The Megyn Kelly Show - How Psychedelics Can Help People, Addiction in America, and Practicing Gratitude, with Dr. Roland Griffiths | Ep. 483

Episode Date: January 31, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Dr. Roland Griffiths, Director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, to talk about the history of psychedelic drugs, how caffeine is one of the most-used addictive drugs in the world, how "psilocybin" research started and how it is conducted,  the amazing results of psychedelic use in patients, how psychedelics can help with depression and addiction, what happens in the brain during a psychedelic experience, the differences between MDMA or psilocybin or ketamine, the current state of addiction in America, groundbreaking cancer patient study using psychedelics as therapeutics, how Griffiths' personal experience of a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed his own perspective, appreciating life and practicing gratitude, the questions about end of life, how we can make the most of our lives, the nature of consciousness, and more.Support Roland and his work: https://griffithsfund.orgFollow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh my gosh, I'm excited for today's show. This is something I know absolutely nothing about, but it's popping up here, there, and everywhere. And if you're like me and you've never taken a magic mushroom and you don't know anything about it, but you're hearing the buzz about this psilocybin, there's also LSD. I get it. I have the same associations with those, at least LSD, that you might as a children of the seventies. Um, but this is growing and growing in popularity under controlled settings because it's proving to be a game changer, a game changer when it comes

to things like depression, anxiety, um, even potentially addiction, anorexia, smoking. I mean, we're going to go down the list of things that this drug is potentially helping with and the studies that are being done on it now, thanks to our guest today. Now, psilocybin is a naturally occurring, basically, compound that you can find in these magic mushrooms, and it affects the central nervous system. I know what you're thinking, okay, but it's not about getting high. It's really not. It is about treating some of these problems that a lot of people have. My God, have you seen the latest stats on anxiety and depression? Studies have shown that psilocybin has great potential when it comes to depression, alcohol, addiction, smoking. We could go down the

list. Eating disorders, as I mentioned, OCD potentially. Here to discuss all of this is the expert on the topic and the author of many of these studies, Dr. Roland Griffiths. Now, Roland is not a Timothy Leary, the guy at Harvard back in the 60s who was like getting, he was taking the mushrooms just right alongside his patients and kind of fell into disgrace. Roland is a straight arrow. He is a man of science who came about this very professionally and scientifically and had never taken a magic mushroom or done any of this, but said this is an avenue that could potentially help a lot of patients. He'd been at Hopkins researching how to treat addictions and things like that. He went to Hopkins right as soon as he got his degree back in, I think, 1972.

And now, as of 2019, they created a whole center around our guest today, the first and only, I think only, but definitely first in the country that is devoted to studying these psychedelics. He's the director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Roland now, at this point, also has firsthand experience in connection with psychedelics, a wealth of stories, and a fascinating background. He is the expert on this topic. Welcome to the show, Roland. So nice to have you here. Thanks so much, Megan. I'm delighted to be here.

What a background. So I will tell you that we have a friend who first tried, and I realize this is different, ketamine to help him with his depression a couple of years ago. And my husband and I were like, that sounds nuts. What's he talking about? He was under the care of a psychiatrist. And so he did it in the psychiatrist's office. And's he talking about? He was under the care of a psychiatrist. And so he did it in the psychiatrist's office. And he started talking to us about how it really changed his outlook on life and really helped him with his depression. And we were thinking, you know, my husband and I are pretty straight laced. I mean, I've never, I was telling my team before we came on the air, I've never smoked a cigarette. I've never done marijuana. I've drank alcohol. That's it. So to me, I'm like, what are you doing? You take it so like a mind altering substance and with your psychiatrist is a bad psychiatrist. He's failing at the normal ways that he's supposed to help you? So these are all my biases before I came to it. Then more and more people started talking about this. And all the while you've been researching this as a scientist

and not somebody who's into recreational drugs at Johns Hopkins of all places, one of, if not the most respected medical institution we have. So let's go back to little Roland, young Roland in the 1970s. And when you first started at Hopkins, what were you thinking about it? What was your goal as a young scientist to study there? Yeah. Thanks, Megan. Let's see.

So I was trained at University of Minnesota in psychopharmacology, which is this cross-disciplinary field of psychology and pharmacology. And came from that to Johns Hopkins, where we were doing research with mood-altering drugs. And initially, I was working both in the animal laboratory and the human laboratory, very interested primarily in drugs of abuse. And so for years, I'm now a full professor in the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience at Hopkins. And for years, my research program focused on abusable compounds. And we developed models for assessing drug abuse. We're very interested

in subjective effects. And I've worked with a whole variety of different types of compounds, from sedative hypnotics to stimulus, cocaine, amphetamine, dissociative anesthetics like ketamine, dextromethorphine, hallucinogens, etc. And so that was kind of my life course. And then interestingly, about 25 years ago, I undertook a meditation practice. And there was something that was intriguing to me about exploring inner states. And I realized that I didn't have any strong orientation at all toward that. And as I got more deeply involved with meditation, I started to have some very unique experiences that were unlike anything I had experienced before, and which struck me as profound. And frankly, I didn't know what to make of them.

It had overtones of what people reported as spiritual experiences, but I couldn't quite figure it out. I started reading about different meditation traditions, experiences that come out of religious traditions, experiences that come out of religious traditions. And then I stumbled upon the older research from the 1950s and 60s on the psychedelics. And there, that research suggested that psychedelics could produce some of these same kinds of interesting experiences. And so at that time, well, let's just kind of put it in perspective. So psychedelics had been actually pretty extensively studied in the 50s and 60s and early 70s, but not according to the methods that we would use

today. But then, as we all know, the psychedelic 60s happened, and these drugs were widely used, misused under a variety of conditions. Media really took that and emphasized what really sounded like to all of us within the culture that this was very bad news, very often emphasizing catastrophic outcomes, people killing themselves or jumping out of buildings or burning their eyes out looking in the sun. And then there was a whole narrative about chromosome damage. And what that resulted in is a functional shutdown of all human research with these compounds, which is a fascinating thing to contemplate in and of itself because it's actually so unusual that an area of science gets closed down altogether. But what happened was the Nixon administration started this war on drugs. All of the drugs out of that category, these psychedelics or hallucinogens, as they were known then, went into Schedule I, the most restrictive schedule there is in terms of regulation. The funding, federal funding disappeared completely.

