Full transcript: Robin Carhart Harris on London Real
4:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. With us today is Mr. Alexander Ward, a former guest on this show, I think about a year ago. Yep, I think to this day, almost a year.
4:38 Wow, that’s a little scary. I would describe you as an ayahuasca filmmaker. It might have changed. You’ve spent the last year touring all around the world. You’re in Peru. You’re in New York. I think you’ve participated in 40-plus ayahuasca ceremonies. You’ve recorded documentaries. We’re going to get to you in a while, but thank you for coming back.
4:56 How are you? It’s good to be here. And thanks for guest hosting. It’s perfect timing and a perfect topic because our guest today is Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, who is a postdoc researcher from Imperial College London in the Neuropsychopharmacology unit. I practiced that last night, a few times.
5:14 He is conducting research on the effects of psilocybin and MDMA on the brain and and how they could potentially be used in therapy to help with depression, addiction, PTSD, all sorts of that stuff, so welcome. Thanks, it’s nice to be here. You know, it’s quite a resume you have and it’s really interesting stuff that you’re dealing with. And I was struck by watching you is that you kind of expect somebody in academia to be really clinical and talk about all of the research and the different parts of the cortex of the brain, but like, you almost cross over almost to like concepts of consciousness and like a qualitative, almost like a spiritual perspective in some of your research.
5:54 And I just wanted to know, are you the modern day Timothy Leary? Definitely not Timothy Leary. I wouldn’t wanna be associated with Timothy Leary. But he was at one point at Get Harvard running studies and stuff, right? He was, early on he was a credible scientist, psychologist.
6:12 But then he became a bit of a pariah on psychedelics. So, scientists who are working with psychedelics think Timothy Leary was a bit of a loud-mouthed and seemed to be promoting and popularizing psychedelic drug use. They tend to say that it negatively affected legitimate scientific research with psychedelics. And the strongest critics say that he was, in no small part, responsible for the downfall really scientific research for the banning of the of the research of those substances yes because of the explosion in in recreational use and he was saying some quite irresponsible things about you know promoting recreational use and that children even should be taking these these drugs and cross to the dark side a little bit. Yeah, he was, he just became too much of an evangelist, and he was the self-proclaimed high priest of psychedelics. And I think there’s a danger with these drugs that people kind of allow their enthusiasm to go unchecked and yeah he’s the prime example of that.
7:41 But you study something every day and it must be hard because you’re studying it and you’re doing the effects and then you’re like okay I’m a human I’ve got one of these brains too. It must be difficult or maybe it isn’t to just be like okay I need to experiment with these things or find out what it’s all about. I guess it would help you in some ways to empathize with your patients as well if you have that own personal experience with them, or do you need to keep a certain distance from that?
8:03 I think it’s useful to be objective, yes. So personally, I haven’t been a volunteer in any of my own studies. I think it’s useful to have that distance. I do understand the idea that, you know, what you’d do to other people, you should willing to have done to yourself but in academia it’s useful as well to retain that objectivity. Sure that sort of outsider’s objective look on the reason.
8:36 Yeah but of course I don’t really feel like an outsider so much in that you get so much exposure to people having these experiences and recording their subjective accounts that that you really get to know the state, you know. Can you describe for people that don’t know exactly the kind of the research you’re doing on MDMA and psilocybin? I don’t even know if you’re doing more research on one or the other, and just walk us through your work for the last few years.
9:06 Yeah, sure, so after finishing my PhD in Bristol, the University of Bristol, I began some research with psilocybin, so psilocybin is the constituent magic mushrooms. Do you hate calling them magic mushrooms because we had a guy in here Simon Powell friend of yours who I think he hates that term he’s written a book called the psilocybin solution and it’s like almost saying cage fighting to a mixed martial artist. It’s also that age as well in like the 70s when the name magic mushrooms came about and so when people hear that word they associate it with all that kind of dropout hippie behavior. Honestly actually I quite like it. I guess it immediately lets people know what you’re talking about.
9:48 About. It does. And why do you like it? It actually appeals to the state and the style of cognition or thinking that people have under psychedelic drugs. You know, this term magical is actually, it’s quite apt term really, because what people, you know, isn’t a little bit nondescript of that word. It’s, it’s, it’s got a kind of simplicity and a kind a media seed which I think is quite appealing. I mean it sort of suggests that there’s something magical, metaphysical about the experience which I don’t believe as a scientist. But I do recognise that people have magical, mystical ideas under these drugs and their style of thinking takes on a kind of, it takes on this quality which kind of lends people to kind of thinking in sort of magical metaphysical ways.
10:55 You said I think in one of the videos that it returns people to a more primitive way of thinking, more away from the ego and more in tune with the felt present moment and that can conjure up a much more magical and majestic outlook on the world around you. That’s right, yeah, so my own view on what this state is really is that there’s something primitive or atavistic about the state and so I’m very interested in depth psychologies like psychoanalysis and Freud and Jung’s ideas and so, you know, they talked about this style of thinking, this style of cognition, certainly Freud did, that’s primitive and that’s associated with what he called the id, and that has been kind of lost as humans have developed and the cognition’s become more precise. Do you think there’s, I mean, when you use the term primitive it sounds very derogatory, but do you think there’s value in that type of experience?
12:03 I do, so it’s loaded in that sense and there’s a slight problem in that potential for it to sound derogatory, but I do think there’s a use and I do think there’s a potential therapeutic use in the kind of spiritual aspect of this style of thinking, but scientifically I do think it is primitive, I do think it is an earlier style of thinking that has been sort was surpassed by modern thinking, in a way. Why did you choose Psilocybin? Yeah, of all the things you could have been doing, why that?
12:43 Well, I mean, I was very interested in psychedelics. And when I went to my now boss, Professor David Knott. Right, we’ll talk about him later. Yeah, sure. Very controversial guy.
12:56 He is. Yeah, he’s a great guy. And this was when I was applying to do a PhD and I managed to get myself an interview with him and we sat down and he said, so why are you here, what do you want to do? And I said, I want to do a PhD and I want to do a brain imaging study, an FMRI study with LSD actually. And I just finished a Masters in psychoanalysis.
13:26 I was very interested in the idea that LSD could allow access to what in psychoanalysis is referred to as the unconscious mind. Okay. Why were you always fascinated with psychedelics? With psychedelics, I became especially fascinated during the masters I was doing on psychoanalysis Because I read an incredibly fascinating book by a psychiatrist who was working with LSD in the 1960s, a chap called Stanislav Groff, who wrote this book called Realms of the Human Unconscious.
14:05 So during my masters, I was in a seminar and the seminar leader was talking about different ways that you know Freud spoke about how we can access the unconscious mind and I always felt the frustration when I was studying psychoanalysis that this thing that they were talking about so much was so hard to access and how do you establish its authenticity that it is something real if you can’t really get at it and I’d raised the question in the seminar has anyone ever considered a substance as a way of accessing the unconscious mind and no one knew of any substances but they liked the idea so from that I went away I did a library search and then I found this book by Stanislav Groff realms of the human unconscious and that was a real you know light bulb. They must have known of these substances it’s not like LSD has a history. Oh absolutely I did yeah I I mean I wasn’t entirely naive to it like that, but my interest was primarily around psychology and so I guess I became especially interested in psychedelics through my interest in psychoanalysis and then I became aware that these could be incredibly useful tools for finding out more about the nature of the mind, and if we are to incorporate them into, you know, in a neuroscientific framework, which hadn’t really been done extensively at that time, and still hasn’t, of course.
