only hurting people. Now if your goal is just to hurt as many people as possible, yeah, make laws. Yeah keep locking people up. Lock people up for things that don't hurt anybody, even themselves. Well the other part of it is the tax money. Yes. When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, you're, alternatively, you could have it as taxes and it could make it easier on

the rest of us. I could see as an argument, if you were the attorney general and you said you are propping up organized crime by allowing it to be decriminalized and the people that are growing it and selling it in Austin or the people that have it in Austin are all committing crime so they're probably cartel people. I could see that Argument kind of but you know what the fucking solution of that is make it legal. This is dumb We can just buy whiskey anywhere, which I love nothing wrong with it, but you can go by I have a bar You know I said I'm a drug dealer

Literally, I have a drug dealer. I have a bar. I own a bar. I sell drugs alcohols a fucking drug It's just a sanctioned legal drug that we pay taxes for and you know The alcohol commission has to check make sure we're doing everything right, but it's drugs It's way more dangerous and prohibition of alcohol actually in the in the 20s led to organized crime Yes in America. Yes Al Capone all that stuff propped up organized but also led NASCAR to Pretty cool. I figured soup up some cars to get away from the cops. That's what NASCAR came from. Did you know that? Yeah, it's amazing, but it's so dumb It's so like and everyone who enjoys a little alcohol with a you know, drink at a social gathering

It's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that Let people do what the fuck they want to do We're all going to die someday and if people are having good or bad experiences on any of these substances It's up to them to manage their experiences like I don't get along with alcohol. I won't drink alcohol I don't get along with marijuana. I don't want to try okay good. That's okay It's all fine, but like let people don't wanna try it. Okay, good, that's okay, it's all fine. But let people who enjoy it have it, it's dumb. Well, this idea that we're all gonna die one day,

one of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying. And also for palliative care. So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life-threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying and have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s. So the kind of big fears that we have about illness and death, when people are not able

to process those fears, it just gets worse and worse. I wonder how many people Larry Hagman turned on. You know what I mean that day on CNN? gets worse and worse. I wonder how many people Larry Hagman turned on. You know what I mean that day on CNN? There's probably millions of people watching Larry Hagman saying, I'm not afraid of death because I had an LSD experience and I realized that it's all just connected.

Yeah, well, if it wasn't for my mother-in-law reading his book, and he became a big supporter of maps, and he spoke out in public, those are the kind of dialogues that change people's minds. Yeah You know, there's been some we have a lot of I live in Massachusetts where marijuana is legal Marijuana is legal in California and Colorado and all these states. They're doing really well Economically. Oh, it's a huge tax.. Especially like Colorado had the craziest taxes. One is like 39% or something at one point and everybody's like, okay. Because it's first of all, economically, like if you want to go out for a night drinking,

that's going to cost you a couple hundred bucks. You know, buying a round of drinks for your friends, round drinks here, there. It's a couple hundred dollars worth of marijuana. You're stoned for a month. Like you're just stoned forever. And if you have to pay 39% tax like okay like I hope it fixes streets like I'll give you my tax money. I'm not scared to pay taxes. I want to pay taxes if you were doing good stuff with it. Is it helping pay for the schools? Great let's get great schools and a lot of people smoking weed legally. Yeah. But not kids. You know that's the other thing like we

need education for children to let them know like it's not good to alter your state of consciousness Especially on a regular basis when you're young. There's some Developmental issues that come along with abuse. Well, this is with abuse for sure abuse abuse definitely for sure one of the things that's pretty interesting is look at the cultures that have successfully integrated psychedelics like for example The ayahuasca churches that are in Brazil or the Native American church that uses peyote, often for Native Americans that have problems with alcohol. I was out on a Navajo reservation, this is about 20 years ago, and it was for a Native American church peyote ceremony and one of the Navajo men brought his nine-year-old son

to take peyote and spend the night with us. Whoa. And peyote's mescaline, right? Peyote's mescaline, yeah. And wachuma is from San Pedro, cactuses also that has mescaline in it. But this nine-year-old did not take the same amount of peyote as the rest of us,

but he took more appropriate for his body weight. And it's within a cultural context, within a family context, within a religious supportive context, these cultures tend not to have age limits. So I think when you talk about the developmental problems that come from abuse, that's totally the case. But when you talk about occasional use for inspiration,

particularly when- In a ceremonial setting. In a ceremonial setting. In a ceremonial setting, which has been for centuries and centuries they've refined it. There's no neurological damage that comes to your brain from mescaline. Right. The ceremonial settings are very important. And I used to think it was foolishness. I think ceremonies, like get the fuck out of here with your ceremony.

I was cynical, you know? But I think that, and even rites of passages like into adulthood I just think that was foolish too but then I realized like wow a lot of people have a hard time determining if that they're an adult and They stay kind of infantile for their entire life And especially someone that's like really coddled by their parents and over over protected helicopter parents you never developed the ability to be solitary and just to be out there on your own and autonomous.

And things that are important should be treated with respect. And that's where I think ceremony comes in. Yeah. One of the things that I think has led to my interest in lifetime use of psychedelics was been the failure of my bar mitzvah to actually turn me into a man. Oh that's hilarious. Because I'm the oldest. You thought you're gonna be a man, that's it. I wanted to avoid all the awkwardness of adolescence. I'm the oldest of four kids, so I had no older siblings to tell me. And we did this rite of passage

and it's been used for thousands of years and I just had this somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way that I would be one thing the morning of my bar mitzvah and I would be something different the next morning and I remember waking up in bed the next morning after my bar mitzvah and I'm like I'm the same. This particular rite of passage didn't work. And you're 13, you're not so smart. And I was like, well, God must be busy. A lot of people got bar mitzvah.

It's like Christmas. And you're on a list. Eventually, God's gonna get to me. Yeah, and so every day for a week, I would wake up and think, is today the day? Am I different? Nothing happened. And then finally, another week

and another bar mitzvah Saturday came along. and I realized that if I was on a list I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people at Bar Mitzvah and the rites of passage that we do have I believe probably worked in the past for a lot of people and they did have this demarcation between different ages. People didn't used to live that long either. So 13 was kind of a transition point. But it was when I was 17, almost 18, that I first did LST.

And one of my very first thoughts was, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been. Because you're like, who am I? Where do I fit in? Because you're like, who am I? Where do I fit in? I'm sort of, my ego sense is dissolving a bit from LSD, I'm connected to something bigger and larger than myself. I thought this is the courage, the test of courage. This is the test of manhood.

This is something that is a part of a rite of passage. So for me, the psychedelics became the rite of passage when the religious rite of passage didn't have the same impact as I had hoped it would. That's fascinating, that's fascinating. It's interesting too to talk about not restricting it for young people. And I thought about like wine in Europe.

Because kids in Europe, particularly kids in Italy, they don't have the drinking problem that kids have in Europe. Because kids in Europe, particularly kids in Italy, they don't have the drinking problem that kids have in America. When high school kids in America get a hold of alcohol, they get drunk and ridiculous and like it's because they're doing something naughty. But kids are normalized to the just regular consumption of a glass of wine with dinner is normal. Well, and then in the US where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine but they tend to use stronger drinks. So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition

that when you prohibit something it moves more and more to more concentrated more powerful forms of that drug. Hence fentanyl. Yeah, or even cocaine when you could have coca tea. It moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug. Hence fentanyl. Yeah. Yeah. Or even cocaine when you could have coca tea. I mean, Andy Weil has been promoting for decades and decades this idea of coca tea. Yeah, I had that once.

