The Joe Rogan Experience - #782 - Rick Doblin

Episode Date: April 7, 2016

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

the call is that okay is that comfortable yeah okay it's where there's a constant debate as to whether or not the headphones are the way to go because the headphones are the only way that you can hear exactly what other people are going to hear when they listen to the podcast so you can kind of like review it while it's happening like and if only i wear headphones then it feels weird like i'm interviewing you yeah and it seems kind of to focus my attention just on the yeah what i hear and yeah yeah welcome back man it's good to see you yeah rick doblan from maps that's for whatever reason that acronym i always stumble with multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies yes

yeah and actually i was just um yesterday yesterday and today with Ralph Metzner, and I got the name from him in a way. He wrote a book, Maps of Consciousness, and I needed a name for the organization that had a P in it for psychedelic. Right. And so I was looking around for words that had a P in it. And maps, and I really liked what Ralph and with tim and around us and the rest and so i i thought maps it helps you know explain a territory yeah well you guys are so important

when it comes to the the dialogue of psychedelics because from an outsider this is how i always view maps maps is always like oh those are the actual really smart dudes psychedelics because there's so many wacky fuckers out there in the world of psychedelics they want to bring you crystals and talk to you about channeling and I know a healer and there's so much going on that's so crazy and then there was science and then there was people doing actual peer-reviewed studies. There was actual scientists involved. There was real data. And you guys were pursuing it the right way. And I was like, ooh, these guys are so important.

Because there's not a lot of people that – that's one of the weird things about psychedelics. You could tell people that you went out and drank whiskey until your feet went numb and you shit your pants and no one cares. But if you tell people that you got together with some friends and you took a naturally occurring psychedelic drug and you explored your consciousness and you you're so much happier now and you feel better about life and you're more optimistic if you do that you're some fucking wacky hippie druggie some loser well that's the perception and so we've got this uh coming out and we've looked at other social change movements like gay marriage and gay rights. And it comes from people coming out because there are loads of smart people that do psychedelics or, you know, talented or emotionally wise. And they just keep it quiet.

So people don't really know who in society has had these influences. And they don't have to keep it quiet either. I mean, it's jobs think that their employees, for some reason, would be better off if they didn't do certain drugs, certain jobs. I think that's crazy. The idea that they get to control your body when you're not there is just crazy. Yeah, but if you look at the companies like Facebook and Google and all these tech companies, they don't do drug tests. They better not. They don't. They'll lose everybody. Yeah, they don't do drug tests. They better not. They don't. They'll lose everybody. Yeah, they know not to. Imagine if Google did a pot test.

Oh, good Lord. Oh, my God. They would lose the entire company. It would come back. It would be like real straight-laced, Republican, Trump-supporting. Yeah. Yeah, so the innovation and psychedelics and marijuana and looking at things in different ways, people are getting to appreciate that. I think more the culture is changing.

Well, we're in these camps, you know, we have these camps, the do's and don'ts. Do you take drugs? Do you not take drugs? And, you know, and there's a lot of people that pride themselves on one or the other, whether they're a perturber or non perturbed. You know, there's there's people that get weird about people that are doing things other than what they're doing. They don't like it. Yeah, and that's why we need this kind of coming out. So we were having these global psychedelic dinners. This is our 30th anniversary.

Actually, tomorrow is the 30th year that I started MAPS in 1986. year that I started MAPS in 1986. And we're asking people to, in their own homes or with their friends, to invite people over and then have them tell stories of what psychedelics have meant to them or what their hopes are for psychedelic research. So you're inviting everyone to do it like to make a night of it? Yeah. It's like a holiday? Yes. Yeah. During April, during the month of April, generally. It's like a holiday? Yes. Yeah. During April. During the month of April, generally. You're creating your own holiday. Well, there's people that have done this before.

There's with conversations about death with dinner and drugs with dinner even. Right. So they try to promote conversations in safe places, but where people feel comfortable to really be more honest and they can open up. And so it's kind of modeling on that. Right. And then it hopefully helps people to come out even more. I mean, we even have like a Twitter, it's a hashtag psychedelics because.

And so people can write in and just say psychedelics matter to me because or you know i i'm more hopeful or i'm you know feeling that multi-generational trauma can be addressed through isn't that incredible that that is one of the best things for it is mdma one of the best things as far as getting over traumatic experiences is an illegal drug yeah and yet there's a carved out area that we've been able to make legal, which is the research area. And it's because science is the vehicle in our culture that we trust more our religion than our religions. And so it felt like science and healing were the ways into the culture that was freaked out by psychedelics in the 60s. And now, because of these crises we're in, and also these tools that can be shown to be really helpful,

and that people have made lives out of them, that it's not hurt them, it's helped them. But people don't know it. So that's where we think the research is helping people create a space where they can talk about it. Well, I think people are starting to understand the true nature of these things instead of the propaganda. And they're doing it from people like yourself

being really honest about their experiences and people like yourself even more importantly, because there's not a lot of people like you, that have actually gone out and pursued all the significant scientific data on psychedelics and the beneficial properties to it so that we can understand, like we have this idea about a thing, forget it, put all your ideologies aside,

whether you're a right wing or a left wing, we have an idea about a thing that's not correct. And this idea about a thing is that there's a certain group of consciousness adjusting substances that are for losers. They're for dumb people. They're for fools. And don't you mess with those. And everybody who does those is lazy and stinky.

And you lock their, like, people. There's a lot of people that automatically lock into that pattern of thinking. That's their go-to for any drugs, anything that's not legal. But yet those same people oftentimes will drink. They have no problem doing that. And a lot of times they'll take pills too, which is even more bananas. Yeah. Well, there is this idea that drugs or marijuana hurts your IQ.

Says who? I mean, there's been- Says who? Let's prove it. Is that true? Well, there was a study, the National Institutes of Health, just two weeks ago, had a conference in Washington at the NIH headquarters. The head of NIH was there, the head of NIDA, the head of NIMH, National Institute of Mental

Health, about marijuana and cannabinoids. And it was a neuroscience review. And they presented results that suggested that there was heavy marijuana smokers that started early in their lives over this was done in New Zealand over like a 20-year period had some differences lower IQs than their control groups well if you're talking about people that are smoking marijuana heavily, one of the things that I would say is that if you're smoking marijuana heavily,

you're not going to do a whole lot of thinking. You're going to zone the fuck out. You're going to do a lot of zoning out. And while sober people might be absorbing more information, you're probably off on a world of your own all day long. That's not necessarily healthy. I think all psychedelic drugs should be an enhancer, but they shouldn't be in replace of.

Like you shouldn't say, you know, I'm just going to be high from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep every single day. And this is how it exists. I'm just high all the time. High, high, high. Take a break, man. Yeah. I had that sense of, as in my early 20s, of smoking all the time to be high, high, high.

And I enjoyed it. And I felt it got me into things. It got me really into physical work and labor. Really? Yeah. Pot and exercise is fantastic. I mean, that's the opposite of the couch potato idea that people have. But pot and exercise just meant I ran the New York Marathon

while I was stoned. That's amazing. I got tired in the middle, and I walked into Port-A-Potty and smoked some more. You got tired, you smoked some more weed and jumped back in? Yeah. That's amazing. Oh, my God, that's a great story.

Isn't that hilarious? A lot of jiu-jitsu people smoke pot for jiu-jitsu. That's a great story. Isn't that hilarious? A lot of jujitsu people smoke pot for jujitsu. It's a big one. Snowboarders. Yeah, snowboarders love it. Yeah, snowboarders love it. They say basketball players. Yeah.

They say that it's one of the things about the NBA. It's like, you better not be testing for weed, because these dudes love it. It makes sense, too, because I don't play basketball, but I play pool. And one similarity they share is that it's about touch and feel. And that touch and feel is way enhanced. A lot of the best pool players also smoke pot. You know, this guy, I don't know if I'm blowing up his spot. I probably shouldn't blow up his spot,

but there's a video of me doing an impression of him. And he's like a genius. Ah, fuck it, I'll say it. His name's Earl Strickland. He's a genius pool player. And he might have occasionally enjoyed marijuana. That's all I'm saying. But these guys, like they say that when they're smoking pot and playing, you can like see things better.

You have a better sense of where the ball's going. You have more sensitivity as far as how far it rolls. i used to play racquetball a lot and handball and a lot and sometimes i would play stoned and sometimes i when i was you you did have that deeper sense of being in the moment you were just one step instant more into the moment as and predicting and knowing and knowing. But I could never tell. There was an unpredictability about it. So I could never really tell if I would play better or worse.

There was just... Well, that's probably why you played good because you were never sure and you stayed on the edge. There's an ego-d quality of uh any of these psychoactive substances and i think that ego dissolving quality gives you more space to move around with all your other focuses that's my theory about it because i always felt like like with jujitsu there you definitely feel better at jujitsu when you're high and i was trying to figure out why well you also feel like you somehow or another, you feel more vulnerable yet. You do better.

Like you're more like, like kind of freaked out by any aggression or more trying to avoid any sort of conflict. That's what the driving studies of marijuana and drivers show that, that people know that they're slightly impaired and they take defensive measures, they drive slower and they're not- We're just more aware of the possibilities of an error as well. Yeah. Yeah. And you're correcting for it and you drive more carefully. I think that's the

part that we have to really be the experts on the risks as well as the benefits. Yeah, definitely. And that we can't ignore that there are both sides of it. For sure with edibles. Yeah. You know, like edibles and driving. Settle down. Just please settle down.

Are you sure? You sure that's a good idea? Yeah. Are you sure? Are you sure that's a good idea? Yeah. Although I think the idea we need to do is more move to performance tests rather than drug tests. And then that's really directly what you're concerned about. And then you leave people's behaviors to themselves, but you check their real performance, not these indicators or predictors yeah from my personal experience there's a big difference between how you understand and operate under it as like someone who's been smoking pot for like 15 years versus someone who's been smoking pot for like a week or a month or even a year like there's a difference in sometimes

your ability to handle being really high like you your anxiety takes hold of you because you're like, oh, my God. And you start freaking out. And you can't drive. You can't do anything. And then there's people that are just, oh, geez, like that Action Bronson character. Action Bronson came in here. This motherfucker smoked like nine joints in the entire time he was here. He just kept smoking.

I had to tap out. I had to sit back and watch. And he just never slowed down. He kept going in. He kept lighting that fucker up. I'm like, this guy's insane. But like a dude like that, that guy can handle being high. He understands how to be high.

But for someone who's not really that experienced at it, man, especially in a car, it's not a good idea. Yeah, for sure. You have to be, again, if you can just focus on performance, it takes a while to get used to it. I think my point was the performance varies considerably depending upon the individual. So I don't think you can even do an across-the-board performance test, like say, oh, we've shown that this guy under five joints can do BMX flips

because a lot of those BMX dudes, they could do that shit drunk too. You know what I mean? Yeah, it has to be an individual examination. Yeah, the part that I really liked about exercising and playing racquetball with marijuana is that sometimes it would be so easy to forget the score. And then you realize you're not really playing for the score. It doesn't really matter. And you're just so into the moment and playing as hard as you can.

Yeah, just enjoying the movement. And there is this competition, but it's like about helping each other do your best. And then the score, yeah, that's the one downside of your high is playing trackball, trying to keep track of the score. Yeah, you need someone there who's sober. You need to hire someone. H's sober you need to hire someone hire a dude with a clicker but we can't be bothered man well you just give each other participation trophies like they're doing with kids today where everybody gets a trophy don't worry about the

score just play just keep playing who won i don't know i i think this idea though of science and the the being rigorous about things. Yes. Yeah. I mean, I saw something that you did about aliens. And I thought you did like a TV documentary. Yeah. I thought you did great about it.

Thank you. I was very impressed. Well, the alien. Listen, man, nobody wants to believe more than me. Nobody wants to believe more than me. Believe me. I fucking want to believe. But when I'm honest and I look at all the evidence it's not there folks there's nothing there there's nothing there there's like a few

people that have seen some stuff there's some people that wrote affidavits other than that you got nothing you got some shaky ass pictures that could be fucking anything it could be a bird that got shot out of a cannon i mean there's some of these photos that they're convinced are from another planet. Like, are you fucking serious, man? I think it'd be anything. Who knows what that is? I think the bigger question is, if it's true, then what? Yeah.

And that's what I've tried to look at. And so for me, if it's true that there's aliens from here somewhere else that are here, what would I do differently in my life? Do I really need to solve that mystery which doesn't seem very compelling and doesn't seem likely but it wouldn't i think it's a way to be connected to something broader it's like a spiritual urging i think it's a it's like a secular jesus yeah that's i really think it is i don't think i'm the only one it's not like i don't even think this is my theory. I think other people have definitely thought this up, that there's some sort of a connection between people that don't want to believe in religion and don't want to believe in any sort of ancient ideologies. But they desperately want some superior. And so they reach out to the skies and some of them get fixated on the idea of maybe even they have been personally visited because it makes them more significant.

It gives their life a bit more meaning. You know, you were chosen. We're testing you. We're trying you out conveniently always while you're dreaming. But trust me, dude, it's really happening. You're not just sleeping and dreaming something crazy. No, you are actually on a spaceship. And so you get these people that are kind of delusional and when you look at the sheer

raw numbers of people in this country and then you look at the ufo stories and go how many of these people could be delusional could it be all of them could it be some of them could it be most of them what what's the real number and that was the the cold hard thing that we got to on that sci-fi show. Because it doesn't discount the possibility of, definitely not of extraterrestrial life, and definitely not of people being visited. It's entirely possible that extraterrestrial life has visited Earth, observed dust, and there was a unique, unique moment where someone was there and witnessed it. And maybe even was in contact with them, and then took off and they were gone and they never returned again That is entirely possible because that's entirely what we would do

If we could just go from planet to planet as dumb as we are now if we could just go from planet to planet and do Studies fuck yeah, we would do it And if we found an intelligent life form that was like more primitive than us like cave people like some 2001 shit with the monolith you know if we found something like that you don't think we'd go say hi of course we would say hi we would definitely say hi and then we'd jet back off in our fucking sleep machine off into the skies we would do exactly what we think they would do well you could make the case that we already know by looking at these tribes in the amazon that are as if living cavemen without much contact and we try more and more now just to let them alone but but yeah but you go there they're wearing nikes you go there just do have fucking kobe bryant t-shirts on they have like mickey mouse hats i mean it's weird you see these people

in the jungle they have all this western clothing you're like wow it's weird. You see these people in the jungle and they have all this Western clothing. You're like, wow, it's so weird. But yet they're living like an indigenous tribe. Yeah, there's very few that are still pretty uncontacted. They live primitive. I actually did a peyote ceremony one time with some Native American church shaman. Dude, how many people could say that? But this was a bunch of people can say that but they wanted to see um what a friend of mine who was helping them with their sheep

was uh using because it seemed to help him get stronger and it was mdma and so some when when they would go off and do um peote ceremonies somewhere else, he would tend to their animals. Right. And he would give their sheep ecstasy? No, no, no, no. No, I'm sorry. No. Did you understand what he was saying?