15:46 We’ve done a couple of studies. Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that maddening? It seems so strange. I mean, I also wanna know, what did your fellow academic peers say when you start mentioning things like LSD?
15:57 Do some of them turn off? Do some of them? To those that have no experience in this. I mean, most people you say that to them in the word and they’ll be like, oh, yeah, that’s really bad stuff. And actually, what were their current methods for understanding the unconscious if they weren’t willing to delve into these ideas?
16:13 First, I just want to know, do you have, do you get weird reactions from peers? Yeah, you do. It’s very polarizing. Yeah. Good word.
16:21 Good word. And so you get people who are just incredibly fascinated and they just want to know more and more. others that are slightly aloof when they hear about what you’re doing. I’ve had that response as well, so I’ve been at some important neuroscience conferences and I’ve been talking to people and having a conversation about the brain and different findings and then they ask what I’m doing and I tell them and they kind of turn their noses up and say, oh well, good luck with that and then they go up on, you know, in their own way. But yeah, it is very polarizing.
17:07 But I think the majority response is one of interest. It’s hard not to be interested by these drugs. And there is a bit of a sort of problem in that people who have had an experience with the drugs, kind of know why they are so interesting, so people can be really profoundly affected by an experience with a psychedelic drug and then they just want to know what the hell happened there, you know, and those people are the most interested and you’d be surprised how many academics have had personal experiences with psychedelics.
17:47 But they can’t talk about it to a certain extent? It depends on the situation. I think some people do, in confidence they’ll tell you. People are a bit reticent about it. It’s a great way not to get promoted in academia, I would guess.
18:02 Yeah, yeah. Maybe. Because we had some guests on here and we were talking about how, I think it was Rupert Sheldrake who said in academia it was actually harder to talk about than say in business because there’s such a phobia and you have to be, it’s such a political game to get tenure and be promoted that if they think of you as a strange one or an outsider, as opposed to if I work in banking in the city and I was like, yeah, I did some mushrooms the other weekend, but I’m still making you tons of money. They’ll be like, okay, whatever.
18:30 But in academia, they were like, you know, you’re not behaving in the right way. Is that fair? Do you think it’s a tough environment? I think, yeah, I think that’s probably true. I mean, it’s one of the questions that people are most keen to ask at the end of my talks is whether I’ve had a personal experience along with whether they can volunteer for the facilities.
18:51 And that’s the first question we asked them as well. Yeah, I know for a second. And you tell them it’s none of their business, right? Yeah, then they call me a politician. I’ve had that response.
19:00 Fair enough. Well, I guess you have to be a little bit. I’m trying to bait the question, then they don’t. So I’m sorry, I interrupted you, and you were talking about the trials themselves with psilocybin. Just so people know roughly, if you could just describe one of your trials that’s going on.
19:13 Yeah, sure. So, I mean, the ones that we’ve completed recently, we’ve looked at two different brain imaging modalities. The first one is functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, measures changes in brain activity. And the other one is another long word, magneto-encafilography, MEG, or MEG, which is another measure of brain activity. And those are done in real time, after the patient has ingested.
19:42 That’s right. It’s done online, and these were the recordings that we did. They were done entirely online. The first modality fMRI, it gives you a very high spatial resolution, or very high spatial image of what’s going on in the brain. You can see all the brain structures. You can see very deep down.
20:03 But its limitation is that it has quite poor temporal resolution. So the signal is very sluggish, And we know that brain activity is very fast. So we’re losing out on a lot of information there. And this is one thing that people don’t realize is that you’re constrained by the limitations of the methodologies. They think you’re going to get all the secrets about consciousness by doing these imaging studies.
20:28 And I think we truly are actually acquiring a lot of important insights. But there are some major limitations. And the second methodology that I was talking about, MEG, that has much better temporal resolution. So we do get all that information about what’s happening in the brain in terms of fast neural activity. And we get a more broadband idea of the different neural activities that are taking place and how they change when we give a drug.
21:06 But their limitation, the limitation of MEG, is that it has a poor spatial resolution and it can only really record from the outer layer of the brain, the cortex. Okay. So the people go to like a center where you’d, do you have to administer these in a specific place because they’re technically illegal drugs? You have to have a license to do it and you have to have a number of different permissions from different bodies. So you need to have ethical permission And there’s a certain process around that, you know, the submission of a lot of material, a lot of documents, and then a meeting, and then a review, and then further submissions.
21:44 And then there’s also kind of institutional regulation, regulations around doing the research. And then there’s the acquiring of a home office license to do the research, which for schedule one drugs, which psilocybin is, and MDMA as well, they’re quite expensive. And so that puts people off getting those licenses. It’s one of the problems around why it’s so difficult to do research with these drugs. It’s the definition of schedule one, one that doesn’t have any medicinal qualities.
22:13 That’s right, yeah. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah. Okay. And have you shown quite the positive effects of the psychedelics in your research?
22:21 Well, we’ve observed that it hasn’t been our primary question. So my personal research to date has been all around trying to work out how the drugs work in the brain. But there are obvious or clear implications from the results that we’ve seen, which relate to the potential therapeutic use of the drugs. What does it do to the brain? I know in one study, you said that it actually shuts some parts of the brain down, whereas most people have the wrong assumption and that it actually stimulates certain parts of the brain.
23:01 That’s right, yes. So we were quite surprised by our results. And I still remember when the results came through. And we were quite sort of disbelieving. And we did a number of checks to make sure that we hadn’t got the signs mixed up and we were actually seeing increases in brain activity.
23:22 But no, the primary finding was that we saw decreased brain activity with these drugs. And now we’ve replicated that a number of times, so I feel confident that that’s how these drugs work in the brain, and it also is consistent with animal work and other human work as well. So what happens to the brain when psilocybin is addressed? Yeah, okay, so with the fMRI work we’ve done, we’ve found that there were decrease in brain activity they were localised to particular regions of the brain.
23:58 So these regions of the brain are important hub structures in the brain, they receive a lot of blood flow and they consume a lot of energy, they’re very metabolically hungry brain regions. functionally what they seem to do is kind of orchestrate global brain function. So they’re kind of like the conductor in the brain. They have a kind of central function which seems to regulate the rest of the brain. And we think that this function has a kind of constraining influence on the rest of the brain. The brain has a kind of natural randomness to its functioning.
24:54 There’s a sort of balance between its natural kind of randomness or kind of chaotic or noisy dynamics in the brain and the tendency or the propensity for the brain to self-organize or to become ordered in its functioning. So there’s this funny balance between a natural, what they refer to in science as stochasticity or kind of randomness, and this tendency for systems to organize. So it’s kind of like removing the conductor from an orchestra and then everyone, ever the pieces kind of play on their own, is that the analogy you’re raising?
25:33 That’s right, so this system seems to be important for the formation of coherent gestaltes or hulls to keep our experience of the world as cohesive and integrated. And so one of the classic descriptions that you’ll find when people have an experience with a psychedelic is they talk about this kind of fragmentation of their consciousness and a kind of looseness to their style of thinking that their thinking becomes freer and more imaginative. Maybe less bound by belief systems, say.