What was the, what did it feel like? I couldn't shut the fuck up. I couldn't shut up. I was like, oh my God, thank God I've never done cocaine. I was telling my friend Doug, I was goes like I don't think I could shut up But it wasn't anything crazy I think that chewing the leaves is supposed to be like super beneficial and actually even healthier than coffee Yeah, there's a lot of nutrition in the leaves. It doesn't help fuck your teeth up though

Well, if you do anything too much it can But it's something like an apologist you saw Well, I think it's this idea that Appropriate use well Paracelsus is the One of the early physicians and he said the difference between a medicine and a poison is dose. Mm-hmm, right? Well, yeah salt will kill you, you know eat a pound of salt. Right, well yeah, salt will kill you. You know, eat a pound of salt, see what happens. Water will kill you.

Yeah, drink too much water, yeah. Yeah, hyponitremia, you dilute your blood. I remember a lady died because she was trying to win a PlayStation for a kid in a morning radio show. She was trying to drink the most water. Crazy. Yeah, like who knew? I guess no one knew then.

But people are pretty aware now because of frat parties like, you know Hazing they've had kids do that. Yeah, that's one of the things that has been water has been happening in terms of the raves And ecstasy use so that occasionally people will overheat and die from MDMA where you dance all night You don't drink adequate fluid, and you can get hyperthermia. And there are some cases. So that's one of the dangers of ecstasy use outside of therapeutic context. And so people have heard, okay, now I need to drink fluids in order to not overheat.

And there have been cases of people that have died from drinking too much water. Well, I can counter that because there's a bunch of people that have died from too much exercise. There's something called rhabdomyelosis that people get when you over-exercise where your protein starts breaking down, your kidneys can't process it, you start peeing brown, and it can be totally deadly. You can push yourself too hard and die from exercise too. How many people every year die of rhabdo?

Google that. Because I know it's very common in the CrossFit world, because people are competitive with exercise, which is not necessarily the great. A lot of people I know that are trainers do not like the concept of CrossFit, because it's doing exercises that are just supposed to strengthen your body and condition your body, but doing them

in a competition setting, where it's unlimited amount of repetitions. As many as you can get in X amount of time. Or, and then they have these games where people play where they might not be conditioned enough to sustain the workload that they're putting forth and then they get Rabdo. And it's fairly common. I know multiple people that have had Rabdo. Wow.

Yeah. How many people die? So it doesn't say that, but it says there's 26,000 cases reported annually and about 5% of those lead to mortality. 5 to 20%. That's a lot. That's a lot of people that that's probably more than people drink water and die. I guarantee that's more. I bet drinking water so much water you die is probably fairly rare. But I think that Rabdo stuff is super dangerous. Yeah, you're reminding me of something funny. David Nutt was the drug policy advisor for the British government. And he did a ranking of the dangers of all these different drugs.

And what he found was that the psychedelics were at the very low end of the dangers. And so he talked about how horseback riding was more dangerous than ecstasy. Oh yeah, it's super dangerous, man. People fall and break things all the time. Yeah, and so he got fired for that because he was telling the truth. He was making people love horseback riding in England.

Oh, that's crazy. So what MAPS did is that we- He got fired for telling the truth. Well he was the drug policy advisor saying things that people did not want to hear. Maybe should have like got his job districts and down before he started yapping. Like what am I trying to do here for real? Like you really want to know my opinion or do I have an angle that I'm supposed to be headed towards? Can you guide me? Yeah so we did something similar. We looked at cheerleading. Oh yeah.

And we looked at the emergency room visits on a per person visit for the percentage of people that do cheerleading that go to the emergency room versus the percentage of people that do ecstasy. And cheerleading is more dangerous. Oh yeah, they fly through the air, man. Yeah. Yeah, they bang heads sometimes Yeah, yeah, so we had a poster that we made it said give me an e

But here's the thing it's like we allow multiple Dangerous things like horseback riding is one thing. How about bull riding? Totally legal super dangerous like super duper dangerous. I mean we allow BMX riding. You should of course allow that. I'm a martial artist. I know how many people have accidentally died doing martial arts. A ton. It's real. You know there's a ton of activities that people enjoy. Skydiving. They enjoy bungee jumping. Legal. All legal. They enjoy bungee jumping. Legal, all legal.

Amusement parks, legal. Yeah, well I think that in those circumstances, people believe that there's benefits that outweigh the risks. Amusement parks? Well, people enjoy them. Oh, people enjoy psychedelics. Yeah, but I think that's the critical issue

is that people have got, as you started out by saying, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits, you're hallucinating, you're running away from reality, you're not paying attention to what's really going on, you're making yourself more vulnerable, you're gonna fly out a window and think you can fly. Well, it's just like we need a comprehensive addressing

of the actual real landscape of what these things are, what the benefits are, and just this addressing of the impact of propaganda, the sweeping Schedule I Act of 1970, the whole William Randolph Hearst connection to marijuana illegalization, which was right after alcohol prohibition, so they were looking to put these agents back out into the field all that needs to be like Comprehensively explained to the American public to reinforce people because I think people are there there They have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things

You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda. And they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data. And also the problem with that too is there's real side effects of some of these things. Those need to be understood. How do you understand them? Well, you have to make them legal and do tests and studies. And maybe people have gene expressions that you know maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing but they can do that thing you know.

Yeah I think this idea that for me how do we break through the wall of propaganda. And for me the idea has been we go to where the suffering is we go to where the science is and we try to make things first into medicines. And I think that's where people are willing to listen. When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that overwhelms your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look.

And that's where you go to where the suffering is. And that's where with post-traumatic stress disorder. I think one of the things that we've been able to do, remarkably, is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the things that we've been able to do, remarkably, is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days. There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research, and it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was. Sympathetic patients.

Most of the people in our studies are women survivors of sexual abuse. Most of the people with PTSD are women, but most of the media attention goes to the veterans. And people put veterans on a pedestal and if so many of them, you know, there's different estimates, but it's, you know, 18, 22 or more per day commit suicide. And you can end up avoiding a lot of that by helping them process the traumas that they experience. And again, it's like we're talking about boards, the bridge. That's the real bridge. The bridge is these hard-nosed right-wing guys who have these experiences, become better

parents, become better friends, just like reintegrate into society, make peace with the past. It's totally possible. And that these tools are being so underutilized to so many vulnerable and needy people. So many people just fucking need them help. Yeah, one of the speakers

at the Psychedelic Science Conference is Sharif El-Nahal, who was the undersecretary of the VA. Wow. And he's become very passionate about what he's seen from those people that have done the veterans that have done MDMA assisted therapy inside the Veterans Administration. But it took MAPS 25 years starting in 1995 we were offering money to the VA to do MDMA research until 2021 when the first veteran received MDMA

inside the VA from VA therapists. Wow. So talk about frustration. Think about the number of people that have committed suicide from when we started offering to the VA to do it. But it was the propaganda, it was the stigma that made it so that they were not willing to do it. What's most amazing today is that Congress gave $10 million to the Department of Defense for MDMA

assisted therapy research in active duty soldiers. So there's a 4.9 million dollar grant that went to a Dr. Aaron Wolfgang at Walter Reed and it's going to be giving MDMA assisted therapy. There's another 4.9 million dollar grant that went to a group called Strong Star that's in San Antonio here in Texas elsewhere and they're connected with Emory University and so they're going to combine MDMA with a therapy called prolonged exposure where you talk about the trauma over and over but that's very re traumatizing there was a study that the Veterans Administration did that took them about six years it was 916 veterans and it compared two therapies

that they use, both non-drug therapies for treating PTSD. One was called prolonged exposure. The other was cognitive processing therapy. And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study drop out because the therapy itself is re-traumatizing. Oh God. Because you're just forced to go over the trauma,

over the trauma, over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you. And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it re-traumatizes so many people. So what we've shown is working with the MDMA, with the veterans, is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala,

the fear processing is part of our brain, that you can, once you can approach these things that have felt like will tear you apart, that they'll be overwhelming, you can't really go away from them, but they never really leave either, that then you can process it. So this study that will be done here in Texas

with active duty soldiers, again, is gonna be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure. The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches. And so- How do they decide which approach? Well, this is gonna be research research trying to different kinds of...