No. Okay. I skipped it. I was just trying to follow. I think we might have gone too deep before this episode. A friend of mine was living out with the Navajos to kind of get his head straight. Okay. And he would help take care of their animals when they, this male, female shamans both, would go off to do peyote ceremonies.

Oh, wow. And he stayed out there for about a year. And he kind of put himself together. And they said, what helped you? And we're interested in what your medicine is. And he said it was mdma and they said well we'd be interested in trying to experience mdma so i was invited out there and we ended up doing this ceremony in a navajo they and they only spoke navajo they didn't speak

english at all and there was this like in the Western movies, there was a trail of dust coming in. Somebody came on horseback to be our translator. Whoa. Dude. It was their 17-year-old niece. Holy shit. And she came to mediate during this MDMA experience. And it became clear that this was really for her, not so much for them.

For them to show their 17-year-old, who was torn between the different cultures, that something about our culture, we wanted what they had. We saw and respected it. Wow. And a lot happened. thing about our culture we wanted what they had or was we saw and respected it wow and the and and a lot happened and and in the it was wonderful in all different ways and there some important healings but in the morning um when we were going this young woman uh was going to get back on her horse, and she had 17 magazine. Whoa. And was reading it.

And that's when I started figuring out that even out in the reservation in these protected cultures, this globalization of ideas and internet and podcasts, and people are being exposed to ideas that they wouldn't have normally been exposed to, even in China. I mean, they're having to do so much to kind of censor stuff. Yeah, there's an explosion of thinking and ideas going on right now. It's a very strange, strange time when it comes to that.

And I think people are getting unsettled because things they had thought were true and rigid and part of their frameworks are different in other places. How many people speak Navajo exclusively? There's a bunch. That's insane. I didn't even know that that existed. I didn't know that inside of this country there were entire cultures of people that speak in the original native language. Wow.

I didn't know that existed. There's something to their accent that just, I guess it's like we're programmed to think of Native Americans as like spiritual and authentic. You know, there's like this sound to it. Like, do you remember that scene with Clint Eastwood? Was it the outlaw Josie Wales where he met that Indian chief and they got together and these are my words of life and also my words of death. Do you remember that speech, Jamie? Do you know what I'm talking about? Dude, you got to find that it's so powerful it's like one of my favorite moments in a movie i mean those clint eastwood movies were all ridiculous right like when you stop and look at it it's they're all ridiculous but there was something to that genre that spaghetti western

genre because it it wasn't just that it that there were cool action movies, but it was cool action movies that were in some ways reminding you of how people lived just a hundred years ago. Because these were all in the 1960s and 70s and shit, right? That's when they did these fucking movies. Well, this is the 1970s in 1870 they were riding fucking horses everywhere i mean this literally is a hundred years old you know 1865 they abolished slavery we're only talking about a hundred years and this cowboy

western shit was going on and for us it it almost like hearkens to a time right before we fucked up the country you know right when the first marauders on wooden wheels rolled their platforms covered in tarp across the entire continent to find a spot to have babies not that it was like this perfect paradise before we got here definitely wasn't yeah that's a that's an interesting perspective that some people grab on to um that the native american people were completely at peace with each with each other they definitely weren't um they're amazing it's nothing to take away from their cultures and i'm i'm fascinated by native american culture it's just an amazing place that they existed on

and for so long without any European influence. While all this stuff was going on in the world, they were living here in a very, very different way. In a lot of ways, an intensely harmonious way with their environment, with nature itself. And I think we look at that and we have all these deep spiritual attachments to that. It means it's very significant,

but they fought amongst each other so much. And that was their sport in a way. I mean, and they had that as killing. It was, it was a way of becoming, you know, trained as a predator.

Yeah. And somehow that's so deep in us. And that's part of the question. I think for me with psychedelics and therapy. Is there a way to get that out of the human heart in a way? I think the way to get it out is the way that it's getting out right now, and it's through information. I think that when even you look at these Native American tribes that were harmonious with each other, right? They have these very close-knit bonds and close tribes, and they're very communal.

But they didn't know these other people that were exactly like them that were 100 miles away. And they assumed the worst. And they assumed the worst, too. And they looked at each other, and there was not enough communication. They couldn't interact with each other instantaneously. They couldn't get to understand each other. Like, we've talked about this on this podcast before, but it wasn't until about 100 years ago where a boat showing up didn't mean... I mean, if you were in the 1800s and a strange boat pulled up on shore, you're fucksville, right?

This is a terrible problem. These are monsters with swords, and they're going to jump off, and they're going to shoot arrows at us. That was really common. If you had a boat that showed up, a giant boat, and a bunch of people got off, you're fucked, man. You just got invaded. Now that means tourists, and you want tourist dollars, and people have translators on their phone

so they can speak to each other, people that speak different languages. I mean, this is an amazing time. It's amazingly strange, but we're experiencing each other on a much more even playing field than ever in the past. And I think that's how we can exist with so many of us. Yeah, and I think if we can see that really we're all more in common than we have different, and we can appreciate the differences rather than be fearful of them, And we can appreciate the differences rather than be fearful of them. And that what we have in common is this fundamental sense of connection of being this web of life that really we're not virtually, we're pretty similar to animals.

We're way close to people with different skin or different cultures. And to be able to see that that is who we really are and that acting from that and trying to work on cooperative solutions. And I think that if we can have lots of people having these direct experiences so that they can't be manipulated by politicians. experiences so that they can't be manipulated by politicians. So it's about grounding this kind of globalization, but comfort with the sense of connection that we're able to find these bonds, that they do exist and that they can be built. I think one of the things that we're seeing in this extreme oversensitivity that we're experiencing right now, this is like a really interesting time as far as like PC culture and what you can do and what you can't do and cultural appropriation.

I mean, people are going after people for cooking Mexican food that aren't Mexican. Yeah, we're trying to call that guy cultural appropriation. food that aren't Mexican. Yeah, we're trying to call that guy cultural appropriation. We're trying to take ayahuasca out of the ayahuasca rituals and out of the jungles and turn it into a therapy drug. But that's out of respect. It's not out of... Well, that's an interesting analogy.

It's a different thing in a lot of ways. But yeah. Yeah, I mean mean cultures can evolve you just have to be acknowledging where it comes from and try to bring give back as much as you're taking yeah what i was going to say though is that this over sensitivity is just it's just it's a side effect of this expanded understanding and in this expanded understanding now all of the different things that are injustices in the world are being highlighted in a way that had never been highlighted before. So then people start going after them

and then pushing the line further back. And then they start looking for other slights that might be around. You know, other... Microaggressions. Yeah, microaggressions. Anything... What is this? White people with dreadlocks.

Justin Bieber adds fuel to the cultural appropriation debate first of all ladies and gentlemen all you have to do is google dreadlocks that's what i did and i found out that the fucking ancient greeks were like the oldest people that wore dreadlocks like they they believe it might have come from the ancient greeks also like a lot of other cultures wore dreadlocks. Vikings wore dreadlocks. It's across the board with hair, folks. This is not a black thing. Not only that, that's not what cultural appropriation is.

That's just style. What cultural appropriation is, is say if these Native Americans had a specific style of clothing that if you wore it, you were a shaman and you were a sacred person, or you had a headdress that you wore during very intense spiritual ceremonies. And someone just started wearing that for fun. Someone thought it was cool to wear that for fun.

Well, then it becomes offensive. And that's cultural appropriation because you, this, these people have this ritual, this very important sacred ritual, and this one part of that ritual you are defacing. You're mocking it openly, and it's offensive to them. It hurts them. And even that's arguable. That's cultural appropriation, and I agree.

I think if someone has something that's sacred, like a headdress or something that they specifically wear, and then you walk around and wear it, that's kind of a dick move right if you have to earn that It's like someone yeah Yeah, it's like being a fake black belt or having a fake PhD or Pretending that you went to Vietnam and you didn't there's a lot of those people out there right? They're all equally offensive, but that's Cultural appropriation is not a white guy wearing dreadlocks. It's just not.

Okay, that's a kid who likes to wear his hair like that. Who gives a fuck? And the only reason why you give a fuck is because you've run out of things that are really important to care about in your life. Because if you cared about really important shit, you would concentrate on that. That is a massive distraction.

If a white kid with dreadlocks is going to, you're going to go out of your way to find anger in a white kid with dreadlocks. All to, you're going to go out of your way to find anger in a white kid with dreadlocks. All that says to me is you need more interests. That's for sure. You need more things that are interesting to you. Yeah, and that's called work avoidance. You know, you're just focusing on things that are.

Yeah, work avoidance. Right. You're right. Yeah. You're right. That is a great way of approaching it. It's exactly what it is. People do do that.

Well, there's a class at leadership at the kennedy school that i said it was taught by the only psychiatrist on the faculty ron heifetz and that was a big concept was that you know as a leader there's just so much work avoidance being done in different ways and how do you help people focus on the issues that are tearing them apart or that they're avoiding but would be better if they try to work on it and you know that word work is weird because work avoidance doesn't just mean like actual work like working on your job it could mean working on yourself you know it could mean like there's a lot of people that get involved

in wacky behavior because they also are addicted to cigarettes and maybe they drink too much. So they start getting addicted to wacky behavior as well, not just as a side effect of the drugs, but also to distract them from dealing with the work. They create dramas. They create bullshit. And almost like to just drown out the nagging poking of all the shit you actually need to get done. So then you just fucking tank your life again in this way. Tank your life again in that way. Yeah, my favorite approach to work avoidance is doing lots and lots of other work other than what's the most important thing.

Oh, really? Do you put off everything except what you really need to do? I catch myself doing that now and then. That's crazy. Isn't it weird how your brain would just play little tricks on you? Like, what is that? I think it's this anxiety a bit about this is a big challenge, and you don't know until you start how it's going to turn out,

and there's lots at stake. It's a matter of what you tolerate from yourself, too. That's a weird line in the sand that you got to kind of learn to draw if you want to actually get things done. You got to say, OK, now from, you know, 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., I do this. This is what I'm going to do. I want to sit down. We're going to work. And you be the boss of yourself.

And then you sit down and you stare at that computer screen or you stare at the notebook and you do the writing that you were really trying to put off. That's hard for people to do, though. Because a lot of times your brain is very wishy-washy and we savor our choices. We savor our ability to open up our websites and just start going, oh, what's going on on dig.com today? Oh, wow, that's crazy. And the next thing you know, it's 45 minutes after you were supposed to start. Yeah, I call it the tyranny of the empty page. It's just so...

But it's so nothing. Yeah, I have... It's such a weird thing to be terrified of. What really put me at ease was one professor when I was working on my dissertation at the Kennedy School at Harvard. And I just had this idea that you had to have it so good, you know, to be worthy, and what I was doing, it just, you know, it doesn't start that way, so I had three professors, but I needed a fourth on my committee, and he was the academic dean, he's terrific, but I said to him, you know, should I, because you're so busy,

should I just work through with the other professors and then just give it to you in the final phase just for you to read over? And he said, no, give it to me in the junk phase because that's when your comments are the most important. But what it was, God, he acknowledged that there was a junk phase. And that helped me feel like, okay, I can start because I'm producing junk. But, you know, you just keep trying to refine it. Oh, that's so important.

I mean, Ari Shaffir has this little piece of paper that he has glued or taped to his laptop. And it says the first draft of everything is shit. It's Ernest Hemingway. And it's like taped right underneath his screen. That's such a good point. You really have to go over things. Writing is weird. And whenever I read something that's like ponderous and just labored,

I go, did you read this again? You got to read it after you write it. You got to write it, you got to read it, and you got to rewrite it. And that's where, for me, getting stoned and editing stuff that I've written. It's harder. Sometimes I can write when I'm stoned, but it's early, and sometimes it'll be like a half hour for a paragraph or so. Right.

Because I'm thinking about all the different words and ways. What do you use to write with? To write with? Yeah. Do you have, like, particular software do you write with? To write with? Yeah. Do you have like particular software do you write with? Do you have anything? Just Microsoft Word. Do you ever try Write Room?

Do you know what Write Room is? No. Write Room is this program where the entire screen goes black. I'll show it to you. The entire screen goes black and all you get is these green letters and you can't access your browser you can't you can't do shit this is what it looks like when i write oh nice so it's green letters there you can see it up on the big screen as well um so it's green letters black background and um so when i write like that man i i feel like it just zones me in just i can't do anything

else i can't fuck off i can't you know i just shut the wi-fi off and ram that's for me the best way the best way to get into it you know yeah for me it usually takes uh um being like midnight or something like that have you ever seen scrivener youer? You know what Scrivener is? Scrivener is pretty cool too. It's something I've been using for years. It's this program that you can set it up. I think you set it up a bunch of different views, but the one I like, it looks like a cork board.

So you have like index cards and you can write on index cards. See them up there like that? And all those index cards are expandable. So each one of those index cards can be an essay. And you click on each one of them and then you get to notes and you can open them up and read the full extent of it. You can highlight things and make notes on the highlights. It's a really cool program. I like it a lot. It's really cool too because I like it a lot. It's really cool, too, because I like cork boards. And I use them in real life.

And I learned that from watching sitcom writers. Can you have it where you've got the different columns or different kinds of tasks, and then you have them prioritized so you can kind of in one glance look at? I don't know. You'd have to explore that. I only use it for notes, but I'm sure it's pretty flexible. But I think it's mostly... I don't know.

Who started using it? I think it was a screenwriting tool initially. I think it was. But a lot of people use it because it's a really cool view. What kind of stuff are you writing? So mostly just bullshit, just my thoughts on things.