26:13 That’s right. So, yeah, so kind of schemas that we hold about things will be broken down and then they tend to kind of review those schemas and sort of observe them with a kind of objectivity. Yeah, but kind of objectivity, they sort of stand back and sort of think, oh, I was really convinced by this idea that I have a coherent sense of self, for instance, that, you know, and then, you know, they sort of stand back and then perceive that as some kind of construct that they built up.
26:45 So that’s probably at the basis of why the experience can be so profound for people. Because these assumptions that we develop and then hold very strongly are kind of shattered up to the drug. Yeah, I know for me it helped me understand the difference between the way I was perceiving the world and how it really was and just how all my different belief systems was really just shaping how I saw the outside world. So it’s great to have that broken down and step outside of that.
27:11 So in terms of the potential merits of psychedelics used in a therapeutic context, we were talking about this idea of the state being primitive and that kind of sounds quite derogatory but those experiences where people can stand back and look at belief systems that are built up is at the basis of how the drugs can be useful and a good example is in depression. So people will get very fixed in their thinking in depression, they’ll also be very fixed in their idea of their self often. And that idea will be quite critical. And so there’s a great potential usefulness there.
28:03 It’s also being shown to be able to break free of addictions. That’s right. Well, it’s a similar principle. In addiction, people become very fixed in their behavior and they keep repeating the same procedure and they can’t break out of it and so the function of you know how a psychedelic drug could help would be to break down that very rehearsed and reinforced style of behavior in this case. What happens when you tell people that a psychedelic like Sybilah Sadman might actually help people overcome depression it seems like the public would just have a hard time putting those two together, even though it makes complete sense to me.
28:46 Yeah, it’s incredibly challenging, but there is a lot of good science which supports it, and so if the hard science supports an idea, it’s very hard to dismiss it. Even though there’s so much baggage in cultural history. There’s a huge amount of baggage, but the idea does come with some very important caveats and it is that the experience when the drugs given therapeutically should be mediated in a particular way and there should be a care structure around the individual so to avoid any negative responses both in the acute experience itself and after after the experience. Are you familiar with ayahuasca because it’s something that Alexander has a lot of experience with. I have a little bit we’ve talked about it on the show last year I’ve had three ceremonies and it’s a it has dimethyl tryptamine and it it has been compared to psilocybin as far as a similar type type trips but the ayahuasca is done in a you know a ceremony that’s thousands of years old where the settings are very controlled There’s a shaman. It’s the epitome of set and setting. It’s in a very comfortable and safe setting and it’s very Difficult to have a very bad experience with that because you’re so very well cared for. I think that is the key. Hmm well in those situations if if they are well controlled, then it’s it’s just a You know very similar to how say psilocybin would be given in a therapeutic context in a kind of scientific
30:24 Context, you know. And they’re doing this at John Hopkins in Baltimore I think with some terminally ill cancer patients. I think they’ve been doing some psilocybin experiments where they bring them in and they bring them into a room, there’s an attendant, they can bring pictures with them and pillows and yeah I mean tell me if I’m wrong but no no you’re absolutely right I’ve been there so we visited the team and sat on the sacred couch and we actually simulated without a drug the experience because we have a study of our own planned with depressed patients and so we wanted to learn how they do it. What did you think of what they’re doing there and can you describe what they’re doing? Very very impressed yes they’re very thoughtful and and they’re a very you know careful team they’re very good scientists they really care about what they’re doing and I think they do incredibly well. What specifically are they doing with psilocybin? Okay so they’ve been giving quite large doses of psilocybin, single doses. The earliest work was in healthy volunteers and individuals who had never had a psychedelic experience before and then they would have this experience with a high dose of psilocybin given orally. How much higher compared to say the doses you use like five times ten times? Yeah, so we give two milligrams intravenously.
31:56 They give up to 30 milligrams as an oral dose. And if you compare the subjective effects with two milligrams and 30 milligrams, you know, two milligrams IV, that compares to roughly ten, fifteen milligrams given orally. So we’re giving roughly half of what they they give. The Baltimore team, the John Hopkins team, they’re much more likely to observe these kind of spiritual type experiences than we have with our dose. But yeah, the way they do it, they’ll dose the individual and they play some very relaxing music. The individual lies on a couch and they actually kneel close to the couch. They like to be on a lower level.
32:52 They talk about kind of treating the individual having the experience with some kind of sort of reverence that they’re having all the insights, you know. They’re very detail oriented. Yeah, and quite humble I think that they do that. You know, for them it’s the individual having the experiences, who has all the major insights and it’s them that really know what’s what, they’re kind of in awe of this individual having the experience. And yeah, there’s usually a couple of what they refer to as guides who look after the individual having the experience.
33:36 And what have they found out? Then they moved to terminally ill cancer patients? They have. They’ve done that, yes. So that, the John Hopkins team haven’t yet published on that. But with the healthy volunteers, they did find some quite incredible things.
33:50 So people were reporting that their experience was one of the most profound of the whole of their lives. And they rated it, I think it was about two thirds of the people who were in the study, and there was quite a large number of people. They rated it in the, about two-thirds rated it in the top five most meaningful experiences. Me and Alexander were like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that makes sense to people who know, but it was a very useful study because it communicates how profound the experience is to people who are naive to the drug, so when asked kind of what this means, you know, what does it mean to have an experience which Which is one of the most profound of the whole of your lives and then people compare it to things that people are more familiar with.
34:43 Like they would talk about the birth of their first child or something or the death of someone very close to them. Things that really… Getting married, another terrifying experience. Yeah, yeah. So your idea is that if you can show the science, then the science is irrefutable, right?
35:01 It seems like you’re like trying to show this specific scientific evidence and with that then then there’s not really like a qualitative discussion after that well it’s hard to argue with with some objective data you know you can you can think of the subject matter as kind of kooky and some people even think of it as being you know a kind of unscientific realm but I actually think because so little is known about it That’s why it’s so important for science to get to grips with it. And actually, when we know so little about a subject, that’s when we’re more likely to have kind of unscientific ideas about it or kind of, you know, these kind of magical, mystical ideas about it. LSD was banned, I think, in the 60s from further scientific research.
35:53 And this is 50 years later. I mean, why are we ready now, do you think, to accept this research than, say, we were 50 years ago? There’s a bit of momentum now, I think, that’s it. And people have shown that you can do it. People have demonstrated it’s safe, done in the right way.
36:13 I think people are kind of jumping on the bandwagon in a way, but rightly so, because I think it’s an important area. And I think, you know, and again, it’s something we know science really doesn’t have a firm grasp on is our understanding of consciousness. You know, it’s kind of one of the last frontiers, really, for science. And psychedelics have a huge potential for providing, you know, major new insights into how consciousness arises from the world. I had a soldier in that seat two days ago and he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
36:53 He had two tours in Iraq, one tour in Afghanistan. His name is Jake Wood. He’s written a book about it and he was like physically shaking during the interview when he talked about some of the activities he had in Helmand Province and shooting in Afghani and some of the guys in his troop getting killed. I asked him, he’s on heavy medication, I think traditional heavy medication, and I asked him about psychedelics. I was like, have you ever thought of this or considered this?