FDA stopped approving new research protocols. And within academics, it really became an area that you didn't want to express any interest in because it immediately raised suspicions about, yeah, who are you and why are you interested in this? And isn't that a goofy thing to be doing? In fact, I think- Right, like do we have another Timothy Leary on our hands? And it's been stigmatized. And only now is that, I mean, as I say, I came into the subject with that same judgment.

You know, like that's, what do you mean? That's a hardcore drug. Who would do that hardcore drug? And then I remember hearing Steve Jobs saying that he did a bunch of LSD when he was younger and he thought more people should do LSD. And, you know, that man created the iPhone. So you've got to think, well, maybe it does unlock an area of consciousness that the rest of us would like to access, but it's really just for trailblazers. And yet maybe not. So, so you're still in the, in the camp of only the weird people are kind of looking at that. And that's what my industry thinks of this, but I'm in this lane of study that could lead me there. I mean, it might be an interesting thing to study. So you did the

meditation, you got kind of into a mystical world here and there like sort of a light bulb when it goes off for you yeah and then was that it was it after that that you said i'm gonna take the leap and actually propose a study on this yeah that's exactly what happened uh this kind of the thought of investigating inner life was new to me, frankly. And here I was, a full professor at Hopkins with an been touched for decades because we had essentially outlawed research with them. And I thought, geez, that would be really interesting to study. approval for that kind of research because it has to go through a very strict ethical review at the institution level, and that's Johns Hopkins. And then, of course, it needs FDA approval and DEA approval. But I was, in principle, interested enough to give it a try. And going into that process, I thought

maybe I had a 50% chance of getting it approved. At that point, I really started going back into the literature and thought we could conduct these studies safely, but couldn't know that for certain. And the thing that I really want to say is I'm really proud of Johns Hopkins as an institution because there was institutional risk for any academic center, green lighting research of this type, just because if it pulled in media attention, it's going to raise the specter of Timothy Leary and that sort of thing. But Hopkins weighed the risk-benefit ratios, put apart the political or media risk that they might undertake as an institution and approve the protocol. And it was very, very carefully reviewed by the dean of the medical school and Hopkins managing attorney as well as this review board.

But they approved it. And ultimately, so did FDA and DEA. And so we ran this first study and Megan, I have to say that, I mean, the results for me were astonishing. And just to correct the record here, I had what I'd consider a couple of trivial experiences with psychedelics in the 1960s growing up, nothing that was meaningful, nothing that caught my attention. And so I don't want to claim to have been completely naive, but it was absolutely not something that I had any affinity toward. And if anything, I would characterize myself as having been a skeptic at the time. And there were people in the culture that were very pro-psychedelics. And I have to say, I was suspicious of them. There were people in the culture that were very pro-psychedelics.

And I have to say, I was suspicious of them. So I'm going into this research like that. I did partner with a clinical psychologist, Bill Richards, who had extensive therapeutic experience with psychedelics back when they were legal. So he handled the clinical front. I was the skeptical scientist going into this. And this, just to jump in, this is the 2006 study? Is this what you're talking about? Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And before we get to that, before we get to that, let me just take one step back, because I do think the study, the stuff you were doing before that is interesting too. And studying things that are addictive that people are struggling, struggling with all

over America right now. Many of the listeners to the show are going to be interested in this things like alcohol, caffeine or caffeine, nicotine, and in addition to some of the other drugs you mentioned. So just before we get into the psychedelics, do you have, um, do you have a couple of words on which of those is the most addictive and sort of the most pernicious, like the toughest one to attack? Whatever you do, don't take that first cigarette versus the first drink or the first, I don't know. I'm just curious in your overall thoughts of addictive properties. Yeah.

Let's see. There's no simple answer to that because the probability that someone is going to become dependent depends on the setting, context, and the availability of the compound. So actually, the drug that more people in the world are dependent on, and many would object to using the word addicted to, is caffeine. But it's the world's most widely used mood-altering drug, and it turns out that it does produce physical and psychological dependence, if you use it daily at any kind of dose above a pretty small cup of coffee, it's very likely you have developed low-level physical dependence. And what the pickup, the sense of awakefulness that occurs in the morning is in part due to suppression of low-grade withdrawal symptoms that you have, fatigue or tiredness or kind of muzzy-headedness, being suppressed by that morning cup of coffee. And so, in that sense, in a culture in which caffeine is freely available, people are going to much more likely become dependent on that.

And that actually, I ended up doing a lot of research on caffeine because it was kind of a model system for understanding how drugs come to capture and control behavior. And actually, at the time that we did that, interestingly, the soft drink companies were saying that they were adding caffeine as a flavor enhancer. That was the only reason they did it. And that story, in retrospect, looks very much like what the cigarette industry was claiming about nicotine. Oh, no, nicotine's a flavor additive. It's not. It's addictive. Caffeine is.