Then I extract stand-up out of it, you know. I'll just, I'll write like long form things. I keep saying I'm going to get back to writing a blog, but I just never, I never have the real itch to just, I like, I like like these half processed things that then become bits. You know, I almost like use it as like a farm like i used to try to like write a joke i used to try to write like beginning punchline setup but then i realized like the best way for me at least with my style is to write a bunch of shit and then find out what's funny about it you know is uh tweeting sort of for you like notes or blog sometimes useful sometimes it is yeah sometimes it's cool i like tweet i like texting uh tweeting rather because you only get

140 text characters those 140 characters i think that's good because it makes you economize and it makes you edit and then it makes you it makes you a better joke writer in a lot of ways. Like the actual, like figuring out the slams and the punches in a joke. I think you can get to them better when you learn how to say funny shit on Twitter. Because you only have 140 characters. That small amount of text in this little box and you've got to figure out a way to get your point across and hopefully be funny too. You know? Sometimes like stupid text to me like someone will say something really stupid just so silly and i just can't stop laughing like i think uh it's it's interesting like how tweets have like a time where they work too you know like there's something could have just happened

the news and then someone will have the perfectly timed, ridiculous tweet. And in that moment, that dude cracked up the whole party of the world, or that woman, or whoever the hell said it. There's a lot of people like Jenny Johnson who was in here. She's become famous and a working comic from tweets, just from being funny on Twitter. Wow. It's amazing. Yeah. It's Twitter. Wow. You know, it's amazing. Yeah. It's crazy. I haven't really used it.

Well, you guys use, Maps uses it. Oh, oh, we have tremendous. Yeah. No, you guys have excellent. You guys are really on the ball, too, when it comes to social media and getting people engaged and retweeting your stuff. Yeah, Bryce Montgomery is in charge of that, and he does great. We have such a really good team.

Yes, Bryce. No, you guys are amazing. Like I said, it's so important to balance out people like me. You want to balance out people like me, you know? Well, we're in the stage of what I'm considering our major reality check of our 30 years of existence. And that's submitting the data from MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, these phase two studies that we've been working on for the last 15 years, and submitting that first off to our FDA consultants and then to FDA about going to the next step,

and then to FDA about going to the next step, about going from exploratory studies to studies that if they work, then you get approval as a prescription medicine, as a prescription treatment. So we're bringing all of these data points that we've gotten roughly just in this bunch of studies, around $7 million studies, over 105 people. And what we're able to tell is a story about risk and a story about benefit for post-traumatic stress disorder from any cause with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as compared to a placebo and also from the literature and working with people who have failed on other medications. It's a weird subjective subject, isn't it? Like how people feel, how do you feel about, you know, your life?

Because it's assisted psychotherapy, like how much of an impact specifically can you attribute to the drug? Right. The test will actually determine that because one group of people will get the therapy with a placebo. Right. I mean, this is how we're thinking of for phase three, and this is how some of the studies we did with phase two. So I think being rigorous and skeptical is really important super important so the first point is if you can do this with the therapy without the drug then why do you need the drug but there's so many variables when it comes to therapy as well right like the relationship between the therapist and the patient yeah there's so many variables and ranges of individual responses. So there's these massive tables, statistical tables for

sample size calculations that help you figure out on the basis of all these assumptions, how many people you need in this study to get statistically significant results. And how many do you need? Well, we're still working through the different assumptions. I would say a million. Let's get a million people high as fuck. See what's up. Well, just think of the cost, though. I know.

That's your problem. There's got to be some billionaire character out there who's smart. What's it like Richard Branson? Richard Branson starts dishing out MDMA. Then we've got to party. There are support that we're getting give makes me very hopeful about our ability to raise the money for phase three we think it's going to cost around 24 or 5 million dollars wow and we have about half of it already wow either in hand or committed this is serious

shit yeah well the consequences if it works is that then we can start setting up psychedelic psychotherapy clinics for MDMA for PTSD. We can start negotiating with the VA and the Department of Defense with their hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Last year was about $6 billion that the VA spent in disability payments for about 600,000 veterans that are disabled to some degree with PTSD. Just for PTSD? Just for PTSD, around $6 billion every year. What? Just in disability payments. That's what?

The human suffering, too, the money. Oh, my God. Because it's hard when people are traumatized. I would have never guessed it was that high. $6 billion just for PTSD. I would have thought. Just for disability payments. That's not cost counting other things. Wow.

And that's a lot of people. And what we've been able to show, what we say in this group of 105 people, is that, and this is PTSD for many causes, not just war, but childhood sexual abuse or rape or workplace accident, trauma of any kind, that a substantial percentage of these people can have significant

improvement. And how that's evaluated is, fortunately for us, there is a independent rater-administered scale for symptoms of PTSD, and it's called the CAPS, the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale. It's the gold standard developed by the VA, used by the FDA to approve Zoloft and Paxil for PTSD, and it's just been revised from CAPS-4 to CAPS-5, so it's a work in progress over decades. And so this is the objective scale, and people do have to tell their story to an independent rater. And the way that the independent rating system is going to be done is going to be a whole pool of them that are calibrated with each other, inter-rater reliability,

and they know how to administer this. And they're randomly assigned to what we think will be about 230 people for one phase three study. That's probably what we're going to be proposing and we need two of those studies, two large-scale phase three studies. And what we're going to have is these raters will be randomly assigned to one of the subjects, and they won't necessarily know, is this the one-year follow-up, the two-month follow-up that really is the primary outcome measure or the baseline? So the independent raters are really important because for skeptical people in science, the double blind is a key development. How you do an experiment, you shouldn't know the two conditions. You shouldn't know which is the experimental one

and which isn't because your biases might make you subtly see what you want to see. Right. And it's very hard not to do that. That's kind of a human tendency. So the idea has been these placebo-controlled double-blind studies. But it's good in theory, but with a psychedelic drug you people tell if they've got a placebo that does nothing or a psychedelic drug

it's a fundamental problem of this research and that's why these independent raters are even more important for people to have confidence in the results. And what we've tried is a series of studies giving low dose MDMA and comparing it to medium and full dose. And so the idea we thought was that if people are confused about which dose they're getting, but then we can show a dose responseresponse relationship, then that's the double-blind. That's the solution to the double-blind problem, is that everybody knows they're getting MDMA, but they don't know what dose they're getting. And so you have to show the people that get the

higher dose do better than the people that get the lower dose. And the people, patients, might not know. Therapists could be confused. That's the ideal. So that's what we are heading for. And that's what we've spent the last 10 years or so researching with different low doses of MDMA, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100, and 125. And we would always have this possibility of half the initial dose administered one and a half to two and a half hours later to prolong the experience and make it an eight-hour therapy session. So when these people are getting this ecstasy, they're getting it, or MDMA, they're getting it in a clinical setting? Yeah, they're getting it in a clinical setting. How often?

Three times, three to five weeks apart. And it's a three and a half month therapy process of weekly psychotherapy. So the emphasis is on the psychotherapy, the preparation, the therapeutic alliance. And then after three weeks, there's the initial MDMA session. And it takes place in a special treatment center, treatment room, where there's a male-female co-therapist team with the person. The person, the patient, is having their blood pressure monitored, they're having their temperature monitored, they're being videotaped, the whole thing, and there's videotapes on the therapists as well. We're trying to understand about the method. And the experiment, this portion of it, this session, is about eight hours. Jesus.

Who's auditing all this footage? We are loading it up. We're not having somebody audit all of it. We have the therapists sort of note which are the decisive moments. It's like a best of on YouTube? We're developing. Yeah, actually. So in order to train therapists, the best way to train therapists is to show here's videotapes of actual patients under MDMA.

And this is how they're – it's poetry. Wow. It's symbolic poetry. People talk in terms of imagery because half the time their eyes are closed listening to music, having just their own private experience. The other half of the time, more or less, they're communicating with the therapists. And it varies. And there's no particular order of things so it's basically and this is what i felt with the native americans with the when we did mdma with the in the peyote circle that they had these elaborate rituals that you know went through the whole night that were beautiful and filled with

these rich symbols um but then they went so they did some, that were beautiful and filled with these rich symbols. But then they went, so they did some of their opening prayers, and they wanted to know what we were going to do. And we didn't have anything. It was like, well, we just sit around and somebody says, it's kind of a more free form. It felt that we had like a poverty of ritual, but also freedom to explore like that. And that's what we try to provide in this MDMA experience, that people have their unconscious as the guide. And we're not the guide, we're not steering them anywhere. There's all these techniques we know, we're not, we're responding to this emergence of material that's been catalyzed by the relationship, the setting, and then the drug.

And we're supporting this emergence. And different people will sometimes go to the trauma first or not talk about it until the fifth hour. Or they'll go to child experiences that were supportive to build strength. But often it's in the symbolic language. to child experiences that were supportive, to build strength, or they'll... But often it's in the symbolic language, and they're sort of telling themselves a story. Wow. And that story can reorder the neural networks in the brain and de-emphasize activity in certain fear centers of the amygdala

and can change how memories are stored. We're just sending MDMA to Rockefeller University, where one of the leading scientists in anxiety is going to start some studies in animals, mice, rats, I'm not sure which, and trying to look at fear extinction and memory reconsolidation and how MDMA affects that. Whoa. Yeah, so we're starting to get ideas. Fear extinction. Extinction and memory reconsolidation and how MDMA affects that. Whoa. Yeah.

So we're starting to get... Fear extinction. Like through giving someone MDMA, it lessens anxiety? Yeah. So it means that when you have memory, you react with fear all the time. And this fear has never fully been processed. It's always like it's about happening it's it's not been fully processed because it's been so scary right or emotionally rigid

so with the mdma you can help people through this way of reducing the fear response their activity in the amygdala is reduced wow Wow. And so people can have the content without the fearful emotion. So as some sort of a bridge or a blocker. Yes, yeah. But it changes the structure of the memory to that person? Or the reaction to the memory? Yes, it changes how the memory, every time you have a memory, you have to consolidate from different parts of your brain, then you reconsolid to the memory? It changes how the memory. Every time you have a memory, you have to consolidate from different parts of your brain.

Then you reconsolidate the memory. Yeah, that's why people have weird false memories, right? Yes. That they would swear were real. Yeah. Your memories change over time. But it's a memory of a memory that you're retelling. It's almost like if someone you know had a story and they did something and they told it to you. And then you tell your friends about that story. that how, hey, I know Bob's story.

Let me tell you Bob's story. But you don't really know Bob's story because you only know it from him. You know what I mean? Like you weren't there when it happened. And I think that's some of what happens with at least my memories. As they get older and older, I'm like, this is a memory of a memory that I had. Yeah, you have to double check a lot. And what happens is that people's memory for the trauma actually gets better.

So you can, with MDMA, you can somehow or another change what that memory is. No, that's the beauty part of it. You change your reaction to the memory. Right, but I mean what that is to you. The feeling tone, yes. So because these memories were so scary, they've been suppressed but not successfully. They're not fully integrated, still activating fear reactions frequently. And so when you can feel peaceful and then bring up the memories

and then because you're feeling peaceful people remember even better you know what you guys should really do if you really want to prove the effect to see effectiveness of mdma you should go to worldstarhiphop.com and find all those people that got fucked up and give them ecstasy and see if it helps because there's so many people that got punted in the head and thrown off a fucking building we have the zendo project is that for worldstarhiphop.com exclusively it's for um electronic dance music festivals and burning man um that's definitely different. Definitely different. Yeah. But I mean, the idea of being able to better process trauma is universally appealing. I think all of us have had bad moments in our life that you probably overcome and you, you know, you probably have some character

because of those moments, but it would be nice if you had a full handle on how it makes you feel. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where this memory enhancement comes in handy because then you can really learn from what happened. Can I ask you how you chose MDMA out of all the different psychoactive substances? Yes. I felt that MDMA had a chance of being welcomed into the culture as the first of the different psychedelics because it has that fear reducing it's it's not so psychedelic it's not a classic psychedelic

yeah it it doesn't make you feel like you're losing control right it makes it so that you feel a subtle shift of openness to self-acceptance and self-love. And this just self-acceptance, I think, is like the core of it. And your muscles relax. People can stretch a couple inches more. Really? Or more limber on MDMA. No kidding. Yeah.

Have they ever done that with athletes? I don't know. They should do with athletes like people that are already really flexible, like maybe gymnasts or something. Yeah. And that's yoga people. Yeah. Martial arts people. Yeah. You can do. I think that's part of the muscles relax and that part of your tension.

Right. tension right is or it's tense because of parts of your brain and so that the way in which you can then have this full memory when you're feeling peaceful and you're looking at it as if it's happened in the past which it did so you finally have got this perspective on it because this piece makes it so that you're you're not seeing it as happening right now. Because you realize it's not happening right now. It happened then. And so you're creating this longer, different kind of memory storage of something that was clearly in the past. And it's connected now to this reflective, peaceful tone. So when the memory is reconsolidated, restored, the next time you call it, you get the incident, but you get the emotional tone of this peacefulness and that it's in the past.

And so you can do work within a period of minutes sometimes or hours of seeing a shift and looking at something differently and processing these traumatic memories. It's rare, but one person was in our study, and he dropped out after just one session. He's like, I got this. He's like, and part of what he got, Tony Macy is his name, was one of the vets part of what he got was that he had been telling himself that he was on opiates for pain for injuries but that he was starting to realize it was really more of a escapism and that he didn't need them and he didn't need drugs and he didn't need MDMA either he didn't need

any more and he'd had what he needed. Well, kudos. Yeah. And we asked him later if he would at least be part of our follow-up evaluations. Right. And he said yes to that. Well, that's nice of him. And so he didn't have, he wouldn't qualify for PTSD at the two month. And then when it got closer to like the one year, which is our last follow-up, he started saying, well, you know, I'm still feeling pretty okay, but I think I could learn more from MDMA. Maybe can I have now some more of these sessions? And we said, well, it's a rigid protocol.

You've dropped out. But let's just wait and see if you even would qualify to be in the study, if you even have PTSD. So we did the 12-month follow-up, and he didn't have PTSD. He wouldn even would qualify to be in the study, if you even have PTSD. So he did the 12-month follow-up, and he didn't have PTSD. He wouldn't even qualify to be in the study. But he still wanted to get some ecstasy off you. Because there's other things to learn. Yeah, like how good it feels.

Yeah, that's, come on. This guy's trying to party. He's trying to party under the auspices of scientific study. And in order to be the most rigorous, too, there's a way to look at studies. One is called per protocol, everybody that finishes the study and meets the criteria. Right. And the other is called intent to treat. So that means everybody that comes, you've got to look at their data, even if they drop out or they lied to get in the study or they wouldn't have qualified or whatever it is.