37:18 There’s a lot of stuff in MDMA and psilocybin. He had never heard of it and he said, I don’t want to replace my behavior with another addictive behavior and I was just I was shocked that someone that was you know you type in PTSD and new research I would think this stuff would come up especially with MDMA I believe now and I don’t know it is that is that something that you come upon as people are shocked to hear that as a potential solution it’s quite surprising to hear that I mean being in this area right you know pretty much right in the middle of it it seems surprising that somebody He doesn’t know about that, but that’s part of my job and other researchers working in this area. The other question is, one of the big questions we got from some of our fans was, should we wait until this is approved or should we go ahead and try to self-medicate in the meantime?
38:13 I know you said earlier the setting was really important, but someone like Jake, does he have to wait five years, ten years, until he might be able or get lucky and be part one of your studies in order to get potentially some psilocybin that will help his rigid thought patterns? Well, if he was serious and believed in the treatment or the idea of the treatment, then he could probably volunteer in one of these trials. I mean, it’s difficult because the only ones that are happening at the moment are really in the US. I mean, they’re kind of leading the way with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder.
38:49 This is the maps group that’s right yeah yeah but they’re finding really quite remarkable things i mean the um the uh efficacy of of the drug you know um seems to be pretty incredible at least the studies that they’ve done Alexander you you interviewed the guy the head of maps in new york city yeah i stumbled on him by accident and we just started talking uh interviewed him about his work with MDMA. And he talked about MDMA as something unique qualities of it is accepting of self and opening the heart and they can relive certain memories and kind of come to terms with them in a time when they couldn’t before because they were too much. Yeah, I mean we recently did a study, I mean that makes sense, it’s a little different to the classic psychedelics MDMA but is it considered a psychedelic personally I wouldn’t sort of group it with the you could loosely call it psychedelic but it for me it’s not a I’d like to categorize the classic psychedelics which work in a particular way in the brain mushrooms LSD DMT yeah yeah LSD and and MDMA and sometimes people talk about cannabis as a psychedelic.
40:06 Right. What’s been your experience with MDMA and have you used it in your research? Yes. We did a study recently with MDMA, an FMRI study. We were interested in the work around PTSD.
40:20 We had a paradigm or a task in the study where people, they provided us with very worst memories and also their very best and then they were shown cues referring to these memories in the scanner while they were on the drug and also as a controlled procedure while they were on a placebo, you know, in art compound and then we looked at the difference, how the brain and how they responded subjectively to these memory cues in these two different conditions and we found that for the negative memories people experienced the memories under the drug as less negative with MDMA and it also reduced some of the brain responses in regions that were sensitive to negative memories so it kind of dampened down the response and that’s that kind of makes sense in terms of how people talk about how MDMA could be useful in psychotherapy, that it kind of, it takes some of the sting out of an actual medical situation.
41:34 And are these realisations permanent? They come out of this and they, you know, they always see these memories as less negative or does their normal everyday consciousness kick back in? Well, the effect in therapy seems to be lasting. That’s what they found in the US. So they did a follow-up study to their main study with MDMA and patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the beneficial effects, the therapeutic effects did seem to be lasting.
42:04 Is there any issue with, because one of our viewers had asked if there’s an issue of a permanent effect on the reuptake of serotonin once you take MDMA as opposed to a classic psychedelic where that might not be the case? So MDMA does work on a mechanism in the brain which is responsible for kind of the reuptake of serotonin, the kind of recycling of it. And taking MDMA seems to reduce the number of these reuptake sites. And there’s a bit of kind of controversy or uncertainty about whether that’s some kind a marker of damage to the serotonin system or whether it’s some kind of adaptive, almost functional response to having taken the drug.
42:56 And what is known is that there is recovery of these transporters, you call them, these reuptake things, processes, mechanisms, and so that suggests that if it is damaged then is recovery with abstinence from the drug and the way, the idea around how MDMA would be given therapeutically is that it would be a small number of sessions. So what I’m referring to in terms of, you know, a reduction in these reuptake sites which might be a marker of serotonin damage, that’s only really being established in recreational users of MDMA or ecstasy. And so in the therapeutic context, it may be that this marker of damage, whether it’s damage or not, it may be the case that there isn’t a reduction in those sites when the drug’s given just a couple of times in a therapeutic context. There’s something that we don’t know and it’s, you know, experiments that need to be done.
43:59 I mean, research of MDMA is still quite new, isn’t it? So you don’t have those long-term studies of it is good there’s been a fair amount of research with MDMA my personal view is that the amount of MDMA that she’s therapeutically I doubt very much that that would have a damaging effect on the serotonin system and it’s so much uncertainty about whether the doses that people take humans take recreationally does truly damage the serotonin system but it may do but I I mean, in terms of a kind of health message, I guess, it does seem to be very sensitive to the amount of MDMA that people are using. So I think in the small doses that are being used therapeutically, at least the small number of times that the drug’s being given, it probably doesn’t damage the serotonin system.
44:59 So the original question was around MD may be potentially damaging or may affect something permanently in the brain and does do the classic psychedelics like Psilocybin and DMT. There’s no evidence that they affect those. You mentioned Professor David Nutt earlier, who I think you’re his, are you his protege then? Is that something I can say? I guess I am, you’d have to ask him, but.
45:24 I mean, and he said some pretty controversial stuff, which I think got him sacked from some, it was Department of Health or something the home office. And I thought he basically came out and said that cannabis and ecstasy were actually safer than alcohol and cigarettes, something like that. He actually had a chart that looked quite credible to me as far as the addictiveness and the danger. What did he mean by that? How come that was such a hard thing for the public to accept or why didn’t he get sacked?
45:50 He was sacked because he was talking about cannabis and saying that he was chief advisor to the government on drugs. And so he would provide advice to the government, and this should inform their policy. But he would give certain advice that they would ignore, and I guess that frustrated it. And the Labour government at the time had decided to reclassify cannabis, it had been downgraded to Class C. There was a bit of a scare around hypotency cannabis and its links with schizophrenia and the government decided to reclassify it as Class B and this was against the advice of of David’s group that he was heading and he had a very strong evidence at the time to back up his theories yeah there was still I mean there was still debate around around the issue but he expressed his views and I guess they didn’t like the fact that he was criticizing the government policy they wanted the advice but then they wanted to make their own minds up and David said well you know we’re the scientists why don’t you why don’t you you know we know best I guess because we I mean we talked about how if you have the scientific data then it’s just sort of irrefutable but in this case he had the evidence and it still wasn’t accepted Yeah. People still debate the evidence that some people might argue that there is a credible link.
47:27 He made a great comparison I know during his campaign speech and he said something like people riding horses like one in 350 experience a serious injury and yet one in 10,000 of ecstasy takers experienced like a significant injury. So he said riding horses was more dangerous or more Dangerous to be addicted to I think is what he said. Yeah, it’s an interesting point He made from a statistical thing is everything we do is inherently dangerous And if you run the numbers like Alexander you’re saying or you’re saying Robin if you actually run the real numbers You find out that it’s actually not necessarily more dangerous Yeah, subscribe to that or well the David’s very good at those kind of arguments because there’s so much misinformation around these drugs and to give an analogy like that to give something to compare the dangers of MDMA and ecstasy to is useful because it puts it in a context that people can understand and yeah making comparisons with the dangers of horse riding and alcohol is useful because it helps to educate people about the true dangers of these drugs and puts them in a context. David never says that these drugs aren’t without harms. He just says that people don’t understand the nature of the harms and are unable to put them in a context. There’s so much misinformation and kind of scaremongering around drugs.