Oh, so it's going to be multiple ones just to see what's the most effective. Yeah, yeah. And I think that MAPS has started funding studies combining MDMA with cognitive processing therapy as well. But the one that I think is the most potentially the most valuable is called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy. Conjoint means couples or dyads and so what happens is the designated patient, the veteran with PTSD, is where the attention is focused, but when they have PTSD it affects their

families, it affects their partners, and so cognitive behavioral conjointined therapy was developed by this woman, Candace Monson, at the Boston VA, and that's where they bring in the partner as well as the veteran, and they both get therapy. And so back in 2014, when finally I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator J. Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and they finally convinced the FDA I mean the VA to be willing to let MAPS support research with MDMA. They said that they would not let it they wouldn't refer veterans they couldn't do it inside the VA we had to pay for it but that the first thing they wanted us to do was

combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy where both people now get MDMA and the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD, but also in strength of the relationship. Do they combine it with 5-HTP or anything like that to sort of bring back your levels? The answer is no. People do use 5-HTP and it can be helpful. Can you explain what that does? So 5-HTP is your precursor for serotonin.

So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992, the very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992. And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85. And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about a serotonin depletion. And so when you take 5-HTP, that can be helpful. But when we started with the FDA they said all this

information that you've got from before from underground use or from before when it was still legal doesn't matter to us really everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA proof studies and they said don't assume that you're gonna have problems and you're gonna use MDMA plus 5 HDP or something just start with the MDMA see what problems you get, and then you can start. So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one-day thing, it's a two-day, in the sense that the second day is for rest, it's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapists come back and do more

integrative therapy the next day And also we do the therapy during the day. It starts at 10 in the morning It's an eight-hour session So often people can get sleep that night and we don't see more low mood Or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA. So we were never people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA. So we were never felt that the need to introduce 5-HTP. We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this. But I think it's because we talk about it as a two-day experience. The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or

parties and things like that, often they're drinking, they do it at night, they don't get full sleep. The next day they don't just take the day off, often they go into activities. Right, and they're exhausted. And they're exhausted. Yeah, makes sense. And so I think that this concept that we've developed

is this really thinking about it as a two day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience, or the PTSD or depression or whatever it is. Now, there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland, and they've worked with cancer patients

who are anxious about dying, and they have brought in their partners to the therapy, and both of them get MDMA as well. So these are all under FDA-approved studies. And they found that that was tremendously effective as well, because when your partner has got a life-threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them, it affects you as well. And often, the therapy is focused again on the designated patient. So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is

that is gonna be treated and bringing in people's partners I think is gonna be very important. One of the works, Marcus and Amber Capone, who've done work with vets, they've brought probably by now about 1,000 veterans down to Mexico for Ibogaine. And they have also started bringing their partners as well. They realized that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat

the entire family context. This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy. So the scale of the trauma in America there's 13 million PTSD patients. This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration. You know in Ukraine we've got an entire country. When I was there practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed. And so you've got massive population-based trauma. And to think about treating people as

individuals is really important, but it's going to be hard to scale because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that. So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD, psilbin MDMA 5-mEO DMT to start on an individual basis But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA And it was four therapists for six veterans And it started out where each one got an individual session first and then they got a group session. And there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military. One is war

related or accident training related. And the other is what they call military sexual trauma. There's a lot of sexual abuse by veterans or by military active duty people of other people in the military. And they call that that military sexual trauma and so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military that you might not feel safe if you're in a context a group therapy so they've done separate the groups but they they found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process. And so what they've done

is they've realized though that the design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session. And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual. There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate-related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate and so they're going to be doing group therapy there. And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel that's for people traumatized on October 7th, and there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants, but the

Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application. It's funded by charitable donations. The MDMA is coming from Canada. But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy. So everybody is ready to have one or the other. You get randomized to either individual or group, and it will be a direct comparison. And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support, I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy because you have more

focus you're not thinking about other people you can go deeper but when you're in a group setting you can kind of bond with the other people you can kind of hear their other stories but then you can kind of bond with the other people, you can kind of hear their other stories, but then you can support each other in this integration process. So I think at the end of it, it could be that the groups do just as well as the individuals. And then that will dramatically reduce the cost of the treatment and help its scale. So that's where we're at this initial thing. And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances,

that are bonded in groups, that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice. But I think the way the FDA is gonna be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first, that will have to be gone through the system and approved approved and then there will be this additional research with groups What kind of a timeline are we talking about? How long are these studies? Well, it's gonna be about three years for the project in Israel I mean, it's gonna be about 160 people What about the projects here the the project at the Portland, Oregon VA is gonna be done pretty soon

But it's really just been four or five cohorts. It's very small numbers of people and so there will need to be more. I think that there's been some efforts to do what people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group is that they've done some of this at Sunstone also where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time, but each in a separate room, each with one therapist. But then near the end of the session, they bring them together and then they talk about

what happened and then they also have the group integration. So it's kind of a modified. So I think in terms of timeframe, it's probably four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy, maybe longer. The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee and before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. And the advisory committee recommended against it and the FDA voted against it. This was August of last year. And so that was heartbreaking

because I thought that the data really did justify approval and it did demonstrate safety and efficacy. But there was enough doubts that were raised. One of the big problems to do research with psychedelics is how do you do a double blind study? Right. You know, when you take a powerful drug, you know you've taken it. And if you give an inactive placebo,

people can tell the difference. A lot of my dissertation, which I did in 2001, was how to do a double-blind study with psychedelics, particularly with MDMA. And my solution, which made sense, was to do therapy with low-dose MDMA versus therapy with full-dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. So everybody knows they're getting MDMA, they all have the same expectations, and they might not be aware though which dose, you know, is it a full dose, is it a lower dose. So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell the difference between the groups. So for 16

years from 2000 to 2016, MAPS did a series of what are called phase 2 studies to try to figure out how to do phase 3. And we looked at therapy with no MDMA, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150. So sort of like a dose response. We did all these different doses. And what we discovered, fortunately after I'd got my PhD, was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong. That, you know, a microdose of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell. So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses, 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams did indeed

cause a certain amount of confusion. But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable. So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA. They still got better but they didn't get as much benefit. So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning and then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing.

So it's kind of like that with MDMA. But the part that we discovered that was very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters and police officers and one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams and one group got 125 milligrams. And in that particular study, it was about 26 people. When you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal. It just means it's random. So the people that had 125 milligrams with PTSD had more depression than the people that had 75 milligrams.

But the 75 milligram dose group did better than the 125. Interesting. Just slightly better. So what it meant was that the dose that's therapeutically effective was lower than we thought. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah, please. When you said the people that did 125 had more depression, do you mean before the study? Yes, yes.

Okay. So it was chosen that they would get the higher dose because they were suffering more. Well, no. Again, this is randomization. Right, but you said that they had more depression before the therapy. Well, how did you determine that? Well, we evaluate everybody's PTSD symptoms and their depression symptoms, and so just by the randomization, it turned out that those people that were higher on depression ended up more of

them in the 125. Just randomly? Randomly, yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because when you randomize again, it doesn't mean that you're making things equal. Right, right, right. So it was just a chance. Just turned out that way. Turned out that way. How many people were in this group?