Once you have enrolled somebody, that's the more conservative. You just have to include everybody. You can't just be picking the people that fulfill your treatment plan. Right. So this guy was part of that. We couldn't normally count him, but now that we're doing the most conservative intent to treat analysis, we can include the dropout.

So actually, Tony's scores of massive reduction in PTSD symptoms after just one session counts in our data Wow because he was screened and had the first session there's so many variabilities happiness being such a crazy sort of unquantifiable thing right that's what everybody wants everybody wants some happiness and one of the things that MDMA does seem to provide a lot of people is relief from tension, which in a lot of ways equals happiness. I mean, if you, if you never universally, if you had to say, what is the one thing that people get from a drug called ecstasy? It's you feel great, right? You feel relief. You feel comfortable. Insecurities melt. They just dissolve.

They don't exist anymore. And you can approach people in this really weird, open way where you're not constantly ready to judo whatever kind of bad shit they're sending your way. or some sort of a barrier between their real feelings and what they're projecting so that they can sort of figure out how to navigate this conversation with the least amount of social damage. You know? I mean, there's like a zen to some styles of communication, like this way of going through it with having the least amount of conflict in your life. But if everybody was on ecstasy, that would be the vibe. Like there's a vibe that you get, and I'm not saying everybody should do it, but what

I'm saying is there's a vibe that you get when you're communicating on ecstasy. It makes it almost impossible to have arguments with people. Like it's weird. Like you communicate with people in this open way that you would never even attempt if you weren't both on MDMA. Yeah, we actually have a study starting in the next month or so

where we're going to give two people MDMA at the same time to a couple, a dyad. They're going to fall in love. Well, these are already people that are related. They're going to fall in love again. But one of them has PTSD, and one of them, it affects the relationship, but doesn't have PTSD. Oh. And so this was a major, major breakthrough because the first study with psychedelics was in the modern era, was 1990 with Rick Strassman with a DMT study.

a DMT study. And ever since then, now for the past 26 years, it's only been one person getting MDMA or psilocybin or LSD or anything at a time. So this is the first time that we've been able to work with two people at a time and give them MDMA. And it's also the study that's in informal collaboration with the Veterans Administration National Center for PTSD. It's a therapist that used to work within the National Center who's now at Ryerson University in Toronto who developed this approach and who was introduced to us through the work of Richard Rockefeller who was opening the doors for us with the National Center for PTSD and we met this woman Candice Monson, who's the researcher. And she's developed what's called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy.

And conjoint means couples. And so it's a cognitive behavioral sort of scripted how you kind of think about your trauma and exercises about it, but it's for couples. And so when they were thinking how to blend MDMA with traditional non-drug psychotherapies that are used by the VA, the couples therapy they thought would be the most logical because it helps you to have those kind of communications. You're the better listeners. You're more empathic.

You can get over stuck arguments. And the PTSD really does affect the relationship in a lot of ways. And the researchers have all these measures of the relationship with the style of communication between the people. We really care about the CAPS, the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale. But it's going to be tremendously exciting. And we've been able to get permission for the first time to give two people MDMA, and we'll be able to monitor that. But couples therapy, even though it's a tremendous use of MDMA, will never make it through the FDA. Because you can only take diseases, you have to treat a disease. It's not for personal psychotherapy, which is not

those things. It could be anxiety disorder or PTSD or depression. We have to treat diseases. It's such a weird distinction. You know, if there's something wrong and you have a substance that makes that wrong better, why does something wrong have to be something you look at in a Petri dish? Well, only because of the drug war. It's only because it's illegal otherwise. It doesn't make any sense.

It's obvious, like, there's a condition and a solution to that condition. I mean, there's the fact that you're not dying from feeling like shit about your marriage. It doesn't mean it's not a problem. You know? I mean, that's so stupid. Yeah, it will be one of the best uses of MDMA. I mean, that's like making toothpaste illegal. uses of MDMA. I mean, that's like making toothpaste illegal. It's like, you know,

unless you have like a serious dental disorder and you really need to clean the holes, you know, like you have like some sort of a horrible root canal that's about to happen. It's the idea that you can somehow or another keep people from doing what they want to do. That's at the heart of it all, right? Right. And I think that this idea of, again, psychedelics because, hashtag psychedelics because, of coming out of the closet of people sort of saying that this has been helpful and that this is something good and we should be able to do this. And I think the eventual use, we're sort of backing into this use in couples, but it's really about making MD-Mandibumacin for PTSD. And it's also about trying to understand what's the drug and what's the context. So while we had this context I was describing of this non-directive therapy of the unconscious being the guide, other people, like cognitive behavioral, they give you all these exercises to think about and how you think about your trauma and where and when your triggers are and all different kind of thought exercises.

we're seeing that MDMA is like a general tool. And so we're, because it's a nonprofit drug development, we're trying to work with as many other therapists with as many other combinations of treatments that they want to use to explore if they want to blend MDMA with it. And so we have this 960 grams of some of the world's purest MDMA. Don't tell me where it is.

I don't want to know. Made by Dave Nichols. Don't even give up the dude's name. They're going to hold him hostage and make him make more. No, this was a legal. We had a legal permission. Oh, it's a legal MDMA. This is all legal, what I'm saying.

1985, I had a kilogram made. Oh, my God. What? What is that, two pounds? 2.2 pounds. 2.2 pounds. 2.2 pounds. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Good googly moogly, young Jamie.

And this was... Two pounds of ecstasy! Yeah, in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at Purdue. Oh my god. And they got a better yield than they thought. They got more than a kilogram. Oh yeah, I bet they did. They snuck off with it in the middle of the night. I only paid $4,000 for it. Did you guys ever do a rave while you were making it?

Absolutely not. Oh, I like how you said that. I don't believe you at all, but way to go. Way to stick to the script. Yeah. No, this was, you know, there's like the legal track. Oh, I understand. That's why the yield was totally off.

No, but it was. All right, so we have 960 grams left. 31 years later. Jesus Christ. And it's still the exact same thing we're using in our studies. Wow. 31 years later. It's kept in room temperature and without light, without moisture, dark bottles.

It's infuriating that it's taken this long for people to recognize what other people have said. What other people have said for a long time. And I understand the idea of having rigorous scientific testing. But at a certain point in time, there should be enough anecdotal evidence and lack of – I mean, how many people have died from MDMA? Has anybody? Yes. Yeah. What are the risks like what is the ld50 yeah well um ld50 is a measure where you give a bunch of animals increasing amounts and the amount where you kill half of them right um the ld50 of um md main humans um i don't don't actually even know that number um but it has happened people have people have they died from it or they die for i know people have died from dehydration have um died from hyperthermia right so mdma affects your

temperature controls, which is one reason we measure temperature, although in therapy. But in a clinical setting lying down, there's no problem with temperature at all. And normally there wouldn't be either if there was adequate harm reduction and people were drinking not just water but electrolytes. So that's why ecstasy people are always so sweaty. Is that what's going on? They're sweaty, but-

But they dance a lot too. They dance. Yes. It's that combination. So some people have died- And maybe glow sticks, keep them warm. Pacifiers, glitter, glitter. I know my analogy about toothpaste is a bad one,

you know, toothpaste and teeth. But there is some weirdness to this idea that we need a substance like it's classified whether the you know no matter whether it's legal or illegal it gets classified and when you make something a drug and that drug can only be used when there's an ailment then you lock out the whole possibility of performance enhancing substances. Like we can't, I mean, we don't disclude across the board performing enhancing substances. I mean, that's essentially what coffee is and it's mandatory. I mean, coffee breaks are written into union bills.

I mean, all the, like when they make a contract, they write in coffee breaks. Like we've always had coffee breaks, right? That's a break to take a drug, a productivity drug. And it used to be illegal at one point. Yes. Yes where people gathered together and talk and yes Revolution in England incredible. So it's like many other things. So we have this one performance enhancing drug well ecstasy is probably a performance enhancing drug as well because it gets rid of some of the Bullshit that you've got clogging up your thinking right and it And it allows you to think more freely. Right. And you can, it's, it's, it's the most inherently therapeutic of all the psychedelics. So when you asked me, why did I choose MDMA? I think one part is it is the most inherently therapeutic.

People tend not to have bad trips. The kind of bad trips people have is when they take MDMA in a recreational setting and difficult emotions come up and they're with friends that just want to party and they try to stuff the emotions down. And someone plays Slayer real loud. That would be worse too. And then they end up worse off. So MDMA can make people worse off too. Well, there's certain people that really shouldn't be allowed to chew gum. And we should take them into account too. There's certain people that are going to stub their toe every time they walk, and I don't think we should nerf the world.

And I think it's super important to recognize when you're looking at all these numbers and statistics that there is a certain percentage of these people in this world that are helpless. You just can't do anything about them. There is risk in everything. If you look at skiing, look at the number of people that die running into trees. I mean, every year there's about 35 or 40 people that die skiing every year. Dude, we lost Sonny Bono. You'd have to remind me. Yeah.

You'd have to bring it up. Throw salt in the wound. And that's not even counting people with avalanches. But that's because there's benefits. I got you, baby. And that's where, again, this is coming out. It's fun. Skiing's fun. So is driving race cars. That's fun, too. There's a lot of stuff that's benefits. And that's where, again, this is coming out. It's fun. Skiing's fun.

So is driving race cars. That's fun, too. There's a lot of stuff that's fun. But dangerous. Look, there's a lot of dangerous activities. But the amount of people that actually die from ecstasy versus skiing, very low in comparison to how many people take... Who skis?

Do you think people ski more or take ecstasy more? I think that a lot of what people think is ecstasy, meaning MDMA, is really something else. So that's another problem. That is a problem. Around half of it. Like meth, right? With Arrowhead.org, there's an ecstasy pill testing program that they have been conducting that we helped start years ago. There's one licensed laboratory, licensed by the DEA in the United States, that can

take anonymous samples of drugs. You can get drugs tested. And so there's been this program to get ecstasy pills tested. Over 800 or 900 have already been tested. And around half of them don't even have MDMA in them. Jesus Christ. So there's... What are they mostly, amphetamines? They're amphetamines, they're caffeine, a lot of them. Jesus Christ. So there's... What are they mostly? Amphetamines?

Amphetamines, they're caffeine. Caffeine pills? Yeah. And they're selling them as ecstasy. Sometimes they would... There's test kits that dance safe cells. And sometimes to fool the test kits, which turn a certain color if there's MDMA in it, there's been pills that are one part MDMA, nine parts caffeine. Wow.

Because there's the stimulant aspect and people stay up. But that's a terrible up. But the risks of MDMA, even in a large recreational setting, if it were a post-prohibition world, those risks would be very manageable. But there would be some people, probably, rare situations, somebody might die. We have that all the time with cars, with alcohol, with, you know, I can't say that it would never happen. It's like those freaks that are allergic to shrimp, right? Or penicillin, people die from.

Yeah. There's going to be risk for everything. There's nothing that's safe, 100%. Even salt. Salt kills people. People die from salt overdoses every year. Right. Water.

Aspirin. Aspirin kills people. Yeah. Thousands of people die every year from aspirin. But the actual, yeah, it's. Yeah, it's crazy. The number of people that fall in their bathtub and die. Let's get rid of bathtubs.

Let's make them all out of rubber. Yeah. A little of rubber. Yeah, and so one of the things that my wife said about me when some of the neighborhood teenagers, when we had our teenagers, were thinking of coming to visit me at Boom Festival in Europe, which is one of these festivals where they have the most harm reduction. And these were teenage boys. And what my wife said about me was that I wasn't really good at prevention, but I was good at rescue. And so that's for me, prohibition versus public health. You know, prevention, you know, prohibition. But if we can be good at acknowledging the risks, but being prepared for them the same way that festivals have medical tents and people

have all sorts of physical problems. Yeah, but the problem is there's not a strict prohibition on dangerous things so the precedents already been set of freedom that precedent of freedom we would like to extend across the board we that's what we want yeah we don't you can't tell me that i can go to a bar and drink my fucking lungs out and smoke cigarettes all day long, and I can take pain pills, and I can do all these things, but I can't have a joint. You can't tell me that. It doesn't make any sense. Did you see the quote that was recently circulated on the Internet by Ehrlichman

about the origins of the drug war? I did see the quote, but please repeat it. Well, basically he said that Nixon, when they were looking at the protests that were being conducted by the hippies against the war, against a lot of Nixon policies, and the blacks who were arguing for civil, and that they knew they were exaggerating the science, and that the drug war was a political war against certain kind of drug users who were considered to be a problem to Nixon and Ehrlichman. And this was something that Ehrlichman said 20 years ago, didn't get that much attention, and he's been dead, I think, 10 years now, but it just came out again in an article,

and people are looking at what Ehrlichman said, and it seems intuitively true. Intuitively true, and just unbelievable how damaging and for how long. I mean, it's been going on since 1970. So we're deep here. Yeah, but it also triggered into a fear of the unconscious, a fear of the drugs, not just these political parts, but just the drugs themselves and the reasons why they were political. Well, also the blanket label of drugs becomes really problematic because you have all these things lumped in together. You've got heroin and marijuana in the same categories.

You've got cocaine and all these things that are so different. And to call them all drugs, it's not a good implication. It doesn't make sense. It's not a good distinction. There should be obvious classifications. Like, you were telling me about the ecstasy, and I immediately thought amphetamines. Well, that's a category. And that's how we should describe them.

I don't think describing things, oh, you do drugs. That's a dumb—of course I don't think describing things, oh, you do drugs, you know, like, that's a dumb, of course I do. What am I, stupid? They figured out how to do things that are way better than not having them. There's plenty of drugs that are excellent. Like, the idea that you're going to be completely drug-free is dumb.

Our brains are a drug factory. Yeah. Don't do damaging drugs. Don't do terrible drugs. Don't do meth. Don't do things that are going to fuck you up. Yeah, don't do, yeah, there's probably Don't do damaging drugs. Don't do terrible drugs. Don't do meth. Don't do things that are going to fuck you up. Yeah, don't do... Yeah, there's probably some stuff you should avoid just because it's not healthy for you.