It's much lesser so. You know, but if you really want to talk about kind of perniciousness, then, I mean, we have the opiate crisis to look at right now. It's very hard to back out of that. I mean, cigarette smoking is very addictive when available culturally as it has been. The stimulants, cocaine and those sorts of drugs have a relatively high addiction potential. Many of the sedative hypnotics and sleeping medications and sedatives also. What's a sedative hypnotic? Well, yeah, like in the old days, it was barbiturates. But even some of the popular sleeping medications, they're not

highly addictive in the sense that there's social degradation that goes along with it, but one can easily become dependent on those drugs. And these are also the anxiolytics, the anxiety-reducing drugs. So things like Valium, diazepam, and those sorts of things. And people can easily get dependent on that with physical dependence. And it can be very, very difficult to get off of them as it can be with the opiates. I think what you said about the morning cup of coffee is very interesting. So when you feel better drinking that coffee, it may just be you suppressing your withdrawal symptoms, not an actual pick-me-up. Like if you could break the habit, you might feel as good as you feel post that cup of coffee every morning without that cup

of coffee. That's it. Yes, that's exactly right. And it doesn't mean that caffeine. So if you're caffeine naive, caffeine, even low doses of caffeine will have a stimulant effect, but your body adapts to that very quickly. So one of the interesting things that we showed in the course of that research is that caffeine is behaviorally active at doses far lower than anyone ever knew previously. So a cup of coffee, now I'm talking,

I'm not talking about a big Starbucks cup of coffee. I'm talking about a six ounce cup of coffee. Usually delivers about 100 milligrams of caffeine. And many people can detect the effects of caffeine at doses of less than 20 milligrams. And many 10 or less milligrams. So that's a couple of sips of coffee can produce reliable, detectable, subjective effects. And these are really rigorous, blinded studies. So we know this to be the case. But it was actually on the basis of people not having studied those lower thresholds before that the soft drink companies could claim, oh, yeah, this is below the behaviorally active range. And since then, they've kind of fessed up. They now label

how much caffeine is in their product. But at the time, they were denying any physiological effect of importance. But as it turns out, we certainly now understand that that soft drinks, caffeinated soft drinks, if you take a couple of them a day, you're kind of now in the range of developing physical dependence on them. It's amazing how many drugs surround us, you know, the soft drinks and the coffee, not to mention the cigarettes and the alcohol everywhere and the people taking the sleeping pills and then the coffee to wake themselves up and so on. All these drugs, really not that great for you. And yet here's this little class of drugs over here that's been so demonized, you know, the, the drugs that, that you've been studying that we're not allowed to touch. You're not even allowed to research them.

That could be, do appear to be revolutionary in attacking major mental health challenges like depression and anxiety and beyond. So it's crazy how our medical system works, right? Like they're dumping the more caffeine into the sodas, but you're not even allowed to look into psilocybin. Don't you touch that because people could get hurt. Okay. That's America. All right. So let's keep going. So 2006, you get the approval. Everybody's watching you closely and you take a look at psilocybin in, um, okay, this is the headline. Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences, having substantial and sustained, that's important, personal meaning and spiritual significance. So was that study on just regular folks? Who were the subjects of that?

They were just healthy volunteers who had never before taken a psychedelic drug. And so we wanted to recruit people who were psychedelic naive because we didn't want a bias put in right at the beginning. Because if someone had tried psychedelics and liked them, then they're very likely to report good effects from them. If they had tried psychedelics and had an awful, awful time, they probably wouldn't enroll in the study. So you can imagine what kind of biases that would create. So we went in with these psychedelic naive individuals, and then we furthermore just bent over backwards to make the drug as blinded as we could do so practically and ethically in terms of not giving people strong expectations of what they might experience. And then the way we prepared people is we would have about eight hours of clinical contact time before the session. The session involved a rather high dose of psilocybin or another drug. We were comparing it to Ritalin or methylphenidate at a high dose under otherwise

blinded conditions. And then people come in for the session day into Johns Hopkins, into a room that's decorated. It's living room-like. There's a couch and chairs and art on the wall. And during that session, people take a capsule containing the drug. Yes, there's a picture of it. They take a capsule containing the drug. They're in the presence of two therapists or sitters or guides, as they're sometimes called. And the purpose there is just to let the person go inward and have their own experience. So people are laying on the couch after taking this. They have headphones through which they're listening to music. They have eye shades just to have them go inward. And they support the therapists or the guides or the sitters are there just to provide a safe container for them to have their own experience. And the basic instruction is very simple.

It's just go in, explore, see what comes up. You're safe. Yeah, we're here to support you. But it's not guided in the sense that people are going in with a problem to work on. Now, we a therapeutic. Let me ask you a couple of quick questions just so we can get the outlines of this. How long after you take the capsule does it kick in? By 30 minutes, most people are beginning to feel effects, sometimes as early as 10 to 15 minutes.

It reaches peak effect at about two to three hours. Oh, boy. That was my second question. So how long is this experience? How long should you plan on being at a session? It's a day-long session. So people, as I said, they usually come in, they take the capsule between eight and nine.

The peak effects are occurring two to three hours later. And by 4 in the afternoon, they're pretty well back down to baseline. They complete some questionnaires. No, they're not allowed to drive home. They need a pickup person, a family member or friend who will accompany them home and make sure they're doing fine for the- By the next day, could they operate heavy machinery? Yes, they could. But we ask them to come in the next day. We want to interview them the next day, make sure they they're okay but there's no i'm just trying to get my before we get to the effects and all that i'm just trying to get to

the the sort of the setup did you ever have has it ever happened to somebody like ran screaming and yelling out of the room like oh my god had that, but we've had people that might have liked to run and scream and get out of the room. this relationship of trust and support because those therapists, guides, sitters can ground people. And we do a lot to prepare people for what they might encounter. And we give them a lot of instructions about how to navigate that experience. And that's very important, critically important, because there really are risks associated with taking these compounds, particularly under unsupervised conditions. Matter of fact, the most common and probable bad outcome is that people will have some kind of panic attack, and then they'll engage in some kind of dangerous behavior. can commit suicide, homicide, but more often they're confused, they're panicked, they could run out into the street, they could just get themselves into trouble. And so there really is that-

You do not go pick the mushroom in your backyard and eat it. You do this under the care of a professional if you do it at all? Well, that's certainly my inclination. But as you know, there are state initiatives now, city initiatives that are moving toward decriminalization and legalization. And so one of my concerns is that our culture not get ahead of what we know to safely protect people. And then as long as we're on all the dangers of these compounds. So number one is panic behavior, but that's just more probable. A worse outcome is that it appears that some vulnerable people can develop long-term psychotic disorders. So someone in their probably early 20s, if they have a vulnerability towards schizophrenia, the concern is, and we actually don't have scientific proof of this, but we have enough case reports to make me believe it.