26 people were in the entire study. Okay, so it was just dumb luck. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated. So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA, or it tipped

over into being very effective. So when in November 29, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of phase two meeting, after we got approved to go to phase three, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy, I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this, we shouldn't go directly to phase three. The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take called special protocol assessment and you negotiate every aspect of the phase three design with FDA and it can take for us it took eight months and so pharma companies are thinking there's nothing unusual what I'm doing my patent life is expiring but I knew we needed to do that to discuss

how to deal with the double blind. And so we presented this information to the FDA. We said, we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's gonna make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses, because it's gonna compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all.

And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want. And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me. And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experiment or bias, because the whole purpose of the double blind is to sort of reduce bias that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same. They said the first is this random assignment. What that means is everybody's similarly motivated and they will work and the therapists don't know necessarily that so you do this random assignment. But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapist or the patients rate themselves on how well

they've done compared to baseline. You need independent raters that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in. So the raters don't know, did this person get the placebo? Did this person get the MDMA? Just don't look at their pupils. Well this is afterwards, but that's right. And it's done on telemedicine. It's... Just don't look at their pupils. Well, this is afterwards, but that's right. And it's done on telemedicine, it's done on Zoom, and it's an hour-long interview, and it's with what's called the CAHPS,

the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale. And do they have a series of questions? Yeah, yeah, it's like an hour-long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened. You pick this, this is my index trauma, and how do you respond? So we had these independent raters, and then we had this random assignment, and that's

what the FDA said is how we should do the phase three studies. What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 then left the FDA. And then new, more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry. And they made, they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding. And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA when they reviewed what what whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy or not. And so the the pharma company, Lycos, did not

really proactively explain to the Advisory Committee how this design was developed, why FDA chose this design. And so the people in the advisory committee are often more academics and they're more focused on this double blind issue, but they're not practical in a sense. So that the FDA realizes that the double blind fails in practice a lot. It's a theory of how you want to do things. It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times. Even with SSRIs, you think that Prozac or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double blind. But they're not, because when people have sexual side effects, they

have other side effects, and they report to their therapist what's going on, then they can tell from the side effect profile. So the double blind fails in practice a lot But the FDA is saying we can't just only approve drugs where the double line is perfect There's we have to weigh these different things So that was one of the big issues that the FDA Advisory Committee Objected to was this functional unblinding. So when you asked about the time frame, there was other issues, but where we're at right now is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA with the new FDA, with the new people at

HHS, and there's two, the proverbial fork in the road. There's either the FDA will say, we believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another phase three study. They might require what's called a phase four study, which is after approval you gather information about safety, about durability, different things. And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. If the FDA says, we want another phase three study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so.

So that's just on an individual basis. So then, so talk about frustration. Yeah. I mean, so talk about frustration. I mean we had incredible outcomes. So the two phase three studies that were done, the first one was severe PTSD and what we showed is that two-thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions, one month apart, 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions. Two-thirds no longer had PTSD that got therapy plus MDMA.

And those people that got therapy without MDMA with the inactive placebo, roughly one-third no longer had PTSD. And then another 20, roughly 20% had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms. Means that their life has changed, their symptoms are not as burdensome, but they still have PTSD. So they're called responders. So we had 88% responders, only 12% non-responders. Wow. It's the best treatment. In the second phase three study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD. Three quarters of the people did have severe PTSD, and one quarter had moderate PTSD, and it was 72.6 percent. No had moderate PTSD.

And it was 72.6 percent no longer had PTSD. Almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two-month follow-up. And what was even more remarkable, and this relates, I think, to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional unblinding, is that 46% of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having a PTSD diagnosis. That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD. And so what that demonstrated is that the therapist, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people

whether they got the MDMA or not, and we got extraordinary results in the control group. And I think one of the things that is the explanation is that when you have an eight-hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings and the other half they're talking to the therapist in no particular order. You're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy that that's what I said was re-traumatizing in the studies that the VA did. Roughly half the people dropped out. We had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just, we support whatever's emerging. That's the

essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people when they're going through MDMA therapy. And it's very similar to what can be done with psilocybin or LSD or even ibogaine, that you just support whatever's emerging. You have this sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious. We all know that our body has a certain wisdom in that it moves towards wholeness. We get cuts, it heals. It's below our level of awareness. So there's some kind of wisdom to what's emerging. You could think about it as this barrier, this permeable barrier, semi-permeable barrier between the

conscious and the unconscious. And it all happens, we all know, at dreams. That material rises to our awareness at dreams. And it's like that with psychedelics. And so we just support whatever's emerging and people can go to some happy memories or to layers of trauma, whatever. They're not forced to just focus on the trauma. So we have very low dropout rates. But the people that got the therapy without MDMA were able to make incredible progress. We also have what are called fidelity ratings, which is we videotape all the sessions. And then we have raters, are called adherence raters, and they look at our people adhering to the therapeutic method.

And then that's called fidelity. We had over 90% fidelity, meaning that the therapists really were doing the same whether it was a placebo or not. So the results were outstanding in that way and the side effects were very low. We had nobody commit suicide that received MDMA. That was one of the concerns. We had one woman tried to kill herself twice but she was in the placebo group. We had one woman tried to kill herself twice, but she was in the placebo group. And we had another woman, such severe suicidal ideation, she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself. She was also in the placebo group. Because when you help people with terrible trauma, it's difficult for them.

And, you know, they're not able to really process. That's why they had long-term PTSD. So we demonstrated remarkable results, and yet the FDA said, we need more data. We need more data. I think it's tragic. It is tragic, but it's also very hopeful, the results. The results are very hopeful, and I'm always hoping that people come around. Do you ever really consider, though,

the burden of responsibility that lays on your shoulders? Like, you have been at the forefront of this for decades. And I imagine a world where a guy like you doesn't exist, because it's really easy for you to not exist. I only know you. You know what I'm saying? Like you have been responsible for so much research and so much pushing for legislation to be passed and pushing for people to understand these things and so much education. I mean

you're a real hero in this movement. Thank you. Yeah. But it required, it must have been an incredible amount of resolve that you have to have to keep this fight going on. It has been. And I think one of the things that has kept me going was a dream. We've talked about dreams a little bit. It was a dream that I had when I was in my early 20s.

So when I was 18, I had decided to focus my life on psychedelics. This was after I realized OLSD is what my bar mitzvah should have been and I was able to see these tools as really hopeful and there was two parts. One part is sort of this working through trauma depression. The other part is our interconnectedness. I think this the sort of the essence of what people talk about the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things you feel that we're not just isolated individuals we're connected with all of life and so at 18 I

said it's a crazy world I was a Vietnam War draft resistor I was planning to go to jail I had studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance so my contribution to my country was going to be to not register for the draft and go to jail as a protest for Vietnam. And then I thought, you know, my dad was, and my mom was saying, you're gonna have a criminal record, you're never gonna have a real job, you're not gonna be able to be a doctor or lawyer, you'll be a felon. And I thought, okay, well, I'm not willing to go to work because of that, but I can be

an underground psychedelic therapist. You don't need a license for that. So that was my plan. So then this dream happened in my early 20s. I should mention that I was so, I had the real wrong idea at 18 is the idea I had was the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve. I mean again, I was a stupid 18 year old. So I did a good job of it. And I just got more disoriented and very much ungrounded.