But the problem is labeling them all drugs. It depends on the dose. It depends on the context. So that one of the... The FDA made their reputation in the early 60s on blocking thalidomide to be prescribed in America for morning sickness for pregnant women because it caused all these thalidomide babies. And it was a skeptical woman who ended up winning the President's Medal of Honor, the only person from the FDA,

for blocking this drug thalidomide. It was the epitome of the bad drug. But now it's used in the treatment of cancer. It's an approved medication. Thalidomide it was the epitome of the bad drug but now it's used in the treatment of cancer it's an approved medication thalidomide is an approved medication is it just one of those medications that only affects it's certain certain blood vessels and it can be useful in certain ways or terrible so it you know it's not that there's good and bad drugs it's not that things are good or bad in themselves like i don't think methamphetamine is a bad you know, it's not that there's good and bad drugs. It's not that things are good or bad in themselves. Like, I don't think methamphetamine is a bad, you know, there's uses for that. Do you ever do it?

I've tried it. What's it like? I only tried it one time. Did you clean your house with a toothbrush? It did have that kind of, yeah, energetic, you know, it wasn't that, it was similar to cocaine. It was the stimulant that can be really useful. My father, this was a shocking thing. My father is a doctor, a pediatrician. a doctor, a pediatrician. And years ago, and he's retired now, but he, well after I was into doing psychedelics and had dropped out, this is what I was focusing on, he shared

with me that he and his medical friends did meth because they were under these ridiculous residencies and they had to work for these really long hours. Wow. And that in the 50s, it was very common for residents medical doctors all sorts of people to do methamphetamine to and and it's it was a major tool used in the war and with the soldiers and it's um you know it doesn't have this um brain it doesn't have this evolutionary feel in a way it helps you do what you're doing but there's a way where psychedelics help you refine what you're doing and so it just gives you energy it doesn't give you confidence

there's a mood too yeah yeah elevated yeah yeah there's so mdma is methylene dioxin methamphetamine so there is you know similar molecular change with other additions to it, which fundamentally change how it happens, what it does in the brain. So that's a part of maybe what triggers the euphoria, as well as the dopamine release? Yeah, that is part. So that chemically, the army in 1952, the chemical warfare people, they were looking for mind control drugs. And so they did a study with animal toxicity studies, looking for LD50s and others with eight different drugs in a range. One of them was MDMA.

And one was, it was like methamphetamine to mescaline. Whoa. You know, so MDMA is kind of like mescaline in a sense that it has that, which is from peyote, which has this psychedelic, ego-dissolving and things emerging and nonverbal processing and emotional intensity. That it has that from mescaline, but it's not that eco-dissolving. It's more, you're calmer, and that has the energy from methamphetamine, but not in a jittery way, because you can sit still, you can meditate. Meditators are now, you know, some of them have learned from MDMA or psilocybin to deepen a meditative practice. So you can use these in any number of different ways. And so you kind of have this paradoxical

culmination of methamphetamine and mescaline that produced a molecule that does something different but reminiscent. And it is something that I believe that will be used in initially highly controlled therapeutic settings for particular clinical indications. And over time, and by over time, I mean 10 or 20 years, there would be a development of psychedelic clinics like hospice centers. Hospice centers spread all over America in 30 years. The first one was 1974. 2004, there was 3,500. So a place to help people who are at the end of life. So these are psychedelic treatment centers to help people do ego death or to die to their old selves or to see more or that these centers will be developed all over America,

I think, over a process of once the drugs are approved. And probably MDMA and psilocybin will both be approved around the same time. One of the other, you know, 2021 is our current predictions. And then we'll start elaborating these clinics, and then people will get more and more comfortable to it. So that medicalization precedes legalization. And that's what we've seen with medical marijuana right that the culture gets comfortable through this process of now research and use that they can trust that they see directly and they see distribution centers that aren't violent and people see a system and they then are now now – now the latest poll was 60 percent of Americans in favor of marijuana legalization.

Wow. The highest it's ever been. That's incredible. Yeah. So I think that we need – people are under so much stress. And if you look around at the world, the world is under so much stress and the environment is under stress. And if you look around at the world, the world is under so much stress and the environment is under stress and the cultures are bumping up against each other that we need to have all the tools available to manage the stress because it's a tremendously crucial time in human history where we have these capabilities through our technology that we never had before to impact planetary systems. Well, in a way, these psychedelic drugs are kind of a technology as well. They're a technology to get us to understand how our brain is functioning. Yes. And there's this confluence of coincidence

of timing that Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD, first off created it in 38 and then accidentally ingested it in 43, felt that the development of nuclear splitting of the atom was occurring contemporaneously with this discovery of LSD. And in his view, there was this kind of outer technology and this inner technology. And that Einstein said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. What shall be required is a substantially new mode of thinking. And Albert Hoffman was like, well, I do wonder about the technology, which, you know, many people think that if it comes from nature,

it's really good. You know, if it's plant medicine. But if it comes from a lab, it's somehow suspect. Right. But I think that it comes from our mind. We're from nature, labs. So LSD. These nature, these plants, they just extract the chemicals from these plants. When you break it down to what the chemicals are, you can reproduce those in the lab.

It's not as simple as it's not natural. It's exactly the same as it's not natural. It's exactly the same thing as natural. Right. And it's all natural, right? Because it's all from something that's on earth. Well, actually, because we're trying to see, you know, how we're operating in a public benefit manner and fair trade and all this, I asked the company that's now making us our kilogram of we're having a new kilogram of MDMA made. Oh, Jesus. You need more?

I thought you said you had a gang of it. We have 960 grams, but it's not GMP medical. It's not acceptable for phase three research. Oh, yeah. I would say that's something like that, too. I would say it went bad. We've got to give it away to kids. Well, we want to give it away to researchers so if there are researchers that are listening we have free i just became a researcher dude i'm

researching we would research for youtube we would like to give it there but the mostly crocodile attacks but i'll fuck around with some mdma well the current one is um costing us um to have the medical grade is now costing us $400,000. Oh, of course. We need that. We need that medical grade. And that's what our- Wait a minute.

You've got like a bucket of this stuff laying around. Well, but it's not- We're making this transition, yes, into the higher regulated areas. So it is just that the standards of procurement weren't as strict? Is that? Yes. This MDMA, just as pure as what we're going to get now. By the way, I should never use the word procurement. It's one of those words that I use, and as soon as I say it, I go,

did I say the right word? Is that okay? Is that okay to use right there? It's the pedigree of all the ingredients. So there has to be a paper trail for all the ingredients. So you don't have that right now. You got your shit from a dealer. Sort of.

One of the things that he didn't have all of the paperwork on. Oh, it's like a car. Apparently, there's a part of the process of making MDMA where you need aluminum. And he took some aluminum. Oh, Jesus Christ. People are throwing forks in there and shit.

He took some aluminum foil and used it in the process. Oh, and that's bad? Well, because it's not like witchy aluminum foil and witch batch and where did it come from? Oh, Jesus Christ. This guy threw aluminum foil into your fucking mixture. What a janky-ass fucking way to make things. You've got to throw metal in it. That seems so stupid.

I'm sure it was really. Hey, man, you want to eat some cans? Fuck yeah, dude. I'm in. We want to roll. We're rolling. Yeah, if I knew more chemistry, I could kind of explain what it did in the process. Well, aluminum is super common.

Aluminum is like, we think of aluminum as being frying pans. But that's not the form it takes in the wild. You know, or car panels. They make a lot of cars out of aluminum now. Because they figured out how to make like super lightweight but very strong aluminum. That's as strong as steel but lighter. But aluminum is everywhere. It's in dirt.

It's like one of the most common metals. So they use this stuff. How much do you need? Like in say, a tiny amount? I don't think it was all that much. I was...

What does it do? I don't... I'm not a chemist so I can't really say. You didn't get curious? And you found out they were throwing out aluminum foil

and shit you were taking? Well, I was just like, wow, this is pure MDMA. Great. Dude, I would have been like, hold the fuck up. Did you just say you threw a fork in there?

Dude, sit down and you got to tell me what are you doing? What are you doing? Why does it have to have aluminum foil? We went to the FDA and we said, is there some way we can take this MDMA, which is just as pure as what we're going to get, and turn it into medical grade? Right. And they said there's no way you can really do that. Because you have to, this is now preparing for prescription MDMA. I understand.

So you have to take it from – every initial ingredient has to be verified at the source, weighed out, documented, and then you make it, and then it's medical grade. Well – Is that right? More or less. So of this 400,000, about 75,000 is just to validate all the methods that are being used. Another 54,000 is three-year stability studies to show that the MDMA can last three years, even though we have MDMA from 1985 that we're still using, that we have purity studies on throughout the years. But it's about this particular batch. And actually, our 30th anniversary celebration on April 17th in Oakland at the Scottish Rights Center.

Is this a plug for a party? This is a plug for a party. How dare you just snuck that in. See how he just snuck that in? It's for raising money to a legal drug deal to buy this MDMA. How do people find out about this and how to get there? They go to the maps.org website and there's information right on the homepage. Powerful.

Thank you. And it's about helping people, though, also think about having dinners in their own homes with their friends. Well, you're going to make a holiday, dude. Why not, man? Columbus has a fucking holiday, and he's widely believed to be a piece of shit. Right? Yes.

Yes, I think. Yeah. Columbus is supposed to be a piece of shit, right? Yes, yes, I think. Well, Columbus is supposed to be a piece of shit. Okay, well, I think that once we get MDMA as a medicine and then it becomes legal and then most people are doing it. Are you going to change your opinion on Columbus? Then we can turn Columbus Day into MDMA Day. It's a great idea. I mean, look, Columbus did start something in motion,

but Columbus as a person, if you Google him, boy, he was a terrible human being. He was cruel. There was an account of one of the missionaries, I believe, that was there on the island. I think it was a Catholic missionary. I forget what religion. But anyway, this one religious person wrote this account of what Columbus and his soldiers did to some native people. And it was just horrific.

And you realize these were the people that everybody was worried about. Like we were talking about, a boat shows up and some monsters get off that boat. And these were the people and what they had done to these people for gold. They found out that some of them had gold. And they just did horrific shit. Very similar to what happened on this coast here with the Incas, the Aztecs, rather. Yeah, there's a story of Cabeza de Vaca. Do you know that story?

Which story is that? Alvar Nunez, Cabeza de Vaca. This is a true story of people that found real gold uh spanish conquistadors this this is um it's been made into a movie it should be made into a more major movie what's the movie called um children of the sun children of the sun have you seen that jamie it was um i think that's what i think the movie should be called i'm not sure if it was that. You just make up your own names for movies? I don't like Star Wars, bro. I like Bigfoot and his buddy. In space.

Well, the story that I've written, actually, this is incredible. This is the hidden history of America. This is the first meeting. Children of the Sun? Children of the Sun is the script I've written, actually. What the fuck are you doing, man? You smoked too much pot before the show,

be honest with us. A little bit, right? Not too much. Not too much? A little bit. Not too much. Both of us did a little bit, right? Yes.

A little? Yeah, it's good for creative brainstorming. And the movie, the story... What is this movie that you can watch, though? I think it might be Cabeza de Vaca. It's got a dwarf shaman that doesn't really exist in the real story. And I think this has to be told true because it's the hope of America. It's the hope. It's a story of several hundred conquistadors around 1528 trying to link up with Cortez,

blown off course in a hurricane, land in around Tampa, Florida. And of this bunch of hundreds of these conquistadors, only four of them survive. And they eventually, one of them is black. One of them is a slave. The rest are conquistadors, white. And they become slaves. So they start out at the head of the empire, exploring and plundering, and then they get destroyed and they become slaves so they get captured they get captured by native americans that lived in florida yeah so the native americans that lived in florida the seminole tribe right is that them i'm not sure which they they end up um running away and it takes eight years this whole process they go through this is the

charting so this is the first meeting of the black, white, and red races in much of North America. Wow. And at one point, when they're slaves, to get some use from them, the Indians, the Native Americans, say they want them to do some healings. They think they're special. There is a black person. They came, and they say, we're not healers. We don't, you know, and they say, if you don't do it, we're going to not feed you. And they try to do a healing, and it actually works.

The person says they're better. So what exists is the document. There's a lot of historical documents. What was the ailment that they documented? I don't know what it was. They do talk about... But you wrote a script on it. Well, I don't remember the exact verse.

This was a long time ago. I decided that at some point I couldn't try to make the movie happen and also try to make MDMA happen. So you set it aside for a long time. But it's the myth, the symbol I have set aside, but I haven't even thought about for a long time. But I think that the story is important for people to hear. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. They became healers, and they went eventually. People gave them all their stuff.

They didn't want it. They just wanted to go to where they thought Cortez was. Yeah, but hold on. How did they become healers? Just because they healed this one guy? They just said, fuck, this is our new job. Obviously, I didn't know I was magic. And they ended up with basically the whole groups of Indians. One tribe would take them to the next tribe.

They had the allegiance of all of these Indians. And they learned to live very humbly. They didn't take stuff for themselves. They were incredibly good survivors through amazing hardships. And they saw their humanity with the Indians. And they had sort of conquered through love through these healings and then they ended up getting to where the West was to where Cortez I mean where the conquistadors were they finally saw burned out villages and people of slaves and they were taken captured themselves and Alvar Nunez

Cabeza de Vaca went and was taken as prisoner back and he had to write this report to the king about what happened to the expedition. And the black man, Estebanico, he stayed, and he traveled up and explored a lot of California, and ended up being killed by the natives. But the story, Henry Miller wrote a tremendous introduction to this story about the salvation of this westward expansion the opportunity what it showed is that through this respect through whatever circumstances they got they through cooperation and non-violence they had

the support they had and then well the four that they didn't kill before that they yes 96 that they killed they didn't get that's four that they, yes. The 96 that they killed, they didn't get that support. Yeah. Yeah, but it took them. This nonviolence thing only worked out when it got down to like four people.

That's not a good strategy. I would say that's 96% ineffective. That's a fucking terrible idea. Hey, nonviolence worked. These four guys lived

to become fucking wacky carnival healers. This is perfect. If you have time to look at the story of this report. Do you recommend a book on the subject? Yeah, there's the actual original document, Elvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, The Marvelous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez Kabeza de Vaca, The Marvelous Adventures of Kabeza de Vaca,

I think is the translation of it. Yeah, that's the guy. There's a Ken Burns documentary on him called The West, I believe is what I was looking up. Ken Burns did something on him? Didn't Ken Burns do something on The Wild West? Wasn't that a different, he did it on this guy?