49:00 I find that the acceptance of an alcohol culture in the world and especially in Britain, it’s It’s just like a fascinating thing. It’s just sometimes hard to get my head around that if you told people we have this new drug that when you give it to people, they get loud, they get violent, they hurt themselves. We had an A&E doctor in here and we asked him if there was one drug your three daughters would never take ever in their lives, what would it be? And he seen everything and he said, alcohol.
49:25 And just like if you told people about this drug and then they get drunk, they get behind a car, they kill people, you would be like, there’s no way. And yet it’s so accepted and it’s just so common that people don’t consider it a quote unquote drug per se. That’s right. Yeah. I mean, uh, yeah, and, and with, uh, with psychedelics, I mean, uh, you know, like, like I said, you know, it helps put it in a context if you can compare it to, to alcohol and people joke about alcohol and the arms of it and you know, yeah, but, uh, you know, I mean, If psychedelics were accepted by society at large, how do you think they might be incorporated in the culture and what do you think would be the benefits of that?
50:08 Yeah, it’s a good question. My personal view is that they probably do have a place in a therapeutic context. Like healing centers. Yes, and that would be the way to do it in my view. Like Johns Hopkins does a little bit?
50:26 I do. And I think it’s a potential tool that could be incredibly useful in psychiatry. I mean, it was in the 1950s and 60s. And I think that’s where it could be most useful. I wonder, I mean, there is a debate in the kind of what’s referred to as the kind of psychedelic community, because there’s so many enthusiasts around psychedelic drugs.
50:52 And they think, oh, you know, why should there be any structure at all? Yeah, just leave it to us to deal with it. Yeah, but I’m not sure about that. And people who have a tendency to… Do you think that’s quite damaging to the research you’re doing?
51:07 It can be potentially. But equally, I think if somebody wanted to have an experience and they weren’t unwell, should we say that they can’t have the experience? And I mean, my own view is that I think there would be a place for that, that if somebody who was well, there wasn’t a problem there, and they just said, I want to have this experience on an experiential level, I just want to know what it’s like and maybe learn something from the experience, then I think again, if that was permitted, I don’t really see a problem with that.
51:50 The danger with psychedelics is irresponsible use, and when people take them without the right care structure around them, I think, that’s when the true potential harms can come out. I think it’s pretty dangerous when the government tells you how to do something, or what to put in your body. We had a man by the name of Graham Hancock as our guest, and he said the sovereignty over your own body is like one of the most basic of human rights and to have a government to tell you what you cannot put in your own body to him was just one of the most ridiculous concepts in his mind.
52:30 Well, I have sympathy for that view. Yeah. Fair enough. You know, I like the fact, now that I think about it, we spoke with Robin, is I like the fact that, you know, he doesn’t necessarily, you know, partake in this and practice this because he has a really objective scientific point and when he says look this is what I think it’s based on his clinical look at the evidence you know and it’s not based on any as humans we love anecdotal evidence we love to be like well this felt right and this felt right and I think this and so I think it’s good to have someone just running the numbers really more than anything mm-hmm my statement of the day what um what’s what’s next for your studies I mean if you could you know if you could just write a letter to the home office and say I want to do this and get approval within 24 hours and all the funding you want what what’s that that ideal study that’s going to be one that we’d love to do I mean I’m incredibly lucky and that the studies that I want to do are on the table you know so that so there’s two that we have coming up one of them is a study in patients with depression severe depression that’s that’s not responding to treatment and we’ll give them psilocybin on a couple of occasions with kind of guided psychotherapy, low level psychotherapy, really we sort of allow the experience to play out and then there’s a support structure around that.
54:00 So that’s the major study that we have coming up and the other one is a study with LSD, a neuroscience study trying to find out how LSD works in the brain. So both are pretty pioneering. Neither study has been done yet. There hasn’t been a depression study, a modern depression study with a classic psychedelic drug, and no one has done any neuroscience research with LSD since the 50s and 60s. Wow. Is that a tougher one to sell the LSD opposed to psilocybin? Not really I mean there’s there’s so much I mean it’s a provocative word you know. I need to come up with a new recipe so it has a different acronym you know I mean part of the reason MDMA it doesn’t have all that baggage from the 16th and 17th. I mean there’s huge baggage around LSD and really that’s why that’s one of the reasons why we chose to do our research with psilocybin really on and that’s really why most of the research on psychedelics is used psilocybin. Isn’t that crazy from a scientific standpoint? There’s another good reason in that psilocybin is a bit more selective in how the way it works in the way it works in the brain. How is it different from the LSD in terms of what happens within the brain? One of the major differences is that LSD is much more potent you mean you need much smaller amounts of it for it to have its effects and that’s because it’s much stickier it has a much higher affinity for a particular receptor in the brain that these psychedelic drugs work on this
55:47 Serotonin receptor a serotonin to a receptor LSD is very sticky for that and that’s why it’s so potent the other thing about LSD is that it’s generally sticky. It works on a lot of different receptor sites in the brain, whereas psilocybin is quite a bit more selective for the serotonin system. Is it why the dose is so low on LSD? It is. It sticks to everything? Well because it sticks to everything, yes, and because it sticks to a particular serotonin receptor which is most closely linked to the psychedelic effects. I want to get both of your thoughts on this concept. We had a guest here recently and he was talking about a drug called modafinil, which I think is a narcolepsy drug, but which some people have used in the States to like just tune in and get lots of work done.
56:32 And I think it’s known as provigil as well. And this is Tim Ferriss who was here and he even claims that some Olympic sprinters are on it. And he’s done a lot of experiments with himself with all sorts of different substances, you know, anabolic, steroid cycles, etc. And he said the one thing that he found is that there’s no free lunch when it comes to a lot of these substances being ingested, as in there might be some upsides, but then there are always gonna be an equal downside, as in he would have splitting headaches the next day.
56:59 You could argue that with psilocybin or ayahuasca, you can go to some very terrifying places to have some relief and a break of your rigid thought patterns. You could say with MDMA, the next two days you feel horrible because your serotonin levels suck. After you drink one night, you wake up the next day with a hangover. Do you think, I know it’s a general rule, but do you think that’s true, that there is no free lunch when it comes to the human biology? I do, yes. So with psychedelics, the potential negative side is a number of things, but the potential to have a bad trip during the experience itself. And actually, you find that people, it’s not a cluster of drugs that people want to take regularly. So if they take their drugs, they use very sparingly. And actually, the experience itself, people often don’t enjoy.
57:53 It’s kind of the insights that they have kind of afterwards, really, as they kind of return to normal waking consciousness that they think are useful and that they’re glad to have had the experience. There’s almost a kind of survivor euphoria around the psychedelic experience that you come out the other side and you think, wow, you know, that was incredible, and then you return to sort of normality with a fresher look at things so yeah I think really it’s that in terms of the the kind of low side that comes with the high it’s it’s really actually the experience itself that it’s not really a pleasurable experience for a lot of people it’s a challenging experience hmm and you think that’s true with MDMA and any other potentially conscious It’s slightly different because people it’s people it’s more. It’s more reliable The the positive effects of the drug are much more reliable So people tend to enjoy the experience more the negative side as you said tends to be the Feeling kind of grotty and in the following days Yeah, and if it’s overused the potential for kind of low mood Right.