Too much horsepower, not enough traction. That's a great way to say it. Yeah, I was very ungrounded, and I went to the guidance counselor at college. And this was a new college in Sarasota, Florida, and it was a private school at the time. And the guidance counselor, I said, I need help with my dripping. And it's become more important to me than my studies. And he said, well, you know, I understand what you're doing. That really makes sense to me in some ways. We're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. And he gave me this book to

read and I loved it. And it was by Stanislav Grof, the world's expert LSD researcher. And he was MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins. This is now 1972. And the research was being shut down. You talked about the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. And my guidance counselor had got this book directly from Stan, and I said, could I write a letter to Stan? I want to become an LSD therapist. And he said, sure. So I wrote this letter, and Stan was just leaving Hopkins, and I'm this confused 18-year-old. And to my shock Stan wrote me back. Stan is now by the way almost 94 years old and he is still going around the world to educate people but this book was the pivot point in my life reading this I said I really want

to study psychedelics. So the dream was a few years later, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, near the end of it there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all-white room and he's on his deathbed. And so the dream was I'm in this all- white room on this and there's a person on his death bed and he's looking at me and he said earlier in my life I was almost killed but I was saved and I knew I was saved for a purpose but I didn't know what the purpose was. He said let me show you what happened to me. So this is all in the dream.

So we go and it's in World War II and he was a Jewish guy and it was outside of a village and there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave machine guns by the Nazis. Before the crematoriums and the concentration camps they called it the Holocaust of bullets. So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead. And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days. Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes and then he wakes up and he's not dead. He climbs his way through the bodies and nobody's there. It's the edge of town. He runs into the woods. He

survives the war with the partisans. And then I see all this and then we're back in the room and he's on his deathbed and he's looking at me and he says, Now I know why I was saved. I'm like oh tell me why were you saved? He said it's to tell you to study psychedelics. That I want you to bring back psychedelics that if we can all feel our interconnectedness it will be harder to dehumanize others. It'll be harder to do this mass murderer that we need to understand how we're we're all more similar than different and

At the I said in my mind again in the dream. I said I've already decided to do this This is sort of reinforcing it I will say yes, and you can die in peace you will have carried this message And then he dies in front of my arms in front of my eyes And then after he's on his he dead, and then I'm thinking, what do I do next? And I walk out the room. And now I'm somehow or other on a stream. I'm sitting down watching the water go by.

And then I notice that there's this young boy sitting next to me. And I look at him and I realize I know him. In real life at the time, I had a big LSD stash and I was worried about getting busted. And so his father was a friend of mine and he stored my LSD stash at his house. And when I connected this guy with this little kid

with LSD, then I woke up. So that's what's been a big motivator for me my entire life and made it so that I don't feel that I've been able to just give up. It's like this sort of message from what humanity can do to each other if we don't really evolve in our consciousness. And so that's what's helped me to continue. I feel this enormous good fortune in that I was born in this generational, I won the generational lottery is a way to say it.

My great grandparents on my mother's side were refugees from Russia, came to America in 1880, fleeing anti-Semitism. My father's father, my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather flew, fled from Poland in 1920 also from anti-Semitism. They arrive at America and it's the American dream. And it actually for my, on my mother's side it was the classic rags to riches because they had a rags business. And they turned it into a paper company. And so I was born in 1953 after the Holocaust,

after World War II, and my parents were just so supportive. And my dad was a doctor, and I was told, we want to help you do whatever you want to do. And I felt like I was born at the height of American power, American exceptionalism. I was white. I was male. My family was well off.

I was the chosen people, Jewish, American exceptionalism. The only thing I wasn't was tall. But I got every other sort of lottery thing and I just was raised that I could make a difference. And so I had this sort of this luxury. There's actually a Holocaust writer named Primo Levi, who was one of my father's heroes in a way. And he wrote something very interesting that I think has relevance

to where we're at today in America. And he talked about how we tend to think of that the revolutions for, you know, start with the oppressed and that the oppressed throw off their chains and they end up amassing all these people and they try to work for a better world. He said, but that's not actually what happens. The revolutions don't begin with the oppressed because often that's the purpose of oppression is to make it so they can't do that. They're so focused on survival.

He said, the revolutions usually begin with the privileged who for one reason or another use their freedom, use their privilege to argue, to work towards a better life. So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege, you have the obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do. It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs. Many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the bottom one is survival, that you have to work on core survival.

If, you know, we've had these surveys that say a vast proportion of America cannot afford a $500 or $1,000 unexpected expense. So you're living at this edge of anxiety, economic anxiety. You can't really think about many other ways to protest because you're focused on survival. So I felt that I was born into this privileged place and it took multiple generations from refugees from the American dream. And so I felt I've had this mission of this use the privilege for making it a better world. So I've not been focused on making money, I've not

been focused on, I've been focused on bringing these healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics back to the world. And one of the things that was so reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the world. And one of the things that was so reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this, is that once FDA said no to MDMA-assisted therapy, that they weren't ready to approve it, that they wanted to see more data. I was incredibly, you know, depressed and frustrated and all that. But it took me a couple months to realize that the psychedelic renaissance, that MAPS, Lycos could disappear,

but that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics, that the field was moving forward regardless, that something had been accomplished, that this psychedelic renaissance was really moving forward and that that was this wave that I think is unstoppable, that we're seeing the healing potentials in so many different ways with so many different drugs. So that gave me this, it was kind of reassuring, yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't

ready, Things are moving forward in a great way. So we've got an amazing perspective considering how much work it's been. One of the things that you said that I think from the dream is to give people this understanding of interconnectedness. Yeah. That we are all connected. And without that feeling, war is a normal thing. It's part of, if you ask the average person, could you conceive of a time in your lifetime where there's no war? Would you be willing to bet on that? Most people are like, no, we're all, unfortunately, I wish it a world where there was no restrictions on psychedelics,

because I'm of the belief that it's probably responsible for a lot of religious experiences that we've documented. It's not, it's not an uncommon theme in many, many cultures that you have these psychedelic experiences and then through that these great revelations come and then through that great change in the culture. I mean, this is a Illusenian mysteries in ancient Greece that Brian Murorescu talks about so well. Without restrictions, if we didn't have these fucking insane laws,

we would have progressed past where we are now. If we didn't, if we had gone from 1970 to 2025 without those restrictions in place, who knows what this culture looks like? Who knows what the world looks like? And it's amazing that one administration, one presidential administration with one sweeping act that was essentially put in place to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti-war movement and to stop the black rights movement.

Like if they had done that, if they had not done that, if that had not gone through, we might be looking at a completely different world where we have culturally accelerated evolution that mirrors our electronically and technologically accelerated evolution. I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think this, I'm smiling because you probably know this quote from John Ehrlichman who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor and this came out at the end of the 1970s he did an interview and He said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were the civil rights movement and the hippies the anti-war movement

And he said we couldn't bust their we couldn't stop them from protesting But we could criminalize the drugs that they were using and use that to bust up their meetings, arrest their leaders. And he said, did we know that we were exaggerating the risks of these drugs? Of course we did. Yeah. And I think that's such a crime. It's really a crime of enlightenment.

It really is. It is. And when you talk about Brian Mirrescu and the immortality key, which by the way is being made into a documentary Phenomenal book it's incorrect But the Ellisonian mysteries is the longest-running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world roughly 2,000 years It involved the psychedelic potion called Kikion. It's not exactly clear what was in it

But it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality and often religious systems want to be the intermediaries. Exactly, they want to be the gatekeepers. So when we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, you know, we talked about what happened in the Controlled Substance Act in 1970, but it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Elucidian mysteries. And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people, and then we have the burning of the witches. When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people

that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote because they were the center of the communities. Now these communities were not all peace and love. They were often warring and killing each other. So there does need to be a lot more conscious evolution. But there's a- Well, they were living in a very different time. You know, I mean, you had a bunch of different languages, you had tribal raiders, it was very common. It's just a different world.