Ken Burns business in it but though it's a part of it yeah oh I see story first appeared the Ken Burns the West PBS documentary that first aired in 1996 hmm Wow yeah and this there's been an opera about it there's also a lot of people have sort of looked at this story and taken a lot of hope from it, that even though it took a lot of death for these people to get to this attitude and the Indians were, you know, keeping slaves and killing each other, you know, but they were able to have a different kind of, they got off the boat as those rampaging people, but they transformed into humanists and humble. And actually, Cabeza de Vaca was able to go on a second expedition to South America. He was able to talk his way into it, and he did it, he explored more areas than other people did without killing any Indians, and he discovered the Iguazu Falls,

More areas than other people did without killing any Indians. And he discovered the Iguazu Falls where the movie The Mission was made. Big waterfalls. And so he sort of demonstrated that he was a good ambassador between cultures and tried to still, you know, explore, exploit, but do it in a way of a little bit more collaboration. That's really interesting, man. It's really interesting to think of cultures colliding like that. Like some crazy people from Spain getting in a boat, getting washed out of their course and landing in Florida, climbing out, trying to figure out what the hell's going on,

getting attacked, attacking people, being at war, and then four dudes make it through that and live. Can you imagine how cool those guys must have been? Talking to them? Yeah. Like the Native Americans decided, you're so cool, we're not even going to kill you, man. They became traders for a while before they kind of escaped. Trade, D-E, not traders, right?

Yes, traders. And they could, you know, they got very hardy. I would imagine. How long did they live? They got very hardy. I would imagine. How long did they live? Some of them, well, Estes de Nica ended up getting killed.

He stayed in Mexico. He didn't want to go back to be a slave. And then he went with the Christian missionaries up into California and then got killed. In California? Yeah. By Native Americans here? By Native Americans here. Native Americans need a better name. They do. It native american saying native america is clumsy saying indian is even

more clumsy i like uh first nation that's like what the canadians use i like that first nations that's that's their real claim right their first nation First Nation. Because the bottom line is, as far as we know, they're First Nation. But we don't, you know. Well, we did a study in work with First Nations people who were addicted with Dr. Gabor Monte, a Western psychiatrist. That guy's amazing. He is, mediating this accession run by, and then we were able to support the team that did some outcome measures and suggested that this third world, first world, first nations people, that these – it's cultural bumping into each other all over now, more ever than before in the history of the world probably.

Is that cultural appropriation or no? I think it's appropriation if you don't – If you steal from them. If you pretend to be a Native American and hold your own peyote ceremonies with the feathered headband on and red paint. I think flattery, imitation is the – Most sincere form of flattery. Flattery. So I think it's like you want people to adopt, if you think it's good, but they don't have to adopt your dogma or your rituals.

I mean, I see that with our MDMA. We have our method, and we have it. Everything is videotaped. We even have it scored. We have raters that look at the therapist and score them on how much they're complying, cohering with our method. But we want other people with other methods to use it and see how it works in other contexts. Native Americans have their own rules, right,

when they have in their territories. That's why they can put casinos up in there. Yes. Do they have rules as far as psychedelic drugs? Do they have their own rules? Well, they have... Because on tribal lands, right? Well, first off, they have authority in tribal lands,

but a lot of people work in the military or do stuff with the federal government. So they have the religious freedom to practice the Native American church. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld and Congress that they can. But the federal government actually tried to limit it so that if you had to have 25 percent Indian blood to be part of the Native American church in order to participate in the peyote rituals. percent Indian blood to be part of the Native American church in order to participate in the peyote rituals. The states don't have that kind of racial requirement, but to try to prevent the spread of this religion from the Native Americans to wider groups of hippies and others that like peyote, you know, they tried to make a racial, the federal government does have this racial limit, but it's largely ignored and it's ignored by the states. That's why white dudes were trying to be Rastafarians.

Remember that? That's where white, dirty, stinky people with dreadlocks came from. That's how it was reignited. They were all fans of Bob Marley, right? That's why they... I knew a dude who was a pot dealer, and he claimed Rastafarian He said this is part of my religion man It was like real serious

Right right And those cases They've lost in court Oh they have But they didn't lose the What is it Ascento de Daime What is the church

Yeah How do you say it What is the name The Ascento Daime Went up to the 9th circuit It didn't go to the Supreme Court But the Uniao de Vegetal I just came from

Santa Fe this morning And that's where the Lead church The Uniao de Vegetal Was located in came from Santa Fe this morning, and that's where the lead church, the Uniao de Vegetal, was located in Santa Fe. And it was Jeffrey Bronfman from the Canadian Jewish Bronfman family from Seagram's fortune, from smuggling alcohol during Prohibition and then building this massive business as one of the grandkids. He ended up becoming appreciative of ayahuasca. And so he hired the best lawyers and worked on this case that they won a unanimous Supreme Court case

affirming the union de vegetal, the union of the plants. It's two different plants, roots and vines and leaves, and you put it together. So it's the Union Uniao de Vegetal, and they have legal protection in the United States. On the other hand, it's, you know, it's a church. I went to it, and I was hearing, I really enjoyed, I went to it twice and um the second time was like here's the myth of our church the myth of the or the origin myth and part of it was that king solomon you know went to the amazon and told them how to put these plants together right and i like

king solomon really and so there's? And so it is a religion. Right. So I think that that's going to kind of limit it. Well, that's why the Supreme Court agreed with it, because it's so wacky. They're like, yeah, you guys sound like a religion. Right? I mean, that's how they know that they didn't make it up. Ayahuasca is having an incredible effect in America. It's really amazing the number of different people that are using it, not necessarily in these exact religious contexts,

but in kind of shamanistic or personal growth or more or kind of little modified or even in these services. Why hasn't that religion expanded? Well, it's being used quite a lot. There's a lot of ceremonies in California, all over over America all over the world with ayahuasca It's but this but this union do it when you out the veg towel Yeah, udv that but they have they're expanding somewhat, but they're it's how saying they have authority They have authority legal authority from the US Supreme Court. They're the only ones The Santo Daime went up to the Ninth Circuit, so they essentially have the same argument.

It just didn't get appealed to the Supreme Court by the prosecutors. Right, but the Uniao de Vegetal. How do you say it? Uniao. Uniao. Uniao. Uniao de Vegetal. They do have that.

So they're locked down. They are, yes. And Santo Daime is, too, but as I said, they won in the appeals court. We've got to get Richard Branson. We've got to get Richard Branson involved and start opening these bitches up right next to Virgin Records. They don't have Virgin Records anymore. Why haven't they expanded more? Part of it is cultural integration.

So cultural appropriation, but cultural integration. So they're bringing a tradition from a different culture. Right. And they're trying to integrate it at a rate where it doesn't – it grows. It's constitutionally protected, but it doesn't grow too fast. Maybe there's a way where it could grow too fast and there wouldn't be the care and the use of the tea. And they want to make sure that it's responsibly handled. These are the people that are running your church, me and yes yes yes jeffrey broffman they're just too

busy getting high they want to keep it on the dl no no no they're hide no no they trip out and lay on the floor well you know you don't hide by going to the supreme court no obviously not i'm joking yeah but i think it's amazing that they did actually get the ruling. I mean, that's amazing. They're taking one of the most potent psychedelic drugs known to man. It's true. But they got the support of mainstream religions, because there's a lot of weird things that mainstream religions do for cultural practices. Well, hasn't a precedent been set with wine?

Yeah. Wine is most certainly a drug. With wine? Yeah, yeah. Wine is most certainly a drug. And it can be used by children in certain ritual ceremonies. But it's a common part of Catholicism. Like wine is a very common part.

There's a lot of weird stuff in religion. And as soon as you start saying that one person can't do their weird stuff, they go, okay, what kind of weird stuff do you got exemptions for? And you look at their exemptions. You're like, well, what? You can cut baby dicks. What are you doing? You're rubbing dirt on your forehead on Wednesday? What the fuck are you doing? And the idea that one could make fun of the other is just at a certain point in time,

it's like, you guys have blinders on, okay? This whole thing is pretty wacky. The union, you now de vegetal. They might have the right idea That might be the only way to do it Well the part about it that's really good is that while they have their dogma and their their traditions It's about the experience right? It's about the individual experience for yourself Rick Strassman did it with them? And he told me it was very strange. He said it's really strong

He's like they do really strong ayahuasca and they sing songs about jesus i was like whoa daddy what is that like yeah it's a trip yeah i think you have to have a generous spirit in a way like okay it's jesus but you know it's about reverence and then you kind of generalize in your own we were talking about this the other day and tell me if this makes any sense to you if you have this idea when you go like when you take i've never done ayahuasca but i've done dmt on multiple occasions right so i've had this psychedelic effect the most potent version of that, right? I would wonder if you went in with the intention and had these experiences with the intention to communicate with some benevolent deity that you believe is responsible for all life

and all love on the planet. If you kept thinking of that as you entered into this dimethyltryptamine state of consciousness, isn't it possible that a vast majority of what is happening when you are having a psychedelic trip is the word hallucination is very strange because what the hallucination implies is in this world, what we're sitting right here with tables and chairs and rooms, something could, you could see it, but it could not be real. The problem with that is like, what are you seeing? And why can't other people see?

Can other people see it too? Well, if other people could see it, then it's not a hallucination, right? So it's, how do you know what other people are seeing? We really don't, right? Now, how do you know when you close your eyes and you're on a psychedelic drug, how much of what you're experiencing is your visual cortex interacting with your eyes, you're on a psychedelic drug, how much of what you're experiencing is your visual cortex interacting with your mind, interacting with these drugs and your creativity and your consciousness, they're colliding and gliding and dancing together along with

your imagination. And in the, hold on a second. And in this moment, if you go into it with this intention, your imagination can conjure up this Jesus-type character in the ayahuasca ceremony. And he can be real. And he can be what you want him to be. And he could be a manifestation of your own experiences in this life that you've carried around as memories and carried around as emotions. as memories and carried around as emotions. And that in this psychedelic state, if you continually go to it with that intention, it's entirely possible that they do experience something like that.

Exactly. I think that you, we see through our own filters and we see a lot of times what we want to see and that we can coalesce a lot of feelings and images that are like pre-verbal into certain kind of symbols. Well, especially if you're on an insanely potent psychedelic drug. Yeah. So the idea that we ever know the ultimate truth, that it's not somehow or other filtered through our preconceptions. John Lilly wrote this great book. One of the things he did I thought was great was called Simulations of God. And it's like different conceptions that people have of God and how you get to these views.

And then there's a way to transcend that and see something even deeper and deeper and that we have these filters. And so the culture is and the context is more important than the drug. So I think one of the issues of the 60s was people had so much faith. They wanted so much cultural change. It was such a strife-filled time that they had this hope, this unreasonable hope that the drugs were enough, that the psychedelics were enough, that they would somehow or other bring this connection to the truth, to this new understanding just by themselves. And it's really more about the context. But the context, and with a proper open context, and in our case, a therapeutic context in the experimental sense,

then when you add the pharmacology, it produces really unusual opportunities to go very deep. And that's what I think we can show, that we can do that and contain it in a regulatory therapeutic healing context that can slowly be accepted by our culture. And that that's really the value proposition that we're presenting to the FDA. See, the way you described it is why maps are so important. Because I'm talking about making Jesus exist when you're tripping balls. I'm making your own Jesus while you're tripping.

And you bring it back to studies and science and data and present a paper. Look, I'm wearing a tie. Okay. And so for us, yes, yes, we're actually discussing, should I wear a tie at our 30th anniversary or not uh what are you gonna do uh i haven't decided yet you should dress like jimmy hendrix but but the date that um the data is really this um double checking of what we think is true right and it's a way where um we have to have that humility that we don't necessarily know

this ultimate truth. Well, there's no way to know. And that's not just humility. That's just a fact. There's no way to know what you're experiencing, what anybody else is experiencing when they're tripping. You really don't know. We don't know what it is. And it's entirely possible that it's something that we don't understand yet. Yeah. And so the reason i brought back in a way to the science is that we're operationalizing its effect on symptoms so whether you have this memory that is actually true so whether it's jesus or whether you're remembering childhood sexual abuse whether that i don't like how you tied the two of those together right the catholic church i know what you're doing there was a little stop a few things i leaped over there but but but whether that Right. The Catholic Church. point of view, if this expression, if it's symbolic or actual, if it has the consequence of helping people come to terms with themselves and to get more acceptance about what happened,

that's what we're looking at. We're looking at the outcomes. So I think that that's the practical part. That's the science part. It's like, there are questions. I believe, I, for a lot of times in my early LSD trips, I wanted God to show up and I wanted the truth. How arrogant. He's not busy. Yeah. Yeah. God doesn't have a lot of the shit going on.

Well, I remember from my bar mitzvah where I was like the very next day. Dude, it's my bar mitzvah. What the fuck, God? You know, I studied all this Hebrew. So in my bed the next day after my bar mitzvah, I was like, I was the same. I'm like, I'm not a man. I'm not any different than I was. And it took me a couple days where I thought God was maybe busy.

Maybe a lot of people got bar mitzvahed that day. And after like a week, I recognized, you know, I'm not going to change. And it's going to take something else. The ritual didn't quite do it. And then even with my LSD trips, wanting to see God, wanting to have this clarity and not quite getting it and then appreciating that, that that was a delusion in some ways, that keeping the uncertainty is keeping integrity. But there's that strong longing for that, for certainty. Yeah, you're sounding like a dude who's rationalizing that he didn't get to meet God and he's upset. If God did show up, the whole thing would be different, right?

Maybe God's like aliens. He just doesn't visit everybody. But when he does visit, it's a very unique experience and it's real. I don't know, man. I think there's a real problem in saying you know what other people experience, whether it's under the influence of psychedelic drugs or whether it's completely sober or whether it's in a meditative state. The idea that anybody can tell you what you experienced or what you got out of something is foolish. So then it becomes a matter of whether or not we're protecting people.

So if our laws are designed to protect people, we should do it scientifically. We should look across the board at all the damaging things. And we don't do that at all. That's why the government never discusses cigarettes. Because we all know how many people's cigarettes kill every year. It's in the hundreds of thousands and no one brings it up. No one running for president, no one running for Congress. They just don't bring it up. It's not something they want to fight against. Because if they do, they'll get slaughtered with money. So it's not about whether or not they're trying to protect us. So then what is it about? Although at the same time, cigarette use has been going down.