The concern is that someone that already has a tendency towards psychotic disorder, that exposure to these kinds of compounds might be enough just to push them over the edge. And there's no returning from a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Once that's in play, that's a lifelong condition and that's horrible. And so we go way overboard in terms of screening people as much as we possibly can who might have such tendencies. So, so we disallow people to enroll if they even have a second degree relative with a, with a history of schizophrenia that may be overly conservative, but, uh, it's, it's a real risk. And, and in the, in the widespread cultural enthusiasm that we have right now, I think it's being underplayed. Would that be something, Roland, that you could tell before the person left the room at the end of the day?

Would you be able to tell, oh my God, he crossed over? Yes. Yes. So we've never had any volunteer develop long-term psychotic illness. People can be destabilized because of the magnitude of the effects. But that's very low. I. And the incidence in which we've had to support people after exposure to psilocybin is kind of very, very small. I mean, I think we could count them on one hand. And what that meant for those people is that they required some additional counseling to get it. But who am I getting at the clinic? Is it like some 24-year-old guy who had this experience himself and he's just going to hold my hand? Or am I going to get somebody like a Roland disciple who actually knows the right questions to ask if I'm a 24 year old man with schizophrenia in my family history? Now we're on sketchy ground. Yeah. So the training of the therapist is crucial to assuring maximal positive outcome. And frankly, thus far, we don't have FDA approval of any of these compounds, but it looks like it's forthcoming. And so then these drugs will be available under medical conditions.

But I don't think the FDA, I know the FDA has not yet settled specifically on what kind of training requirements are going to be necessary in order to offer this kind of therapy. And you can be sure that it's going to be much stricter within the structure of the medical system than it's going to be at the state level. And so the state level training is, I haven't looked into it closely, but my sense is that the quality of the therapist could vary widely in terms of how good they are. And so it's a source of concern, frankly. All right. So let me do this. I want to talk about what you found in 2006 and now where it is today, because you did a truly groundbreaking work after that that's advanced this understanding of people who are suffering from cancer, people who are,

I mean, think about what cancer victims go through, not only the diagnosis and the fear of end of life, but the treatments, which can be so devastating. So Roland did another study on folks like that. We're going to get into all of it when we come back with Dr. Roland Griffiths in two minutes. Okay, Roland, so you take in a bunch of healthy people, you subject them to a bunch of questioning, you set the table for the experiment, they take the capsules, and what did you find? Well, let's see. So psilocybin, as we certainly expected, produced the whole array of psychedelic-like effects. So there's visual phenomena, visual distortions, visual imagery comes up. There may be greater emotionality and that can be very positive, sometimes transcendent-like experiences,

but also experiences of fear or, you know, unstabilizing kinds of experiences. And then there can be somatic effects, the sense of body has changed. And there can also be cognitive changes. And so people can think and imagine different things, including some paranoid thinking. That's very low, but that can occur. So all those kinds of effects occurred. And then at the end of the day, we gave people a whole set of questionnaires. And one set of questionnaires had been developed originally to measure mystical experiences brought about naturally.

These are religious type of mystical experiences. And we've since refined that questionnaire and we call components of mystical experience that had been described by religious people throughout the ages in terms of discussing these. And we could talk about the qualities of those, but the key quality is this sense of connectedness to everything. And that can be experienced as a connection with the divine in religious terminology. It doesn't have to be. So there's a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, that we're all in this together. There's a sense that that experience is precious. To put it in religious language, it's sacred or deserving of reverence. And then another feature is that the experience feels authentically true. And people have these experiences and say it feels more real than everyday waking reality. So those are the features. They came out. But by the end of the day,

those become memories, right? Now, here's what was astonishing to me. At this point in my career, I had assessed a lot of people at high doses of all kinds of different psychoactive drugs. And so I know how to measure subjective effects. I know what to expect from them. And here's what was interesting. People would come back two months later because the way the study was designed, there were two or three sessions. So they're coming back two months later preparing for a second session. And I sit down and I ask them, well, what do you remember about that

your first session? And the people who got psilocybin, I was blinded to who received what, but the people who got psilocybin would say, oh, I remember that like it was yesterday. That's one of the most important experiences of my life. And so here I'm a skeptic. I've now heard stories about psychedelics, but I wasn't prepared for that. So what does it mean? This was one of the most important experiences of your life. And so my immediate judgmental reaction was, what kind of life has this person had? But no, they would say, well, it's on par with the death of my parent just recently. My father passed, or the birth of my firstborn child. And you go, what? This was a six-hour session

in a faux living room-like environment at Johns Hopkins, and it's among the most meaningful experiences of your life? And indeed, that's kind of the core finding, that there's something about these experiences that are remarkable in terms of how they're imprinted and remembered, and then the attributions that people make to those experiences. So I'd never seen anything like that. It hadn't occurred to me when we started the study even to assess for something like that. And then we started developing scales. How important is this experience on a lifetime of experiences from an everyday experience too, goes up to within the 10 most meaningful experience of my life, five are the single most. Well, yeah, in that study, and then there was something about spirituality, in that study, 30% of the people said that the experience was the single most

spiritually significant experience of their entire life. And about 80% of people in those studies say it's in the top five most meaningful and spiritual significant of their lives. Can I just ask you, back up a little bit, because when you're describing what they're experiencing, now I want to know, how did it get so significant? I'm picturing what you see when you look through a kaleidoscope. I'm picturing, you know, 1970s TV animations, you know, Picassos. This is what's coming to mind as the images that would be flashing through your head with the eye mask on. Not it? Like what's actually being seen?