They were living in a much more barbaric state. But it was essentially a window into pre history. Yeah, there's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hess. And it's called the glass bead game. Magister Ludi, the glass bead game and it helped terminus win the Nobel Prize for literature and he wrote it during World War Two. And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war. But the book was a post-apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these competitive energies into what they called the Glass Bead Game, which was this, it's a beautiful book, but the Glass Bead Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe. And they would have this different kind of, who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive.

And this was kind of the antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse. And he's writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing. But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract and it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people. It became more of this elite and the head of it, the Magister Li, decides that he has to leave. So that there has to be some way that we do compete with each other, but we have to do it in a way to learn nonviolence.

And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive. The nuclear proliferation is taking more. So I ended my TED talk with this which was 2019 and interestingly enough it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage at TED about Ibogaine. So it took six years from my first that was the only ever TED talk on psychedelics in 2019 and then Nolan Williams talked about Ibogaine just recently and he'll also be at the psychedelic conference. But this idea I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe. And catastrophe is very common. I mean as

you just talked about coming back from Ukraine, today I don't know what's happening right now but today India and Pakistan started bombing each other. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrifying. Two nuclear powers and Pakistan started bombing each other. Yeah. Yeah. It's just terrifying. Two nuclear powers are sending missiles into each other's country. Yeah. You know, what's going on with Israel and Palestine? I just want to mention something.

So there are small groups of Israelis and Palestinians that are doing ayahuasca and MDMA together. So that in a way to emphasize their common humanity but also to work through their traumas. And one of the most, I think, inspiring and motivating groups in Israel and Palestine is a group called Combatants for Peace. And so these are Israeli soldiers or what would be called Palestinian terrorists or those that had used violence on both sides and they've given up violence for non-violence. So it's a group called combatants for peace. And the Palestinian has been invited to come speak at Psychedelic

Science and he was denied a visa. Wow. He cannot come to our conference. We're trying to see if we can work behind the scenes. I don't know if we can to get him a visa, but that this idea that we're... He's just because he's Palestinian? I don't know the exact reasons why. He did have a violent past because that is the whole point of combatants for peace. They were combatants. They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together. So there's an incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Lior Roseman at Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians. And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session and with different measures of how you see the other and once you do see this

commonality you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself and you can recognize their pain and you like a residual effect of tribal culture from the ancient times that this you had to other these people in order to commit horrific crimes because they were going to commit horrific crimes on you. You had to protect the people around you and unfortunately that's baked into our genes. You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements Adam Kinsnicker who is the Republican on the January 6 committee from the in the House to look at what happened on January 6th. He said that he's learned from his investigations

that there's something that people are more scared of than death, and that's being kicked out of your tribe, that we're such social beings, that this idea that we would be isolated and alone, that that's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them, because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe and they ostracize you.

So we're so- Cultural things that mimic religions in that way. And then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions. I think this is very true, have the fundamentalists of all the religions. I think this is very true that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions. And the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell. But it's all about this

We have different symbols, different stories that we tell. But it's all about this combination of us being both interconnected and also extremely individual. I think this other part is that the more you realize how we're all essentially more similar. I mean, look at our DNA is very similar to some animal DNA. There's very slight differences. And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more. But once you can kind of understand that, hopefully then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences.

So it's this paradoxical thing where the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person. Yeah, I think what you brought up about the suspension of the illucinian mysteries the that's just so important that that that kind of tactic has always existed because the psychotic people in power want to maintain their control over the population and It's very difficult to do it's very difficult to get people to fight each other when they're all tripping together

Yeah and they're like Oh, there's something more to this like we're missing out on a giant piece of this puzzle and it's like there's these tools that Are available to humanity that can elevate us. And yet these tools are, by tyrants, are being kept from people, not just kept from people, but as you're talking about with Nixon's advisor, openly discussed how they lied and used propaganda to pretend that the effects were far worse

than they really were. Yeah, yeah. And I think that it's again really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used. So the social context, so for example, religion is often cozy up to the people in power. So there's an ayahuasca church, the Uniao de Vegetal, and they came from Brazil. They actually went to the US Supreme Court and got approval for practicing an ayahuasca church, the União de Vegetal, and they came from Brazil, they

actually went to the US Supreme Court and got approval for practicing ayahuasca in the United States. But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church. So they've become patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical, and some of the leaders of the Unia de Vegital aligned with Bolsonaro who was about destroying the Amazon. So that it doesn't, the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person. It's the context. So it's the same way in therapy, that you can have these experiences, but it's the context in which you interpret them and then it's the integration

work that you do after that really makes the most sense. So that you can have psychedelic experiences, but if it's not in this sort of therapeutic context where you're really open to deal with the different issues and things, fears of death, things that come up. So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just, it's a magic pill and it will produce better people. A great example of that is the berserkers. Yeah.

The Vikings took mushrooms before they killed everybody. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It doesn't always make you a better person. Really, and again, context of the culture and the times, barbaric time, you know? Have we talked about McKenna's stone-dape theory before? No, we haven't. What is your perspective on that idea? Well, what he's basically saying is that it's a real good chance that early monkeys and

stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat and that they would eat mushrooms and that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language. I think it's plausible. I mean, I don't know that we'll know for sure. Have you heard Dennis describe it? Dennis, I think, doesn't even better job of describing it than Terrence, because Dennis is like a legitimate hardcore scientist. Yes. Yes. And he explains how psilocybin would interact with the brain and glossolalia and all these different effects that could come out of it. And then that psilocybin is known for helping

regrow neural tissue. Yes. Right. That's what I talked about, this neuroplasticity and this, yeah, that Gould Dullin is talking about, these opening these critical periods, yes. Because part of the theory is taking into consideration the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years. That it's this very extraordinary development. And you know, many biologists called the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record, like what happened? And McKenna's perspective was, I think I know.

I think, I mean it makes sense because he had also, he applied what we know about the climate back then. The climate was changing and that these rainforests were receding into grasslands, which would make a lot more undulates. Undulates were pooping everywhere, mushrooms growing cow poop, bam, bam, bam. And you got all these pieces together. And then the fact that it would increase visual acuity and low doses, it would make people more,

or pre-human hominids more amorous. They make them more likely to mate, make them better hunters, because it improves their vision. Also make them more creative, so improves their vision, also make them more creative so they'll probably develop new ways to hunt and fish so they would survive more, they'd have more resources, more food, more protein, they'd grow bigger and stronger, and then their brains are developing because they're eating these mushrooms.

And I think that's plausible. But I think then what does that mean for us today is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing. Yeah. That we, Einstein had this great quote, he said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking and hence we are drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe. What shall be required of mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking. And what is that

new mode of thinking? It's sort of how we're interconnected. It's what the astronauts have said. So I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics the astronauts Right then up in space look back and see the earth as a whole thing. Well, that's gotta be a psychedelic experience Just seeing earth from the stars Well, not from the stars, but you know from space looking down and seeing like this the nonsense of these Imaginary lines that we put on the ground Yeah, you don't see the borders. You don't see the religions, you just see that this is one really unique planet that we've all grown up from and it's produced all this life

and we're all interconnected. But then there's this thought process that the conflict and the evil is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good and that this is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good, and that this is all a part of this evolutionary process that the human race is going through, and that almost in the face of this catastrophe is where real change comes. And then we kind of have to understand that evil and terrible behavior is a real thing, and have some mad search for the tools to mitigate these problems. And so it encourages people like yourself, it encourages people to try to figure these

things out using these, and again, these tools which are right under our nose that have been here for thousands of years. Yeah, I mean people say that the stars burn brighter because they're surrounded by darkness. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's the weird thing about the human race. It's like, it seems like that has to be there. You have to get rained on to appreciate a sunny day. Well, there's an incredible quote from Carl Jung, so this Jungian psychology. And what he said was that we need to study more about humanity. We need to study how we operate. He said, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.