A little. Yeah. Still half a million people die every year in this country. It's still, yeah. It's still, it's crazy. If it was just 5,000 people from pot, how quick would they shut it down? If 5,000 people died prematurely every year because of marijuana, how quick would it be the demon of television well

it depends on what we do about the benefit side of the equation it's it's not but no but it doesn't exist though you know you see what i'm saying like there is 5 000 isn't dying right right but if it was like the 500 000 are diving from cigarettes are extremely significant right well what should be done but what we should do is make everything legal and then let people figure out what you want to do and not want to do this, which is what we do with most things today. Right. Most things like cigarettes and alcohol that can kill you. We let you try. Exactly. Because no one should be able to tell you what to do, man. If you want to Charles Bukowski it and just drink and smoke yourself to an early grave and just scribble all the cool shit along the way who gives a fuck it's all finite right who's one person to tell another person they can't bmx jump or skydive

well i think i think you can have that i want you to be free i want to be free to do what i feel i should do you should have the same freedom but if you are hurting yourself i'm compassionate and let's try to see are you struggling with your own trauma or what. But not to try to. Well, what do you do about rock climbers? Yeah, you just try to get safe equipment. What if they're rock climbers with bad childhoods? You just cut them off?

People can make choices about risk in different ways. And I think you really, at some point, where does it shade into suicide? Well, do you think suicide should be legal? There's another one. Well, I think the – I think there should be – I mean, I don't think you should be punished. Well, you can't be. If you tried to get – committed suicide and you survived, then I don't think you should be punished. Well, you can't be. If you tried to get committed suicide and you survived, then I don't think you need. Right to jail, you fuck.

Right. I don't think you need that. It's America. We don't like pussies. Go to jail! I don't think it should be against the law. And I think assisted suicide, you know, when people are end of life in pain, makes sense to me. It certainly does.

There has to be a lot of protection. Life and pain makes sense to me. It certainly does. But there has to be a lot of protection. But I think there is this general feeling like life is a gift that I have and that somehow we need to run its course rather than. Well, I think this is another way where MDMA therapy will help. And I think that there's a lot of people that are haunted by their memories. Memories of their past.

Memories of their own failures. Memories of things that they did wrong. And those things can really fuck with you. You know, you, people define themselves in this weird way, like by their past failures, like that is, that's all the experience they have. That's all they know of themselves. And they, they, people have a very difficult time just saying, okay, well, those things are things that I'll never do again. I made these mistakes and now I am this person who's learned. And that's a really hard jump for some people because they need some sort of a memory definition of their patterns of behavior. And when the memory definition, when they look in their own memory and everything is just failures and coming up short and missed your red and car got repossessed, those kinds of failures over and over and over again,

stack up and you define yourself by those failures. And it becomes really hard to move forward. It becomes really hard for people. And so each little positive step that people can do can be so significant because it alters the course. There was this Tony Robbins thing once, and I hate to quote Tony Robbins. He's got some really good quotes. But one of the things he was talking about was how just incremental changes in your life. It's like if you have two cars that are going or two boats that are going in this direction and one veers off course just five degrees. Well, if they both go 10 miles, this one goes further and further and further from the other one and it keeps going further. It's going – it changes the course.

It changes the direction. And MDMA therapy or any sort of a psychedelic experience that's boundary dissolving and ego dissolving, and it just gets to the raw heart of the matter and allows you this really intense perspective on it that's almost unattainable without those experiences. Then that person leaves that, and they have almost like a fresh start and a fresh understanding of who they are. They self-define differently, and that in itself is like a recipe for success. Yeah, there's this beautiful part of accepting oneself and loving oneself even with all of these failures, even with everything that's happened. It's not that you deny that it happened or you don't see it. It's just this sense that you can relax and feel that self-love, and that is what's so rare.

And I think that's why MDMA is one of the most popular illegal drugs in the world. Yeah. And why it needs and will become a medicine. medicine. And the reason that I selected it is also because training therapists reaching to the mainstream so that when we talk about how do we incorporate this as a medicine, it's with healers, it's with doctors and therapists. And I think what we've found is that we have FDA permission for a study where we can administer it to therapists in part of our training program. We're studying the psychological effects of MDMA taken by healthy volunteers in a therapeutic setting. Wow.

And it's a double-blind, crossover, placebo-controlled study, but we can bring in therapists from all over the world and give them an MDMA session where they're the patient, and they're seeing our method of how to deliver it. And so MDMA is something that I think will have a smoother, easier way into psychiatry and into psychotherapy because of it's so gentle, because it isn't so much ego dissolving as ego clarifying. Your defenses are relaxed and you can kind of accept yourself for who you are so you can see more clearly. And how you integrate that and and how you make it so that that affects your daily life afterwards i think it's really important you're saying about it being a manageable experience it's one of the most manageable experiences of all the psychedelics because it feels really good yeah yeah it's not

like you're gonna have a bad trip for the most part although some of the veterans have said you know i don't know why they call this ecstasy why do you say that because they're going through this trauma from their war so it's it's like so even under the experience of mdma or under the influence of mdma it's still um they didn't like the fact that it was bringing back those memories no no they liked it because that was part of this healing but it was painful so it makes the pain bearable it doesn't make the pain go away or it doesn't change your memory like bring back those memories? No, no, they liked it because that was part of this healing, but it was painful. So it makes the pain bearable. It doesn't make the pain go away or it doesn't change your memory like it didn't happen. Well, especially someone in war.

It's like you really can't imagine what their experiences are. It could be even worse. You know, childhood sexual abuse and you can't trust your parents or you can't trust your circumstances. Yeah, it's all terrible. All terrible. No need to qualify right yeah and how people can um get into these patterns it's awful and and it seems like um through the techno mdma as part of the technologies of healing well it's one of the things that we were talking about with Jamie before this podcast started, before you got here. We were saying how ridiculous it is that it takes so long to get things passed and that the government, the DEA, is going to review marijuana in July.

They have this thing in July. Yeah, well, they're going to say no. And we've been working... Well, explain what they're going to say no to. I believe that the request is that marijuana be rescheduled from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. And that this rescheduling, the framework. If you don't mind, can you explain what the difference between Schedule 1 and Schedule 2 is? From the point of view. So Schedule 1 is the worst drugs. And they have.

No medicinal value. No medicinal value. is the worst drugs and they have no medicinal value no medicinal value um they're no current they're not current accepted medical and there's no currently accepted safety under medical supervision and no currently accepted medical use and high potential for abuse schedule two drug and these are the most heavily criminalized drugs schedule two except for certain exceptions in schedule two which are also drugs with a high abuse potential but have an accepted medical use, like methamphetamine. And coke. And cocaine.

And heroin. And heroin is not in the U.S., but opiates, all the opiates are. Heroin is legal in England, but it's been blocked here. But Oxycontins are in Schedule 2, right? Oxycontins are in Schedule 2. Every medicine that you can get is Schedule 2. And that's essentially the same as heroin, right? It's very sometimes more dangerous in certain ways.

But I mean, the psych... It's a synthetic. It has very similar, yes, effects. Right. Okay. Yeah, but it has a medical use for pain. Right. So moving from Schedule 1 for Schedule 2, there's been efforts to try to force the DEA to do this.

But the way the schedules are set up, there has to be a currently accepted medical use. And the data is not there. And you talked before about, you know, when do you have enough anecdotal data? Or I believe that we are so capable of fooling ourselves into believing what we want to believe, and to seeing Jesus when Jesus might not be there, that we need science. We should take marijuana through the drug development system. We should take the psychedelics. It doesn't need to—we're about to start a study with marijuana. I basically started trying to do drug development research with marijuana in 1992. This is the first time, 2016.

So there's no established medical benefits of marijuana that have been proven in any scientific way? Yes, there's been a lot of evidence in phase two pilot studies. But the definition of real proof is phase three studies, these large scale studies that you work and negotiate with FDA for the marijuana plant. Now, GW Pharmaceuticals is a company in England that grows marijuana, it takes extracts, Sativex. It's a THC and CBD combination in a pill. And then they also have Epidiolex, which is CBD for childhood epilepsy. So they are in phase three studies.

So there are people working with marijuana extracts in different non-smoking delivery systems going through the system. But the plant itself is highly effective. It doesn't cause lung cancer if you smoke it. If you vaporize it, it's even less irritating to lungs. And there's the possibility that a low-cost plant, in Israel right now, they grow high-potency trim buds for 50 cents a gram, $14 an ounce. So I think there's public benefit in making the marijuana plant in smoked or vaporized form into a medicine available, paid for by insurance, as an alternative to all these

other medicines. But there is no effort right now. We're starting, six years ago, we started a study for marijuana for PTSD in veterans. So we've talked about MDMA, and the idea is to help people with a few MDMA sessions not need MDMA, not need drugs, sort of reorganize their brain. But there's a lot of people with PTSD that find marijuana to be helpful. They don't have the nightmares, they're more present focused, and they're thinking, well, maybe I don't want to do this MDMA, or maybe it's a supplement. So there's never been a study of marijuana for PTSD. There's been lots and lots of anecdotal reports,

hundreds, thousands of people saying that it's helpful in different ways. But marijuana is a palliative, meaning that it just treats the symptoms, and it's used usually every day. So it's taken us six years. We're about to start the study, and it will take us another several years to finish it. Part of it will be at Johns Hopkins. Part of it will be in Arizona, 76 veterans with chronic treatment-resistant PTSD. And we're testing one sample that's high THC, one that's high CBD, one that's kind of THC-CBD combination, and then one placebo. And we got a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado to do this study.

And it's going to be a definitive thing. And because, again, we're nonprofit, we're giving away the protocol. There's no intellectual property like that. again, we're nonprofit, we're giving away the protocol. There's no intellectual property like that. And so there's a for-profit company, Privateer, that actually has bought the Marley brand and they have a, their medical marijuana company, Venture Capital, and they have Tilray, which is a big production, marijuana production factory in British Columbia, supplies like 5,000 patients. They're owned by Privateer, and we've given them our marijuana protocol. And so they're going to use the study with our study,

with the same study design, but with their marijuana, and they're going to vaporize, and we're going to smoke. And then there's a new study starting in Australia. There's this guy whose grandchild had pediatric epilepsy, and nothing helped. then they tried cbd and it stopped the epileptic seizures to a great extent and then the father donated 33 million to the university of sydney whoa for cannabis research it's the largest grant in the history of the university of sydney so they're going to take our protocol and they're going to get marijuana from tilray but put into capsules as edibles. So we're going to have three different studies, similar in design, but smoked, vaporized, and edibles. We're going to combine the data. And so this is the scientific process. But it'll take us, it's taken us six years so far just to

get the study even started. The study will be three years. Then we'll learn from it, and we'd probably need to do another three, four-year study, a phase three, because this is just phase two. And in the meantime, we have to break the government monopoly on marijuana, because in the U.S., we're stuck with the government, marijuana. Explain that. Well, in 1968, Andy Weil, actually, at Harvard, wanted to do a study with marijuana. And so the federal government started a farm at the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana for research. And ever since then, the National Institute of Drug Abuse has contracts now.

And so the University of Mississippi, Professor El-Soli is now in charge. They're the only federally licensed, DEA-licensed marijuana in America. And the FDA is a federal agency, so it can only work with drugs that are federally legal. So the only source of marijuana in America that can be used in clinical research is this marijuana controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has been anti-marijuana, with this contract with the University of Mississippi. And we have tried, MAPS has tried, starting in 2000 to break this monopoly. And we submitted an application in 2001 with Professor Lyle Craker at UMass Amherst.

And we won a DEA administrative law judge lawsuit. The second time I've sued the DEA and won. But in the end, they ignore the judges, they ignore the science and the politics takes over. And so and we lost in the appeals court in 2013. So the way I described that we have this 960 grams of super pure MDMA, but it's not appeal. The government. What did they say when they're appealing? They said that, that the government had an adequate supply. What does that mean? For everybody? In all research? For the research, yeah. We showed that they didn't have what we needed. And also... Meaning?

There has to be an adequate and uninterrupted supply produced under adequately competitive conditions. Well, also, did you factor in the fact of the different strains have different responses? Yeah. Yeah, that's why we're using these different… Right, but the government, do they understand there's different strains that are associated with different feelings? Only recently have they had any CBD available. So GW Pharmaceuticals started in 1998 combining Sativex with THC and CBD. It was up until just last year that they had the U.S. government could provide marijuana with CBD in it.

They've not been focused on making these things into medicines. It's more low potency research into the risks of marijuana. marijuana. And it's the final next step in the medical marijuana story is to end the obstruction on privately funded drug development research trying to make the plant into a medicine. And that's what, ironically, it's easier to do research with psychedelics than with marijuana to try to make it into a medicine because we control our drug. So I'm getting a GMP, MDMA. It's the same stuff we're going to use in phase three that we want to market. But the federal government marijuana can only be used in research.

It can't be marketed. And because the strains are all so different, we can't show marijuana helps for PTSD with one strain and then just say, oh, give us approval for any other strain. Right. So we need to use this, and this is the truth for FDA for other botanicals. If you're going to do a study in botanical medicines, the phase three study needs to be with the same, a consistent batch that you want to market. Well, I guess this is all important because we want the same sort of stringent process to be taking place for a drug, say for arthritis or

something like that. Like there's so many drugs that have gone through clinical trials and wind up still, even after all that being dangerous. But the problem with this is that we know it's not dangerous. It's not like there's any question whatsoever about whether or not it's hurting anybody. Yes. And what I'm basically saying is about insurance and science so that it should be, what I'm saying is marijuana should be legal right away. Of course. People should be able to get this. The process that we're trying to go through with making the marijuana plant into a medicine is solving the fundamental issue that all of these medical marijuana states that have approved medical marijuana laws, the patients have to buy the medicine themselves.

They don't get it covered by insurance. Right. That'll only happen when you go through the FDA and you've made it federally legal. So the intention is to make it so that people can get their medicine so that they can get it paid for by insurance? Is that the intention? Yeah. It's like a medicine. Right. And so the way to do that is to make it federally legal. That's the best pathway, you think, to federal legalization? Well, I think by, I'm talking about fairly

legalized for medicine. Right. So to go through the FDA process, then insurance companies, I mean, they can be doing studies now and look at the fact that people are using marijuana instead of a lot of more expensive pharmaceutical medications, and that from an insurance company point of view, it could be wise to subsidize marijuana right now. It just hasn't happened yet, as far as I'm aware, that insurance companies... In Canada, the Canadian government pays for medical marijuana for veterans, for PTSD. The Canadian government pays for that, even though there's been no science. These three studies will be the first on marijuana for PTSD-controlled studies.