Well, one of the features, Megan, of these experiences that defines them is that they're ineffable. The first thing that people say is that I can't even describe it. And so what you just described were experiences all in the visual realm, but this goes beyond that. There may be people who have no visions at all, but yet these experiences take on that sense of meaning. well enough, and certainly our neuroscience isn't refined well enough to know precisely what components of these experiences result in this incredible meaning-making. But in terms of visualization, I mean, that can show up in innumerable different ways. And it can show up just as a carnival-like atmosphere, but it can also turn to sacred imagery or a sense of approaching something that is just beyond description. And so for religiously inclined, they might use the word God and encounter with God.

You don't have to steer them. And I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but if you're going to use this to help somebody with stopping smoking or addressing their anorexia, do you have to steer them like we're going to conquer the smoking, picture the cigarette, or even in this study, well, forget that. Let me start again. If you're dealing with depression, do you need to sort of say, we're going to focus on your depression so that you're kind of pushing them toward resolving the thing you're targeting. Yeah, great questions. Let's see. So in therapeutic studies, there's a built-in intention for the session. And that is good. It's going to be helpful for them in terms of managing whatever therapeutic condition they have.

Now, there's also research underway for approval of MDMA or ecstasy for treatment of PTSD. And it's not a classic psychedelic. It's kind of like psychedelics though. But there, the therapy session very explicitly focuses on or the expectation is that people are going to talk about their traumatic experience. With a drug like psilocybin, we don't invite people to talk at all. I mean, if some people are moved to talk, we'll listen. But very often, as soon as you start putting something in the ineffable range into words, it pulls you out of the experience. So our counsel to people is to just stay with the experience, just trust the process,

be interested and curious about it. Think about that. So if somebody goes in, we'll talk about the anxiety, depression, but somebody goes in to do this to see if it'll help with depression. And then you don't have to direct them. The mind knows what to do. It, it like trust in your, in your mind and your soul and the psilocybin working their magic without any specific push or direction. That to me is so remarkable. So we'll talk about what's

happening, you know, what's actually happening physically in your brain. What is doing this? And what's the difference between psilocybin and ketamine and MDMA and all the like, does it matter? You know, you should take LSD or does it matter? So anyway, we have a lot more to get to, including the remarkable lasting effects of these sessions and how you might be able to get one. Dr. Roland Griffith sticks around for the whole show today. We're lucky to have him. And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM Triumph Channel 111

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My kids are just saying, remember when you hit 100 and we celebrated? Now we're almost to 500. I'll have to have another celebration then. We're talking about the sustained benefit to those who participated in the study in terms of their world experience. I mean, they're rating it up here when it comes to most meaningful events in their lives. So, but what did that do for them? So it, you know, like the birth of my three children, they were all very meaningful and they, you know, I remember them very fondly, but what did they do for me as a human? Well,

when I ruminate on them, I'm filled with warmth and feelings of goodness and connection. What does this do for these folks? Yeah, great question. Let's see. The meaning that people take from these experiences is going to be very much intertwined with the set and setting, the kind of intention that people brought into the experience and the support that they receive after the experience in terms of making use of that. But if we take just the healthy volunteers that had this experience, so many of them end up reporting, and this is, in fact, it's years later, they continue to use this as a touchstone experience, much in the same way that you might relate to the birth of your children. And for me, this is very relatable. My number one most meaningful experience was the birth of my first child, my daughter. And for me, that changed my worldview. I came to an understanding of what the human race was truly about.

And it's magnificent, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. So what did it mean to them? Very often people made, I don't want to say similar kinds of attributions, but they really felt that they had a new view of the world, a new worldview, a different sense of self, often one that was felt to be more interconnected, more alive in the world. It's very hard to draw generalities, but I think there's a positivity that comes out of this, a sense of self-efficacy that they have real choices to make in their lives, and they end up making what appear to be positive choices about their lives going forward. And that's, in fact, why we think this has cross-diagnostic generality with respect to treatment of very divergent kinds of psychiatric disorders. And that's because you fundamentally change a worldview and someone's sense that they can make a difference, that they can change themselves. And that's why in the therapeutic context, these experiences are often

set within a therapeutic framework. So to give you an example, the work that we've done at Johns Hopkins on cigarette smoking. This was led by my colleague, Matt Johnson. Cigarette smoking is a very difficult habit to break, addiction to break. And people come in having failed multiple times to quit smoking. And essentially, they're self-labeling themselves as an addicted smoker, and they have reason for doing that. And this kind of experience and telling them how they can approach quitting going forward, but this kind of experience frees them from that self-identified label as being addicted. And so people can come out saying, well, yeah, I've failed many, many times, but in fact, I can put up with a little suffering. I can

put up with a discomfort of quitting. I realize that that's going to be transient and I'm committed to the objective of being smoke-free. And so it's enough to push people into a cycle of making choices that benefit them going forward. And so I think that it would be true in many respects with eating disorders and depression and anxiety and depression and cancer patients. So how many sessions do you need to go to and how long are the results? How long do the results last? Yeah. So we've done studies with single sessions. So a single session. But we're in our infancy in terms of understanding optimal use of these kinds of compounds and understanding at both a deep physiological neurochemical level how they work, but also at the psychological level how they work and how these experiences

can be best packaged in a way to produce enduring change. So we're really just at the beginning of understanding this as a therapeutic intervention. And in terms of the duration, how much bang you get for your buck? Well, that, I mean, it's astonishing. So the first study we ran was in cancer patients who had a life-threatening cancer illness, and they were anxious and depressed. And what we saw is rapid decrease in that anxiety and depression. We followed them out to six months. Another group at NYU that ran a very similar study did a five-year follow-up, and those results were sustained out to five years. It's remarkable within the domain of treatment of psychiatric conditions, right?