59:13 Alexander, what do you think? I mean, you have a lot of experience with ayahuasca. Sure. I mean, we’ve often talked about how many people have this afterglow with ayahuasca, and there is no real down after experience in that. Often times when you do go through very difficult ceremonies, there is quite a low after that, but I do think in many ways those difficult ceremonies are some of the most beneficial because you’re forced to understand certain things about yourself that you’ve maybe been keeping at bay and a force under the psychedelics to face that head-on.
59:43 And so in that sort of way, the lows are kind of needed, I think, to sort of reflect back on that. They say, you know, even a bad trip is a good trip. Yeah. One of the best trips. Right.
59:55 Even though they’re not enjoyable at all. No. And I agree there’s that survivor’s mentality, you know. My big ayahuasca experience was just a horrible long night, lots of purging, lots of deep dark places I didn’t want to go, but afterwards I felt like I had been through the fight of my life, and now I could enjoy the peace and then to go through my mind. And Terrence McKenna was a proponent of a lot of these drugs in the 80s and 90s, and he always said, large doses infrequently.
1:00:22 That’s what he always suggested was psychedelics. So you had to take a big dose that takes you places you might not want to go, and then to take many months and reflect. Yeah, because it’s very important to not get too drawn into these unusual experiences by having done too many times. It’s very important once you go through this to really ground that experience afterwards and apply it into your life. Otherwise, it can just become a form of escapism if you’re just focused on the experience and not grounding what you’ve learned from it.
1:00:49 Do you think, I mean, it just trips me out if one day we’ll have like a clinic where you can go to and grandma has cancer and she’s dying and you’re like, it’s okay grandma, you’re going to go to the Carhart Harris clinic, you know, the countryside and you’re You’re going to go through a four days and you’re going to take psilocybin twice and when she comes back she’s going to have this new perspective. It just sounds like such a great idea to me. Do you think we’ll see it as a reality in our lifetime?
1:01:19 I think, yes, because I think that it’s hard to argue against scientific evidence and I think the evidence will be accumulated. So I think it will be hard to kind of stop that and the potential sort of things that could get in the way of it again is this whole problem around recreational use. I mean that’s what brought the downfall in the fifties and sixties and it could happen again. How do we stop that from happening? That can actually hurt your research.
1:01:56 It can if it becomes out of control. I think we’ve probably learnt a lot from the 60s. Yeah, I think we have a lot more scientific back in this second age. Having said this, some of the ayahuasca tourism that’s going on at the moment, there are some negative reports that are coming from that as well, that they’re a less incredible people. that’s what will happen if these things gain in popularity whereas a lot of them they do have a lot of good merit to them but there will be a lot of people who try and take advantage of that. Well they stay illegal and they become popular.
1:02:37 Be more of a like a business orientated and not really take proper care of the patients involved in ceremonies. So I think that’s the that’s the real merit of going down the the route of having this regulated. I know for a lot of people they find that challenging and a lot of people don’t like structure but for me I think it’s the most realistic and practical and sensible way to do it people don’t often like those things. But to integrate it into this current society you were in I think it is probably the best method of going about it. And also if I mean my own view as a scientist is that the experience can be better understood through the medium of science so in terms of understanding the psychology of the experience and understanding its basis in biology because it is an area that’s very sensitive to kind of pseudoscientific ideas. How do you deal with some of that data that comes back? I mean a lot of your patients must describe very extraordinary mystical experiences. They do and I think it’s important not to kind of belittle those experiences but equally it’s important not to get carried away with them and start thinking something metaphysical is happening here. I mean the experiences however profound can be understood on a psychological level I think and if we can understand things like what it is in the brain that’s responsible for the sense of self that may help us us understand experiences of a mystical spiritual nature, you know, because psychologically
1:04:18 At the heart of a lot of these experiences is this phenomenon of ego loss or ego disintegration. So if we can understand what’s underneath that, then we can understand these things on a more detailed level that will help to kind of demystify some of the thinking around the experience. Now people will find that quite challenging I think and not everyone will want that and I think it may be a situation where that kind of evidence will come and certain people will want to ignore it. But that’s I guess that’s that decision. I just you know, I disagree with it.
1:05:07 That makes sense. You know, we’re gonna take a question from Reddit right now, which is a website and they’ve actually asking us some live questions. So I’m gonna take one is from the subreddit called Ask Science. And they’re asking, have you seen the documentary called the Spirit Molecule? And do you would you like to do any research on DMT, which is this dimethyl trip to me in the future?
1:05:28 I haven’t seen the documentary, I’ve read the book. It’s interesting, I don’t really buy the ideas entirely. It was Rick Strassman that did that, and he got very caught up in the experiences they described of detailing interactions with entities, and he seemed to sort of jump on board with that. Yeah, again, it’s where people are a bit vulnerable to kind of running away with their ideas, And for me, there is a pseudoscientific element to that whole idea. DMT is very similar in structure to, well, psilocybin is a kind of prodrug, you call it, or kind of mother compound of the compound that actually works on the serotonin receptors in the brain, the brain which is psilocin. Psilocin is very closely related to DMT in structure and actually both are very closely related to serotonin, the endogenous or naturally occurring brain chemical. And so doing our research with psilocybin is really like doing research with DMT. I I mean, they’re virtually the same compound.
1:06:47 So I am very interested in DMT, but I’d also kind of argue that we are kind of doing, we’re actually doing research with DMT because we’re doing research with four hydroxy DMT, which is psilocybin. Okay. You’re talking about, I mean, sometimes you describe in your research about our concept of reality and then when you’re on the psilocybin, you have a different concept of reality. So I know it’s a very weird question, but what is reality if right now I’m perceiving it in a certain way.
1:07:16 When you’re on the mushrooms, it’s another way. A lot of people that are, you know, go, go the next step with some of these drugs say that they’re going to different realities, which you don’t, aren’t subscribing to. No, I don’t subscribe to that. Can you just talk about that? But I think it’s interesting that people do, do have a tendency to believe those things.
1:07:33 I mean, there’s a, there’s a really nice example of, of this kind of sort of issue. So there’s a quite elegant mathematical theory of how geometric hallucinations occur in the brain, how the brain generates these geometric hallucinations. And there was an article on this, on the web recently, and then there were some comments below. And somebody made the comment that the scientist was wrong, he got it completely wrong, and these geometric hallucinations are the true reality.
1:08:10 And we’re just being able to tap into that via this drug. Right, you hear this a lot, that there’s a reality out there that you tap into. Very much what Terence Buchanan used to talk about. How would you explain the reason why these geometric patterns come about? The idea is that it’s the functional architecture
1:08:34 Of the visual cortex. And so under the drug, you’re perceiving that architecture. So internal kind of representations of the world are becoming manifest. So you’re seeing kind of latent processes in the brain that they’re kind of intruding into our stream of consciousness. The alternative metaphysical explanation is that this stuff’s out there, but there’s just no evidence for that. That’s pure conjecture.
1:09:08 And you get this kind of metaphysical conjecture whenever there are situations of high uncertainty about a topic. So, you know, when it’s hard to explain something, we often leap to incredible kind of conclusions about about about it to try and explain it and sometimes people are a little bit turned off by the scientific explanations because they’re less exciting yeah but this is this is the classic character of this kind of magical thinking is that we want to get excited by this possibility that there’s something else something magical he said the experience really does tap back into that magical kind of outlook on life it is yeah yeah which I think think is, you know, based on my interest in psychology and ideas around this is, my own view is that this is a kind of primitive way of looking at the world.