That we are able to deal with all these things. We said, we know virtually nothing about man. We must do more study because we are the source of all coming evil. Yikes. This was in 1959, about three years before he died. And it's chilling. We are the source of all coming evil. Well, also that's in the shadow of the bomb, right? Like everybody was still freaking out. Like, what did we do? You know, we just annihilated two cities. Yeah. Now let's talk about the

shadow, something else. So in Jungian talk about the shadow. Something else, so in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown. You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see. And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out. And so these people become the enemies. These people of our shadow onto others. So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself you project it out and so these people become the enemies, these people become the evil and we're the all good. It reminds me actually I was with Terrence, this was my

first DMT experience. So this is about 40 years ago, this was at Ascelin at Big Sur. It was with Ralph Metzner, Terrence McKenna, and a bunch of us were trying to gather together to think how to protect MDMA. And one evening, we all were trying DMT. So not 5-Me-O DMT, but DMT. And you smoke it in a pipe, it's like 10 or 15 minutes. And then you just go out and then you you come back and share what happened and then you pass the pipe to the next person so it's like a three four-hour process with this group and so for me my first experience with DMT was very so the first thing I saw was this horizontal

line and then I saw a vertical line and then it turned. And then it turned red. And then it turned into cubes. And then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting where the space doesn't seem to make sense anymore. And then I was blasted into this other universe, or not, but I was blasted out of myself into the universe. And I felt like I was part of everything and everything was part of me. And it was this glorious billions of years of evolution. And I went through all of this. part of me and it was this glorious billions of years of evolution and I went through all of this. But then after all that finally I had this idea that if I'm part of everything and everything part of me then Hitler is part of me too. And it was shattering. But it was true. You can't claim to be part of everything and only take the good parts, right? And it just was a shocker to me that this

Logic brought me to this and it was really really Shattering and it took me this whole Day to start working on that and then the very next day and this gets back a little bit to legalization the next day And to maps is political strategy the next day we experimented with ketamine. All right. So in my ketamine experience, somehow or other I was above and behind Hitler because, you know, the Holocaust had been this animating idea for me my whole life. So I'm above and behind Hitler.

Ketamine gives you a bit of remove, like you're not quite there. So I felt that I was safe, but I was watching him give a speech like to these rallies where you have, you know, enormous numbers of Germans. And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody, doesn't want to kill the Jews, doesn't want to have this war? How do I get into his head? And I felt this panic rising. And it was like bubbles, like his head? And I felt this panic rising and it was like bubbles like I was underwater and I felt that the bubbles of my fear, if they broke the surface, I wouldn't be able to, I'd have to look away, I couldn't

deal with it. And then I realized that one of the beauties of ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration, you can breathe. So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not. So I started really breathing and then I was able to go back and watch and what I saw was this Heil Hitler salute and then I saw everybody doing it back to him and I got this sense because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger. And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the

Heil Hitler salute and then everybody is pushing it back to him. So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one. And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up, like this kind of unity between him and the people. And it just was terrifying. And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head. Like you're saying, the psychopaths that are often politicians, that they're getting so much out of it.

But it's the people giving away their power that I thought that's where the solution has to be. So MAPS is about mass mental health, about a spiritualized humanity. And so that led to this understanding for me that safety for humanity is not just giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up. You know, it's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power.

So that led to this idea we need to medicalize, we need to go, you know, to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks, but at the same time there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people in a way preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis. So that it's this two parallel paths. One is science and medicine. The other is drug policy reform. And then we talked about earlier about educating young people. We need honest drug education. People have died from taking ecstasy contaminated with fentanyl. You know, we need pure drugs. We need pure support, treatment on demand.

But I think the drug war is so counterproductive that if we could just turn a switch, it would be worth it. But we need to really anchor and build kind of a healthier culture and healthier people. But it has to be a sort of masses rather than just individuals. Have you read Blitzed by Norman Ohler? I have not. We have it read over there right? Don't we have it over there? Is it in the other room? A phenomenal book on the drug use by the Nazis. It's all about meth. Yeah. They were all methed out of their fucking minds which which is like, the wrong drugs can ruin everything, you know?

And that whole experience of being a part of something and everyone's on amphetamines? Yeah. I mean, what the fuck? They were giving them out to the soldiers. That's how they got them to go through Poland in three days. It's a phenomenal book, but just like crazy when you think about how history was changed and a large part of the way it was accepted

was because everybody was messed up. Just on the wrong, I mean imagine if Hitler was dosing out everybody with mushrooms. They would have been like, hold on, why are we in Poland? What the fuck are we doing? I'm not killing anybody. What is this? This is crazy.

I gotta get out of this country People just abandon ship. It's just The worst drugs are the ones that are always pushed by the tyrants And I think blitzed is a perfect example that the the Nazi administration that what the the the Nazi government was doing Giving their soldiers giving their the people in the tanks got the most meth, because they had to be at the front lines. It's a crazy book, man. It just makes you think like, what does that look like if no methods there? Does this all

get worked out way in advance? Is this never happened? Does the Holocaust never take place? Like, what was what would have been like with no math? Yeah, and it promotes aggression as well. Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean they went through Poland in three days with no sleep. Just killing everybody. And then these French soldiers are all drinking. They were given like a liter of wine every day. So they're drunk and silly, and then the messed up Nazis show up and like what the fuck Well, and you talked about the berserkers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but that's the crazy thing is that berserkers were taking mushrooms, right?

Do we have Anita? I'm Anita and the difference change. But did they also take psilocybin sometimes? Probably I'm not sure. Yeah, I think that was a part of the Nazi lure. Oh, excuse me the Viking lore as well Yeah, I think that was a part of the Nazi lore, excuse me, the Viking lore as well. The Viking lore had, did Vikings find that out? Would they just take, because emanate is a weird one, right? I remember McKenna saying something about that he believes that it differed not just seasonally, but he thinks the effects differed genetically and geographically, and they were different in different places. Sort of like, you know, like a bad example, but all I have, like if you grow certain tobaccos in Cuba,

they make the best cigars because the soil is like so rich and you get a cigar from, you know, it's grown somewhere in America, it's not gonna taste like a cigar that's grown in Cuba. Cause there's something going on with the difference and I would imagine is probably something about the nutrients in certain soil that would lead to the Amanita developing these properties in some places and not in others. Yeah, Amanita muscaria. No definitive evidence of a specific mushroom is vikings regularly consumed. Some scholars propose they may have used mushrooms for hallucinogenic purposes.

Most cited examples fly agaric, agaric mushroom, emanated muscaria, some believe may have been the Vedic soma, a sacred drink described in ancient texts. Also speculation about other hallucinogenic compounds like psilocybin cubensis, so psilocybin mushrooms being used. So they might have as well. The emanated muscaria is the weird one though, right?

Yeah actually In Ukraine they they've had some people have developed aminida and taken out some of the more toxins and in low doses They use it for sleep. Oh, wow Amazing also. I've just been in touch with some Also, I've just been in touch with some very well politically connected scientists in India, and they don't think that Amanita is actually soma. What do they think soma was?