Because most psychiatric meds are temporary interventions. They're intervening to block a receptor or to enhance something going on. Antidepressants are given chronically over a lifetime. And this is a single exposure in a single afternoon producing enduring changes for years out. And if you think about it, if in fact it is that people have a different worldview, a different sense of self, they start changing their behavior themselves, then you can understand that that very well could be a process that endures in perpetuity. That is extraordinary. I mean, just to think about, as you point out, the number of antidepressants that people are taking and the self-medication they do with alcohol or drugs or what have you,

and potentially one day could completely change the way you see things. Now, and I want to get into the cancer study in a little bit more detail, but before we do, can we just spend a minute on the differences between psilocybin, ketamine, LSD, and MDMA. Yeah. So psilocybin is what we call a classic psychedelic. And other classic psychedelics, although they're not identical, but they're more similar than not, are LSD and DMT, which is in ayahuasca used in South America. It's an ad mixture. It's also mescaline used So MDMA is pharmacologically different. It works at some of the same receptor systems, but it's not a classic psychedelic. And flooding of empathetic response. And it's very often felt to be a heart opener, but it looks like it's very useful in terms of treatment of post-traumatic stress. Wow. And is that last year? Now, ketamine is an entirely different compound.

So that is a dissociative anesthetic. It's related to PCP, which is not good. It does produce these dissociative effects. It doesn't have some of the depth of meaning or the colorfulness of visualizations. And it is physically addicting in the sense that classic psychedelics are not. So it produces a classic withdrawal syndrome. And so people can, if they get involved with ketamine, can increase the dose and become dependent on it. And that can be a result in tragic outcomes. However, ketamine is effective as an antidepressant, but it differs from the classic psychedelics in that its effects are relatively short-lived.

And so very often people will emerge from their depressive symptomatology, but that's only temporary. And over the course of a week or two weeks or a little bit more, their depression will recur. So that's why ketamine- Psilocybin sounds much better. Yeah, it sounds much better than the ketamine. Well, they're very different experiences. And I think a high dose of psilocybin is likely to be more psychologically challenging than a high dose of ketamine. So it's apples and oranges, really. Now, I was joking with the team before we started about what kind of a difference could this make in one's personality and outlook. Like if I were to go through this psilocybin or you mentioned MDNA,

the heart opener, would I come back on and say, you know, I really see Meghan Markle's point. Maybe it really is Prince William's fault. You know, would I start to see, would it change my whole outlook on people? I don't know. No, no. let's see. I think you would feel changed fundamentally. And to what extent your major worldview would shift is not determined by the drug. But I don't have any, well, I shouldn't say you specifically because I don't know where you would react within the spectrum.

But people feel changed and they feel like the change and what they have learned from the experience is really a value, a very special value to them. And so, I think people would put different words around how that changed them. I mean, yeah, if they're, if they're happy in their life, otherwise, uh, they're not going to make radical, uh, radical changes. Uh, but I'm sure all of us could, all of us are not living absolutely optimal lives. And so there's plenty of room for fine tuning. So how does it work?

I don't want to go too deep in the science because I think just a little will go a long way there. But what's it doing to our brain to allow all of this to happen? Well, I wish we knew. We're not entirely ignorant. The basic neuroscience of this and our understanding of this is accumulating at an astonishing rate, but we're still deeply ignorant. So just very quickly, we know where drugs like psilocybin bind in the brain. We know what receptors they bind to, serotonin 2A. We know

where those receptors are in brain. We know how those areas of the brain are activated or deactivated when someone takes psilocybin. We know something about the brain interconnectedness and how those patterns within the brain, what parts of the brain are talking to other parts. We know a little bit about how that's functioning under the influence of these drugs. And there's some suggestion that there's a downregulation of a system that's responsible for self-referential processing, this kind of obsessionality that we have with ourselves. But there the trail gets very thin because we're really talking at the core here about the nature of consciousness, the nature of our own experience, and how do we hold ourselves in the world? Who do we think we are? And yeah, we're in grade school, kindergarten, maybe nursery school, with respect to our understanding about that from a reductionistic scientific standpoint. level psychological processing about the sense of self and the sense of meaning, the sense of purpose that's all getting intertwined in here in some way that feels magnificently

profound and reorganizational. So people will use the term feeling reborn in a sense that things are new in a way that they hadn't experienced them before. I was going to say, is there a limit on how many of these sessions you can do? Does it cause brain damage if you go back too many times? No. So that's important. With the classic psychedelics, they don't produce classic dependence. They don't produce physical dependence, although some people may want to take them again, it's generally months or years between uses, not days, and they're not habit-forming in that sense. There was a lot of concern about brain damage, and that appears not to be the case with the classic psychedelics. It's more of an issue, but that would be debatable with clinical doses of

ketamine and MDMA. And there is some literature about high-dose MDMA producing some enduring neurological problems, but that's an area of active debate. But that's even not within the debatable range with the classic hallucinogens. Hmm. Can, should anyone try this? Let's see. I'm not going to recommend they do so unless it's under a regulated protocol that's been is making these drugs available, and I don't know how that's going to roll out at unless they're very carefully screened. We talked about enduring psychotic illness. You certainly don't want that. And you'd like to be under optimal clinical care before, during, and after these sessions because they can be disorienting. And the motto is do no harm. So let's be very careful. These are very powerful interventions,

but very promising. Wow. So let's talk about the cancer patient study, because that is a profound group of people who are suffering mightily. And if you want to talk about depression and people who are facing the end of their life, who have to go through chemotherapy and radiation and so much, just so much heartache and physical ache at one time, that's where you'd go to find patients dealing with all of that. When you went into that study, I read that you said something to the effect of, I really wanted to be careful because the last thing I wanted to do was add to their disappointment, their agony, their physical or other challenges. I mean, that must have been a tough one for you emotionally, mentally to take on. Yeah. Yes, it was. And as I think we'll end up talking about,

I now have personal empathy with these people that I didn't at the time. But yes, so this was our first therapeutic study. And it was in people who were depressed or anxious because of this cancer diagnosis. And how can one not have empathy for that, particularly in our culture? I mean, that is kind of the deepest existential question, isn't it? What are we doing here? What happens when we die? And that's a source of tremendous fear for some people. Others not, depending on what your worldview beliefs are, but for many it is, and it's a completely understandable one. And so, again, this was our first therapeutic study, and I thought, do we know what we're doing here? And we need to be careful because whatever that is like to lean into that question about the termination of life. We wouldn't want to make that worse in people. But there had been an older literature from the 60s that suggested that this kind of intervention would be helpful.