1:10:03 That if you look at kind of early humans and the limited evidence that we have, that they had a kind of animistic way of looking at the world. And again, that’s because they knew so little about the world. So there was so much uncertainty, so they could come up with any kind of explanation that they wanted to and that seems to be what happens. I think it’s a bit of a show, I think there’ll be a lot of kind of opposition to the demystifying of the psychedelic experience. Because it’s probably something that’s very personal to a lot of people.
1:10:34 It is and it’s behind a lot of the kind of unchecked enthusiasm around these drugs is that there’s something sort of metaphysical magical about them. That’s That’s why I like the idea of magic mushrooms, because it speaks to that. That’s why I like that term, because it speaks to that tendency for people to have kind of magical, mystical beliefs. Alexander, what do you think, what are your thoughts on reality and then the reality you see when you’re in an ayahuasca ceremony?
1:11:08 Well, really for me, the most valuable experience is, I mean, I think a lot of these entering different dimensions and entities who kind of become distractions and abstract ideas. Really the core experience for me is connecting to this oneness that is kind of behind the ego and you know I understood it before on a kind of theoretical basis when you understand that everything comes from the Big Bang and in a sense we are just all one but to really there’s a very big difference between understanding that theoretically and really feeling it with your own being and yeah I just very much felt like a conscious aspect of the universe now looking back on itself and all the ego really was is part of this consciousness except in all these different cultural conditions that made up this person of myself.
1:11:53 So you don’t agree there’s necessarily a different reality that’s really there that you connect to with the ayahuasca per se? You just think it’s a way of dissolving your ego back to a root or I don’t know. I’m reluctant to say one way or the other because, you know, obviously in my experiences I have kind of seemed to have experiences that do suggest that but again it’s just such a big unknown that I’m just I guess in a sense projecting my own ideas about what that could be.
1:12:22 That’s my view is that that’s what happens. It is a projection. It is a projection that’s incredible kind of susceptibility to do that. But it also speaks a lot of volumes about the person itself to project that certain image. person project that? I guess it’s because we find it very difficult to tolerate uncertainty and we don’t know something we want to have an explanation for it even if that is you know quite a quite a leap you know to come up with whatever explanation is like there’s some machine elves behind it all but you know I don’t I don’t want to be derogatory about particular experiences like the the spiritual experience where people report this sense of oneness, because I think that’s a true and veridical experience. But the thing is, I think it can be explained, and I think it can be explained by neurobiology, and it can be deconstructed psychologically and mechanistically.
1:13:33 And you know, so for instance, the sense of self, neuroscience is really starting to get a good grip on how that arises or emerges from brain activity. There’s a certain system in the brain, which is closely linked to self-reflection. And what’s referred to in psychology is kind of metacognitive functions or the ability to think about thinking, which is a very high level thing. And so, that ability to be kind of self-observant. I’ve just been an observer of the thoughts and that’s really what I go through with the meditation now.
1:14:13 It’s just really becoming conscious of that observer and what is it that is observing the thoughts. It’s very interesting. You’ve talked about how meditation is very similar to some of the drugs that you’ve researched as far as the brain activity, isn’t it? Yeah. And so, one of the similarities is that the system I was talking about which is associated with our sense of self, and there’s increasing evidence that it’s probably the seat of the sense of self or the seat of the ego, that there is an interesting kind of competition between this system and other systems in the brain which engage when we focus on the outside world. And you can kind of intuit what I’m talking about, I hope, because we are always either kind of daydreaming and out of the moment or focused in the moment and in the present.
1:15:04 And these two systems which sub-serve those kind of modes of thinking are in competition. And that kind of competition probably underlies our sense of self itself and what’s referred to as ego boundaries. So that we have this sense that this is me sat in this chair and then the environment’s out there whereas in meditation and with psychedelic drugs those ego boundaries break down and equally the competition between those systems also breaks down so the separation between the activity in these systems becomes reduced and they become kind of part of the same system and so I know that’s it’s probably quite difficult to follow but there is we really are starting to get a handle on experiences as abstract as the dissolution of ego boundaries.
1:16:02 That’s very cool that we are. It’s interesting how you think about ego. The weird thing about ego is when you say the word, it actually has a negative connotation. Because when you say, oh, you have an ego, it’s almost like it’s a bad thing. Although the only reason we’re here from evolution is because we had an ego and we ran away from the sabre-toothed headgear.
1:16:20 Help us to survive through everything. And so it makes sense that we had this separation and you know feed ourselves and run away and stuff Although though I think when it comes to integrating with a society I think that’s when it becomes maybe detrimental And I a lot of these things like you’re saying meditation drugs seem to hmm I guess just dissolve that well I think I guess you know it’s useful to have an ego But it’s it can be problematic to invest too much in in our sense of self and you know it’s slightly paradoxical in depression that people become so kind of self-obsessed almost you know they’re in their own heads and they’re they’re always thinking about themselves and usually about how terrible they are so there’s a strange paradox there where you know they’re investing a huge amount in their ego that’s why depression is referred to sometimes as being this kind of narcissistic disorder because they’re so self-consumed, you know, whereas with psychedelics, you know, you could break down that process and this, you know, this experience of disturbed ego boundaries could, you know, may well be part of how psychedelics can be useful therapeutically.
1:17:40 You know, I’m really torn because like part of me wants to say, if you not to wait for Robin to do all this research for 20 years for the clinics to come and to go down to Peru and do what you have to do but then the other part of me doesn’t want to you know screw it all up when we have a real chance here to make some changes in medicine. I don’t know how do you feel about this? I don’t know I think there is a lot of merit in having the experiences of these things yourself now but you know it’s really we’ve got to be careful not to tread on the toes of the actual real scientific evidence here and we don’t I want to sort of mess up that.
1:18:15 I think if the things like the procedures that are happening in South America, if they’re done responsibly and that there aren’t these kind of false shamans and such, then that will really help. But I was just worried by an article I read online recently about negative experiences with ayahuasca and some quite worrying things. There is a tendency in the media to be kind of alarmist and to make things up. But… Just like they do with ecstasy.
1:18:51 Exactly. With all of these drugs. It’s that one anecdotal evidence that now you’re reading. Well, because the experience is so odd, it’s easy to be sensationalist about it. And so, you know, you have to be cautious about what you’re reading and whether it’s true, But this article did have an air of credibility about it, I mean it wasn’t in a silly newspaper or anything like that.
1:19:16 And so I just think there’s something to be a little bit cautious about around that. But it’s certainly a dilemma, if you run well, if things aren’t working for you, if other treatments aren’t working for you, what do you do, where do you go? It’s a difficult one. It’s tough to break out of a rigid thought pattern, isn’t it, without something that really shock you out of it. It’s not something that you can, but then, but then an alternative may be something like meditation. So that’s, that’s really taking off as a, as a kind of treatment for depression, this mindfulness approach, but Terence McKenna once said that he’s like, you see people going to the temples to meditate and you don’t see their knees knocking together. And he’s like, I guarantee you, if you take 10 grams of psilocybin mushrooms, you’re going to get there. Well, it’s easy to have a altered perception experience with psychedelics, it’s hard to do it without in meditation. And what I’ve learned just on my journey is it’s not about the Iowa school or the psilocybin, it’s about the state of mind, these substances allow you to interact with. And I think they can be done in meditation and I do have a lot of success in myself just being in meditation.