They don't know. They really do. But why do they not think it was Amanita then? Because of the experiences that they've been able to sort of track the way they describe it and the way people have described it before. Well, there's probably a bunch of undiscovered psychedelics, right? Like from the past at least?

It very well could be. Well, we don't even actually know what was in the Kikion from the Eleusis. We think that it might have something to do with Ergot and LSD-like things. There's an article about it actually from Netflix about the show. Vikings talks about how the Amanita might have not actually made them Berserkers it was something else doing it hmm This is if anything fly Our Garrick would have made them particularly worthless warriors since the side effects included drowsiness vomiting muscle spasms and

numbness in arms and legs Rather it's more like your berserkers were getting high off henbane. What is henbane? Henbane is actually it was used in the middle ages by a lot of the witches. It's very I think it's like An important herb for Viking and Druid rituals connected to witchcraft. Whoa. Black henbane.

Nightshade. Yeah, nightshade. Interesting, nightshade. I thought that was a poison. It can be in doses, yeah. Interesting. So, the Ammonita muscaria one though, I always go back to the sacred mushroom in the cross because that was what John Marco Allegro believed was the early days of Christianity. They were consuming that.

But isn't it a strange one that you don't hear about people having these breakthrough experiences on Amanita? No, you don't. And you said one of those side effects was drowsiness. So that sort of relates to what they've done with low doses of Amanita for sleep. Yeah, makes sense. It's just, I've always been puzzled by that one

because it does appear in so many shamanic rituals it appears in the old depictions of Christmas and Santa Claus and you know All the Christmas used to have like little elves and the the Amanita I always wonder like was the Amanita different back then you know like what was going on like what happened? I don't know how you find that out. I mean, you can probably do some genetic studies to see how long these genes that are in Amanita have persisted. And yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, but it's pretty clear that at least from a lot of these Indian scholars that that

Amanita is not soma, but they don't know what it is. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, the ergot thing is very interesting right because ergot has similar effects to LSD. Yeah. And so the Ellucinian mysteries they, I think it's only right now it's been confirmed from I think it was just one or two vessels, these pottery vessels that they found traces of ergot.

Yeah I mean that's unbelievable. Again this just illustrates how far advanced our science has become, way over our spiritual and emotional development. You're able to look at thousands of year old vessels and get microscopic traces of what was in them. Crazy, yeah. Well, at least it lets you know, okay, now it makes sense that that's how they figured out democracy. Well, the Greeks are they figured out democracy.

Well, the Greeks are the home of democracy. I mean, and also, like, just this astounding culture that emerged and how much of it was connected to that. And then the people in power were like, yeah, we're gonna shut that down. We don't like this aspect of your, you guys are a little too hard to control. A little too hard to propagandize.

You don't need the intermediaries. And we want the taxes, we want to tell you what. Exactly, exactly. And so I think when we, this gets back to one of the earlier points you made about it, do I get frustrated? Which is to realize that this is actually thousands of years plus of the suppression of psychedelics. Also you said something earlier how quick a hundred years goes by.

So what if something takes a couple generations? That's okay. I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small. We need to have like multi-generational goals. I grew up outside of Chicago and there's this Baha'i temple. So the Baha'i religion is emerged out of Islam, but it's more of a universal religion and this and they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries. But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago, this beautiful temple, but it took three generations to build it.

And when you're a little kid and thinking about it, I'm like, how could they even plan ahead? How could they even have hope that, why would they even start something that they didn't even know would ever be finished? Right. But that now it's one of the most beautiful temples in the world.

And so I think this process of elevating consciousness in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take. So if things take longer than I thought, you know. Does a great attitude. Yeah. Well, I think you have to have that attitude. but you're always so happy every time I meet you Yeah, you're always smiling. You're always happy. Well, you know, I'm not in jail. They go you're not dead

Crippled. Yeah, a lot of you know unhealthy. Yeah, and I positive I think the You know the hope that we had that FDA would approve. Well, they didn't. So, you know, do you just give up? No, you know, you just keep on trucking. Keep on trucking. Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, man. One thing about the conference, just to say that it's going to be really, really fun. It's going to be if people come to it. 500 speakers. 500 speakers, thousands, thousands thousands thousands of people all sorts of ways the psychedelic community is going to be coming together do you have a website we yeah psychedelic science org or or maps

that org there's actually going to be a molecule that's a molecule but if you put Rogan in when you want to register, there's a 15% discount to go to the conference. We also have this, we have 10 different stages, we have all different tracks for different kinds of interests. We also have this project called Music is the Bridge. And so this is, we have various, people are coming up with the music that they would listen

to during a psychedelic experience. Like Icaros. Icaros, very much. Yeah. So there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference. And it's also lots of opportunities for networking and for, because again, for me, even though MAPS has been focused on MDMA, what it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance. So I don't see the psilocybin or the Ibogaine or anything as competition.

It's we want the psychedelic therapists of the future to be cross-trained in all the different drugs and then to be able to customize the treatment for each in each person. And that's what we're hoping to develop. And one more time, what are the dates? And where's this? It's June 16th to the 20th. It's coming up next month. And it's in Denver. It's at the Colorado Convention Center. We have that's a big place. Oh, yeah. Last time we did this is 2023. We had 12,400 people. Whoa. It was astonishing. It was, yeah. Must have been the nicest people too. Oh, it was so hopeful and it was magical.

So I think that this would be, if anybody wants to learn about the Psycho-Develop community, this is where we gather together. This is where you can... How many feds do you think go to these things? Well, we want them to come. That's the point is that we want them to come. That's the point is that we want them to come. Well, here's the other point is that

we work with police officers. When you think about what job is among the most traumatizing it's being a police. Or being a- EMT. EMT, or being a prison guard. Yep, sure. And they're trained sort of to suppress their feelings, to not talk about it.

And so there's, so yeah, we want the feds to come. The more that they come, the more that they learn. We have trained police officers who are also therapists that have even got permission from their police chiefs to go through our protocol to get MDMA as part of their training. Wow. So really it's a healing for all. That's why I'm going to Beirut. That's why I just came from Ukraine.

We've got a project in Somaliland in Africa. We want to do work in Rwanda. So I think that Lycos is going to succeed, whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever We will eventually FDA will eventually approve MD maces the therapy for PTSD Then they'll approve psilocybin and other things and so I'm sort of going around the world and sort of high trauma low resource Areas to try to globalize access And and I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now

And we could use More people dealing with their fears dealing with their anxiety withdrawing the projection of the shadows You know immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways. I mean Where did we all come from? I mean, what is the story of your family immigrants immigrants in the 1920s? From where Italy and Ireland. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, well this is the real melting pot of the world. And I know that there's a lot of prejudice against immigrants when they first show up.

But now we don't think you're not an American. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the real fear that people have as cartel members and people coming across the border and terrorists coming across and not having a secure border, which I think we should have a secure border. But I also think we should have path to citizenship. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, this is a great place. And this is the reason why people are

willing to walk across the river to try to get here with their children. They know that you can make something out of your life here. I just think we could do better with all the things that you said, all the things you said, and with a guy like you out there spreading the word, it helps the world. So I appreciate you. Yeah. You're doing God's work. And look how miraculous it was that I'm here today with you. Yeah, I think the universe works like that. Incredible. Thank you, Duncan. I'm so sorry you had an emergency root canal.

Yeah, poor Duncan. That sucks. He'll be back. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Rick. It was awesome. Great. Thank you.

Go to maps.org. Yes. That's it. Thank you everybody. Bye. Bye!