And it turned out, indeed indeed it was. And so I was relieved as that study progressed. There was actually, when we initiated the study, we did so at our highest dose of psilocybin and we just had a couple of people whose response wasn't as good as I would have hoped. And so I worried about that. And we dropped the dose of psilocybin down. I don't know now in retrospect whether that was necessary or not, or whether I was just

being overly cautious. But when you're working with new compounds under new conditions, I'm going to default to being overly cautious. And in any case, the dose we gave produced these profound effects. Most people having these remarkable experiences, many of them reporting a changed sense of death and what that means. And I think that came out differently for different people. Some people put it into a religious context and they now were sure that they would encounter an afterlife. Other people didn't put it into a religious context per se, yet they felt that there was something that existed after death. And some just felt that there was some kind of benevolence in this whole story that we're involved with. There's some beauty and elegance in this.

And dying was okay. about the outcomes of those patients and their stories is very often they came out of these experiences in this really uplifted state in which they ended up consoling their caretakers. I mean, there was a role reversal. They had family members who were really worried about them and wanted to do right by them. And a number of them just turned that back on their caretakers and were providing assurances to their caretakers that this is sad. I'm going to leave. I have to go. But it's okay. And it's beautiful beautiful and everything's going to be all right. And to hear those stories, I mean, it still kind of makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because of the emotional significance that had for everyone that they came in contact

to. Oh my God, tearing up just thinking about that. What a difference and what a tool in the arsenal, you know, to help these people who are suffering so much. I'm so moved by it. I want to get it for my mom. She doesn't have cancer, thank God. But I would love to just see how it changes life perspective for her. You know, this could be used far and wide for anybody who's suffering or feeling down or facing end of life issues.

And that does lead me to your story, Roland, which is, you know, I said, and I know you don't look at it like this, but I said to my team, I'm really not looking forward to the part where we have to break the audience's hearts and tell them what's going on with Roland because that study on the terminally ill cancer patients would become relevant to you personally. What happened? How did you find out that you have cancer? Yeah. So this was about 14 months ago. I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy, believing myself to be completely healthy. I take care of myself. I watch my diet. I exercise. And came out with, in short order, a stage four cancer

diagnosis that's been resistant to treatment. So the irony is that all of a sudden I was in the position of the patients that I'd spent so much time with and talking about their views on what death and dying is about. this is that it's rather than being depressed and anxious for me, it's I consider the whole thing to be a blessing. And it's been this just remarkable experience of joy and gratitude. And I don't quite know how I came to have this experience, but I have an idea. I had a long history of practicing meditation, and so I was accustomed to going in and interrogating my thoughts, feelings, emotions as they come up. And this is what you learn to do in meditation. Although I don't want to soft pedal it. Meditation's hard because most people, and I was one of those initially, get very discouraged very quickly, feeling that there's nothing here or that they're a failure. And so it's tricky working with meditation. But what one comes to learn is that you don't need to identify with the narrative self, the voice in your head.

You don't actually need to identify with emotions or feelings that come up, that the voice in your head, those feelings exist within this kind of larger context, this larger frame of mind. And if you don't identify with that, then it's going to pass. But if you lock into a narrative story about what's happening, then that becomes your world. It's like the addicted cigarette smoker identifying as addicted, and then they are. And if you identify as being anxious or depressed, that's where you find yourself. So with the diagnosis, at first, there was this sense of it was just unreal. It was just a bad dream, frankly. And my wife and I cried a lot, but it was confusing. And then this happened just over a few days.

And then I went through and started sorting through kind of the emotional states that would emerge. And one would be anxiety or depression or resentment toward a medical system that maybe put me at a screening interval that was inappropriate or going to combat with cancer, or denial. It's not really happening. And none of those struck me as being pleasant places to be. And so, I really didn't want to What I recognized was that this was a springboard into gratitude, just gratitude for the preciousness of our lives. And it's something we all know, right? that we find ourselves as these highly evolved, sentient creatures walking the earth's surface, talking in the middle of culture. But what's going on here? What's the backstory behind this? How do we account for this? How do we account for the fact that we can even

be aware that we're aware, that we know that we know something. And for me, when you contemplate that, gratitude comes up. Life is a precious gift. It's precious beyond belief. And so my choice then became to deeply practice gratitude and use the so-called problems that arise from a diagnosis like that. And there are plenty of opportunities with surgery and chemotherapy and all the side effects and dealing with the medical profession. There's all kinds of opportunities to collapse into different states, but they can be used in a way that just reflects back as a reminder that each moment is precious, each moment is unretrievable. And that's what this 14 months has been like for me. So it's a gift. It's a blessing. And my wife and I often talk about what a tragedy it would have been had I just been run over by a bus on that day that I

was walking out to that screening colonoscopy appointment, because I wouldn't have had this. I thought I was pretty awake to the joy and miracle of life before this, but it's much more so now. And so I'm moved to talk about it just because I think in principle, we can all wake up much more than we are. And I want to encourage people to do that absent a terminal diagnosis. Roland, thank you for sharing that. My God, I feel more emotional about it than you do, but I know you've dealt with it. And there's so much wisdom in what you just said there. The thought, we don't need to identify with thoughts or emotions as they arise that what a concept so it's there the anger maybe a feeling of betrayal of getting gypped

of why me what could have been like they're they're marching by you like ants in a parade, but you don't have to accept them. Yeah. I mean, you can take advantage of that. So anger comes up, right? And kind of the immediate response, if you kind of query what's going on, is, yeah, you want to get back and however you're going to manifest that. But there's energy that comes. And if you go inside and kind of query that, you can recognize that there's all this energy and you've given it a label of anger and you don't have to act on that.