1:20:27 Do you think there’s often too much times a focus on the substance itself and not a to focus on what it’s giving you, do you think with ayahuasca sometimes it’s focused a lot on the substance or the shaman when you really should focus on the experience? Sure, I think for sure, I mean for me the core experience with the psychedelics has always been about reconnecting with nature and that’s always been something that’s just been a hugely positive outcome of the psychedelics and just promoting more compassion towards other people and yeah, I kind of found it wasn’t really about the ayahuasca, the ayahuasca just helps you open up your heart and really what’s important is the communities behind this that are sort of bringing about these I guess more tribal influences in culture where it’s much more about sharing and community which is a big aspect we’ve lost in our current modern culture. So I think that is that’s what’s most important. Fair enough. I mean before we wrap up I just wanted to ask Robin is there anything that people listening out there can do to I don’t know to help facilitate this research I mean do we have to vote for the politicians are gonna push this forward or is there anything as a public that we can do that that helps you do your work you know if people believe in it? I mean there are there are bodies that fund the research there’s maps. Who funds your research by the way? Someone asked me that. I mean the depression
1:21:48 Study that we’ve got started is funded by the Medical Research Council so that was a major result for us to get essentially kind of you know real support, you know. So that’s a government body? It is, yeah. Okay. Yeah, and again it was a situation where it was the science that spoke out and that gave the application the credibility. I mean David and David Nutt and myself were struck by the reviews that we had on that application because they were incredibly positive.
1:22:21 Okay. So yeah, there’s the MRC but then there’s also private bodies like the the Beckley Foundation in the UK, who do incredible work supporting research in consciousness and reviews of drug policy. So they’re the major UK-based body. And then there’s the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, fortunately called MAPS, who are the US body. And they fund and really get involved in active research with psychedelics.
1:22:55 That’s who you interviewed in New York, right? Yes, they’re Rick Doblin, the founder of Maps. They’re often, you know, fundraising. It’s difficult. The other way is through academia to try and get involved in the research itself.
1:23:10 It’s very hard to do. I kind of got lucky I was in the right place at the right time. Does big pharma not want you doing this research? That’s a good question. There will be some opposition to it, but then there are problems in the pharmaceutical industry at the moment in psychiatry so the drugs that were making companies a lot of money are now becoming available to all companies so they’re losing their patent and also there’s very few new medications coming through there’s very few you know new antidepressants for instance and this old model of chronic medication or, you know, ongoing medication for psychiatric disorders is kind of losing its appeal a bit.
1:24:00 And so I do think there’s a potential gap in the market for drugs that could be what’s referred to as adjuncts or kind of facilitators of psychotherapy. So they work in combination with psychotherapy, and this is what these psychedelic drugs do. That’s the model. You know? Are these drugs unpatentable?
1:24:24 I mean, if I’m Glaxo, well, if I’m Glaxo, how come I’m not doing this DMT research, this psilocybin research, DMDMA research? In terms of the potential money that they can make from it, I mean, one limitation is that the drugs would only be given on a small number of occasions. So that would limit their potential kind of marketing value. Crafty. Yeah.
1:24:49 But equally, depression, for instance, is an incredibly difficult thing to treat. And the present treatments are limited. And there is a gap there. There is a need for new treatments that really are very different to anything else. And so I think it probably will happen that industry will get involved in this, because my own feeling is that the evidence will speak for itself.
1:25:25 The efficacy will be shown. I imagine, actually, that it’s going to be shown to be, I mean, this might be sort of, I should be cautious about how effective the treatments are shown to be. but my feeling is that they are gonna be found to be really quite effective. Me too, highly effective, I think. And potentially, if you prove that MDMA, psilocybin, DMT can be very effective in infrequent doses in these people, I mean, let’s be honest, you’re potentially costing this industry not billions of dollars, tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue.
1:25:59 Yeah, I mean, if people no longer go with chronic medications, But, I mean, they do have an efficacy, approved efficacy in depression. It’s just that some patients don’t respond to them. Do you look underneath your car before you turn on the ignition? No. I now feel concerned about your safety.
1:26:20 Well, is it a dangerous position? I don’t know, there should be that much opposition because there is a gap, there is a need for it. And if there is a need, if medications, available medications are only so effective, And there’s a lot of people who are just, you know, have this refractory depression, this stubborn depression that’s not responding to anything. Then they need something. And so- Like the classic serotonin re-up into inhibitors.
1:26:46 Yeah, yeah, they only work for half a patient, say, yeah. And so there is a big market there. And then as the depression becomes more difficult to treat then the treatments become more severe, you know. So you’ll have things like, you know, more potent medications and also procedures like electroconvulsive therapy, which is, you know, still a controversial treatment. And so there is a place for new treatments, And yeah, if they’re shown to be effective, then industry will probably get involved.
1:27:31 I imagine they will. I think your treatments are going to be shown to be highly effective. And I think in the next five or 10 years, this is going to be commonplace. Just, you know, I know that’s just, I know I don’t have any scientific methods for that, but just on my own personal experience, I just think this is going to be, it almost seems blatantly obvious to me. Well, there’s plenty of suggestive evidence.
1:27:49 So we have things like the John Hopkins work, which is showing that people from just single experiences are having lasting improvements in their sense of well-being. Then there’s some of the published work around end-stage cancer and anxiety around end-stage cancer, which is also showing that there’s lasting improvements in mood. So depression scores were significantly decreased six months after again just a single treatment with psilocybin. So there is good suggestive evidence. There’s also our neuroimaging work which shows that brain systems which are over engaged in depression are suppressed with psilocybin.
1:28:42 So all this is strong support. Really I think that’s why we won the MRC grant because it was hard to argue with it okay wow I wish there were 20 of you out there in all the cities around the world I mean I just I really like the research you’re doing I think you’re a great spokesperson for the whole study so you know I’m just really glad you’re doing this sounds like is this gonna be your life’s work you gonna be doing this for the next 20-30 years I do love it I can tell how long how can people get a hold of you if you know I don’t think you’re on Twitter but what’s the best way for them to contact you or or let you know what you’re doing is right. I know you’ve got a couple of videos on Vimeo, which I’m gonna post as links, but do you want them to get ahold of you?
1:29:25 How can Big Pharma get ahold of you? Well, I don’t know. I mean, if people wanna get in touch with me, they can through you guys, maybe, yeah. Okay, well, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.
1:29:37 I know this isn’t your typical media outlet, but thanks so much for coming on. Thanks a lot, I enjoyed it. Alexander if people want to watch some of your interviews that you did with it with the maps founder, etc, etc How do they watch your work? so they can just type warty works into YouTube, which is my personal account review or just wartyworks.co.uk and you’ll have all the photos on my website there I could do as much you got all the videos and all that stuff coming soon Awesome. All right. Excellent. Thank you for the question from from reddit I’m gonna be doing more of that in the future just to get a little more interaction and And thanks to the guys at Hover, they’re a domain name registration company.
1:30:15 They sponsor all of our podcasts. When we talk about things like Iowaska and Psilocybin and MDMA, so I gotta say thanks to those guys because they bear with us in all of our controversial topics. So, I appreciate that. If you guys wanna find us and you’re listening to us, we’re on a YouTube channel, London Real TV, and we’re on Twitter, Facebook. Come find us.
1:30:36 And that’s it. Thanks so much, Alex, Andrew, for coming back.