And so there's the likelihood that once we make it into an FDA-approved medicine, insurance companies will then be willing, now it's federally legal, to cover it as a medicine for what it's been proved to be, particularly if it saves them money on other medicines. So that's the cultural interest. But of course, then the pharmaceutical drug companies are going to, there's going to be a bounce back there. It's all really, the only thing that's holding us back is this nutty system that we have right now that's so complicated to make something as harmless as marijuana become legal. Well, the system has been blocked been blocked the system itself when it's unblocked isn't really that long you just talked about how okay the civil war wasn't that long right

with with psychedelics i mean part of it is also resources that you know do we have the resources to fund the studies but in 1992, the FDA had an advisory committee meeting. It was about what to do about medical marijuana and what to do about psychedelics, and should they be permitted to be studied as medicines? This was in 1992. So there'd been roughly 20 years of suppression of research, crackdown after the 60s. The FDA had this advisory committee meeting. The National Institute of Drug Abuse convened a meeting of their animal researchers doing studies on psychedelics and other drugs in animal models, trying to figure out what they do. They recommended human use.

The advisory committee recommended that human research be resumed, and the FDA adopted that, so that we've actually had this open door with research at the FDA if we had the resources, except for marijuana, because the marijuana was controlled by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. We had broken that. We'd gotten our own supplies of psychedelics after as their own supplies of psilocybin. takes six to ten years, something like that, of doing the research once you have a drug that you think does something to prove it. And that takes some time, and it costs a lot of money. But it doesn't cost billions like the pharmaceutical company will tell you. I mean, we're actually able to make MDMA into medicine in part because it's a demonized drug, because it's ecstasy. Governments over the world have spent over $300 million, probably more by now, on research with MDMA.

If you go into the scientific literature and Medline and you put in MDMA or ecstasy, there's over 5,000 papers. A lot of science has been done that we haven't had to pay for about the risks. But even then, when we sort of take that and then do the kind of studies that we need to do with psychedelics, it feels like the system takes time to prove it, but we are so good at tricking ourselves. And there is something to be said for this process. And so I think when we talk about how come marijuana isn't a medicine, part of it is that the process has been gummed up for 50 years and is still gummed up by this last step. I mean, there was another step that to get access to this federal marijuana, you had to have a public health service review that was created in 1999. Because before that, they only gave the marijuana to government researchers.

You couldn't even do your own funded study with marijuana through the FDA because you couldn't get the marijuana. It was only for their researchers. In 1999, they created this policy that would open it up in their minds, but there was a special review in addition to FDA, DEA, and IRB that we just were able to succeed in getting them to eliminate. The Obama administration eliminated it last summer, this public health service review. It's what blocked our marijuana PTSD study for years and years. That's gone. The last thing to get gone is this government monopoly on marijuana. And we're working.

We're planning to resubmit an application from Professor Craker. We're working with Covington Burling, a big D.C. law firm, taking the case pro bono to do a legal analysis. And then we will try to persuade, we're working with Senator Gillibrand and Senator Warren and others have been engaging the DEA and ONDCP, HHS in discussions about this monopoly. There's growing support in Congress. And this is the last vestige of sort of politics blocking the science with psychedelics or marijuana. Then the system will have to work with. And in the meantime, people can go around and legalize and then that gets

access. And so we're not saying wait for the science to... Well, do you have any fear with the upcoming elections? Do you have any fear if the upcoming elections do you have any fear if we go right wing that there might be some blowback yeah i mean i fearful that all the time i mean my my sort of core imprint was that in 1971 i first took lsd in 1972 you know i decided that this is what i wanted to devote my life to And I looked around and I saw all the research has been shut down. Right. I sort of came in one year after the big sweeping prohibition. I woke up to it, not when it was thriving, but right after the backlash.

That's why I think I was so motivated to get involved with MDMA, because I learned about MDMA in 1982 when it was an underground psychedelic psychotherapy tool under the code name ADAM that the government had no knowledge of. Were you in Dallas? This was at Dallas? No, Dallas is where ADAM, MDMA, turned into ecstasy. So that's where they started selling it above ground. There's an incredible movie that's going to come out, The Stark Club, about the club in Dallas where it really got well known.

But because it had this dual life, one has this quiet underground therapy drug with about half a million doses having been used by around 1984, and then the other was this public ecstasy use. I thought, okay, now I know about it ahead of time. I can see the crackdown coming. Everybody could see the crackdown coming, but now we can organize. Now we can talk to people about it. It's not a crime. We can gather our forces and have people try it even. And that's where I became really politically involved is in the 80s.

Well, it's just amazing how long it's taken. But it's amazing that you have the fortitude to push through for so long. but it's amazing that you have the fortitude to push through for so long. I mean, the world and the consciousness of the people owe you guys a massive debt. I mean, a debt of gratitude for sure that you've been out there pushing this envelope and chipping away. It's like one of many weapons chipping at this wall of ignorance. But MAPS is a really powerful one. weapons chipping at this wall of ignorance. But MAPS is a really powerful one. And we've been able to do it in a way where right now we have two senior retired FDA officials who are acting as our consultants to prepare our documents because they felt that there's a

strong need for new treatments for PTSD. I mean, they don't necessarily are saying anything about cultural change or spirituality or drug war. They're just saying soldiers, just for other people, everybody with PTSD. They have watched over the last 15, 20 years what we've done. And actually, there's a woman on our staff, Ilsa Jerome, that has been reviewing all these papers, all these 5,000 papers and developing what's called, in conjunction with other members of our team, an investigator's brochure, a summary of the literature with a risk-benefit kind of calculation, how you take all of this information and then what does it mean in terms of the risk that you present to the patients in the study and that you tell the doctors.

that you present to the patients in the study and that you tell the doctors. And the people at the FDA thought that we were doing it fairly in a time when it was being distorted in all these different ways. And Ilsa is actually a little bit more conservative than I am. And I knew that it was kind of good to let her take the lead in writing this and that it got the respect of the FDA. So that's where I'm pretty hopeful. Isn't it kind of strange that MDMA being used to treat PTSD is a primary motivating factor for the federal government trying to make it legal? Because if you think about it, PTSD is inexorably associated with war. So so so in some sort of a strange way war was responsible for accelerating the legalization of mdma yeah which is really fucking crazy i mean that is like yin and yang in like a biomechanical form yeah that's um a keto yeah that's crazy if

you really look at what that is yeah okay now now we've also though what about the other the next step does we've been accused of by or people have raised the cautionary tale which i disagree with but they've said some people have said um are you making war more easy to wage now more pal. If you are reducing the costs of war, are you making war more likely of an option? And I think it's a worthwhile question to ask. It applies to all medical doctors that work for the military, surgeons, you know,

are you, by treating people, making it easier for there to be war? I think that's a very narrow perspective. It's a very narrow perspective, and it's also not taking into consideration the actual psychoactive effects of that substance because that substance makes someone loving. So if you think that giving out pills that make you more loving are more likely going to generate more war or make war more palatable. I think the opposite is probably true. I think the people who become more loving, who can relay the experiences of the horrors of war to other people who become more loving because they also get a hold of this stuff.

Then I think that's more likely to eliminate war or lessen war or at least mitigate it significantly. Because I think that war is probably mitigated significantly now in comparison to like the sheer numbers of people like in comparison to you know 500 years ago 600 years ago it's probably way less war yeah i just watched a lecture it's fellow steven pinker just yes it was very interesting about the reduction of violence or the well it's way easier it's way safer and i think that things like psychedelic drugs in particular, but also the meditative techniques, focusing on being in the moment, focusing on learning how to manage your mind. and attempting to use in their everyday life today, mindfulness. And it's a subject that's repeated very often, and people are trying to find a better way of approaching different dilemmas in their life.

And this is a tool for those things. It's a tool for those things that should be considered alongside of yoga, alongside of meditation, alongside of reading self-help books, alongside of having good friends you can open up with and you can discuss things together and get encouragement from each other and maybe even criticism from each other. I mean, all those things exist in all sorts of different forms and they exist in psychedelics as well. A lot of the times, I mean, especially I find eating marijuana to be one of the most self-analyzing, objective, introspective experiences you can have.

It's like a real wake-up call to any holes you might have in your game. It just smacks you into place and sends you back out there in the world. You're like, shit, okay, I got it, I got it, I got it. Those are tools. And they're all tools that can be used in a variety of different ways. But to deny the fact that they can be used beneficially at this point is really silly because we are finite beings. We live a short amount of time. Wouldn't it be nice if you got rid of most of your bullshit by the time you hit 80?

Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice? And I think this sense of, isn't it about time, that it is. And I think there is a mainstream system that's ready to incorporate, that's reaching out on the other side in a way. And that this possibility of really integrating the heat of battle without the emotions. And I think with MDMA, if you help people feel the emotional consequences of their actions, even if you've healed them from trauma and they want to go back to their units, that they are going to be more careful, more sensitive, they'll be, I, so I, I have, there's a German psychiatrist that, Torsten Passy, and he's sort of raised this issue for me, is what about the concentration camp guards? What if they were tormented and they came to you for MDMA therapy?

You know, you're a German therapist and they come to you would you treat the concentration camp people for their trauma and i think the question is are they are people who are worked with in this emotional way for their trauma more or less likely to go back into these situations that produce the trauma in the first place well that question only becomes valid if you think should you punish a person who's done something like that in if you think, should you punish a person who's done something like that in all ways forever? Or should you try to make them better?

Right. I mean, you're not exonerating them for the horrible things they've done, but if you're going to keep them alive, shouldn't you try to make them a better person? Do you have some sort of responsibility to do that? I would say the argument, if you want to look at our civilization

in the most efficient manner, you want to look at it in the argument, if you want to look at our civilization in the most efficient manner, you want to look at it in the most, like, what is the best way to get our civilization together? We'll have less assholes, less crazy people, less mean people, less psychopathic fucking security guards at Auschwitz. So if you do have one, you could probably get a lot of data from studying that guy. And, you know, he's obviously going to be in jail for the rest of his life. It's not going to hurt. Yeah. I mean, what Torsten was trying to say is, would you do that for an active military where it's not historical, but they go back?

And I'm saying, I don't. Well, that's like, would you do it for a hobbit? You know, would you get on your fucking time machine and travel back to the Roman days, give it to them? Well, you don't have to worry about that. You have to worry about people today. Right. give it to them well you don't have to worry about that you have to worry about people today right and i feel that trying to bring that healing approach that those loving feelings which mdma can really generate through oxytocin and prolactin the hormones released that are in nursing and bonding mdma releases those hormones that same drugs that women get when they orgasm

yeah yeah yeah and actually torsten has written this terrific paper about how orgasms, the post-orgasmic state, and he's compared the post-orgasmic state and the hormonal release to MDMA. And I think when we talk about MDMA, a good way to think about it is the post-orgasmic state. You're satiated. You're, you're not striving. Dude, if you could come and it felt as good as being on Ecstasy. Let's not kid ourselves. Let's not kid ourselves. I don't know what coming for that guy feels like. But if he feels like he's coming on MDMA, all right, dude.

Settle down. Settle down. I don't know if I'm buying it. What an endorsement of MDMA. Someone might be exaggerating a little bit. I mean, it feels real good. MDMA feels like you're not even here. You're in some planet love. I only did it once.

Did it once, two pills, super powerful stuff. The next day I was wrecked. That was not worth it for me. I definitely learned a lot from the experience, but the next day was absolutely horrendous. Well, it's probably horrendous because you wanted to do things. When we talk about people who are thinking about MDMA, what we say is it's a two-day experience. You need the second day to rest and reflect. And again, what's the purpose of it?

If you're trying to have this experience, this loving experience, and then kind of bring, appropriate some of that into your daily life, learn and integrate it, then the very next day is one of the most important parts because you're still halfway in, halfway out. You're able to think about it. That's where a lot of the integration work gets done. So in our therapy, we make it so that people spend the night in the treatment center just so that they don't have to move. They don't have to get distracted. And then there's hours of psychotherapy the next day to help them integrate it. And then when they go home, we call them every day for a week on the phone just to check in and see how they're doing. What's up?

It's Rick. Yeah. Rick Doblin. What's up, dude? How are you feeling feeling Like I just came All the time All the time bro Alright man peace out

We gotta wrap this up man Unfortunately We started a little late And I gotta get out of here Okay Is there anything You can Direct people towards

Yes The website Which is maps.org? Yes. And in fact, we're having our 30th anniversary celebration on Sunday, April 17th, and we're live streaming it for free. Oh, shit. So it's maps.org slash live 30. How are you going to know when people are DEA agents undercover there?

Well. Tie clips? Actually, we have our first senior retired DEA consultant. Ah, smart man. And smart, but again, it's compassion. I mean, he had a son who listed in the Army and has PTSD and is 50% disabled from PTSD and has found marijuana to be helpful. Again, isn't it fascinating?

That's what. Yeah. Yeah, it's those kind of stories that help me think that we can do this integration. We can. And I am worried about right-wing backlash, but there's a couple things that we've put into place. First off, to work with the military. I mean, right-wing loves the military. If we're trying to help the military, there's also people are compassionate about childhood sexual abuse survivors. And so I think that we have enough of

a base of evidence and a long pattern since 1992 of the precedents at the FDA that I think we could survive. The FDA also recently did something very interesting with the abortion bill, RU-46, also recently did something very interesting with the abortion bill, RU46, that they made it easier on women. They eliminated one required step that the science showed that they didn't need. And so the FDA is very much trying to be science over politics. I mean, they will have an FDA commissioner that's appointed by and confirmed by president. But at the same time, the people that are there are really focused on science over politics and compassion. The other part is that we have international strategy. So that was the longest time anybody ever talked over the music.

It was awesome. Awesome information. And I wish I didn't have to get out of here, but I really do. So thank you very much. Hashtag psychedelic because too. Psychedelic because what does that mean? No,

don't say it. Don't stop. I got to go. So maps.org and the, the party one more time is April 17th. Sunday, April 17th in Oakland. In Oakland, where at exactly? Scottish Rite Temple. What time does it start?

It starts from 5 to 11. Can you get tickets to the door? No, not for the evening part, but not for the banquet. So you got to go to maps.org and there's all that information. Thank you. Okay, beautiful. Thank you, sir. Much appreciated. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it for the evening part, but not for the banquet. So you got to go to maps.org and there's all that information. Okay. Beautiful. Thank you, sir.

Much appreciated. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that's it for the week. See you soon. Bye-bye.