In fact, you can just repurpose that toward gratitude like, yeah, oh my God, I'm here. I mean, why? And it's not going to serve me to act on that anger. I mean, sometimes it will. I mean, you know, we have these evolutionary conserved tendencies, you know, for some good reasons. But a lot of times within our culture, you know, we're acting out primitive responses that just don't serve us or the people we're reacting to optimally. And so let me just restate that.

So make sure I understand it. So if in my analogy of the little ants are walking by with anger, bitterness, betrayal, it's not that you're saying I reject you and I reject you and I reject you. It's that you're changing what's written on their sign. You're saying, I'll take all the energy on your sign of that very big emotion that is available to me. And I'm going to, I'm going to, on the opposite side of that sign, I'm going to write gratitude and I'm going to use all that energy to funnel toward that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll take it one step forward. You can, you can thank the little ant or whatever

the condition is, you know, for providing you this further wake up call, you're just not going to go with the message that's on their side. Oh, that's extraordinary. That's so helpful. I love the way you're saying that. So did you have to, because I know we never sort of got to the point where in the midst of your research, at some point you did try the psilocybin in a, in a serious way, not, not the sort of cursory, you know, twenties things you talked about. Did you need to do it again, Roland, you know, after the diagnosis, did you, did you choose to do it again or was, were the earlier experiences enough for you? Yeah. Well, let's see. So the, the way I handled the diagnosis initially, and of course, because I'm known for the psychedelic research,, more awake, alive, joyful, with greater equipoise than I'd ever been before. And I actually thought, no, why would I ever want to disturb that?

So, but also at that point, I'd done a lot of meditation, and I did have some interesting psychedelic experiences that I just used it for some self-inquiry that was very interesting, but it doesn't explain much about what I'm encountering now, how I'm responding to to the diagnosis and my eagerness to communicate about that, including wanting to launch a whole research program that speaks to this very issue. The study you did on cancer patients showed large decreases in depression, anxiety, death anxiety, and increases in feelings of quality of life, meaning of life, optimism, sustained after a six-month follow-up. So now for you, you don't sound fearful, death anxiety. You certainly don't seem to have that. I mean, I think a lot of us who don't have your diagnosis have that. And I wonder, how is it possible, right? Like people of faith often say

they don't fear death, but how is it possible that actually facing it, you don't fear it? Is that a connection to a higher power? Like what's going on in your mind as you think about it? Yeah. I don't know how unique I am, but I'm a scientist. I'm a skeptic. It's really hard to get me to say that I believe in anything, right? Because the very nature of science is to be skeptical and want proof. And so I don't know and don't have any strong beliefs about what happens when we die. Because I'm bred within a scientific reductionistic tradition, I'm inclined to put low probability on afterlife, at least as it's described very often in beautiful religious traditions in which you're assured this glorious coming together with family and friends and the divine. And I certainly would put that at low probability, but also as a skeptic, if someone said that that was a certainty, I'd be skeptical of that. So I do

maintain, albeit a very low probability of something that survives death, I do remain intensely curious about that. And it can be very low probability to still maintain that curiosity. And so that certainly is at play. But more than that, it's the gratitude practice, the leaning into the preciousness of life. It just means every day, every moment, every minute is one that we need to choose how we're going to show up, whether we're going to stay awake to that. And I think that's what I want people more than anything to do, to contemplate that. And what I really want is ultimately, and I don't want to sound like Timothy Leary, but I think it's attainable eventually, and this is going to be multi-generational, that our cultures are going to awake to this, and that we need to see and feel at a deeper level the magnificence of what this process is, and at some fundamental

level, we're all in this together. We share the same dilemma, right? The one thing that we know to be true is that we're conscious. That's probably the only thing we can affirm. And I can affirm it for me. I can't affirm it for you or anyone else. And we're all stuck in that very real situation, unless you haven't thought about it very deeply. And so from that, there's this sense of compassion that opens up, at least for me, for everyone. I mean, I see everyone's, or most of us are stuck in some ways.

And in principle, that's unnecessary. And so the long range vision is that if we're going to survive as a species, and I do mean survive as a species, we've got to figure this out before we terminate ourselves by all these existential opportunities, be it bioweaponry or nuclear war or AI risk or what have you. And I'm not thinking that that's around the corner next week or tomorrow and it can get overblown for sure. But in the longer run, we've got to sort this out. And wouldn't it be lovely if we could?

Wouldn't it? I mentioned Steve Jobs. I'm thinking of him now as I listen to you, and also a man of science in a different way. And on his passing was reported to have said, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow, dying of pancreatic cancer. And I've always thought there could have been something, you know, for a man like that, that he was seeing and communicating in his own way back to us. And I believe it'll be there for you. And I believe it'll be there for me too. And I hope and I pray it'll be there for my family and me as well. What a remarkable hour, Roland. I'm so grateful to meet you. I feel so emotional. I don't want to lose you. So we cry for ourselves and we lean into gratitude that you've been here and that we got to meet you. And I send all my best and all my love to you and your wife and your family. Thank you. But I want to reflect that back on you.

I want you to join me in the celebration of what you have and what you bring and lean into the incredible gift that we're giving. So thank you. I'm going to work on that. You've inspired me to work on that. And maybe I'll swing by the clinic sometime very soon. All the best, Roland. Lots of love. Thank you for being here. Okay. Bye-bye. I want to tell the audience that if you want to support Roland and his work, go to Griffiths. That's two F's in there. G-R-I-F-F-I-T-H-S. Griffithsfund.org. All right.

And we'll be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.