Gabor Mate - Why You Are Addicted

Full transcript: Gabor Mate on London Real

4:52 One-of-a-kind Dr. Gabor Maté. Hey, this is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr.

5:54 Gabor Maté, the renowned speaker and best-selling author who specializes in neurology, psychology and psychiatry, as well as the study and treatment of addiction. You were featured in the movie The Culture High by our friend Adam Scorgie, and your four best-selling books explore the topics of attention deficit disorder, stress, developmental psychology and addiction. You spent 12 years in downtown Vancouver in clinics treating patients challenged by hardcore drug use, mental illness and HIV, and you’ve used the plant medicine ayahuasca for addiction treatment.

6:23 Dr. Maté, welcome to London Real. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure having you here. I think we’ve been trying to get you here for years, so it’s great to have you in London.

6:33 So much to talk about. I figured I might just jump in on that last part, because you were really in the trenches in downtown Vancouver and you saw what I think most people don’t see. I think we see the Hollywood version of what addiction looks like, or we see what we’d like to think it is, but you saw what it really is, and I was wondering if you could tell us what you saw and what you learned in that period and what you can tell us about it. The Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of the world’s ground zeroes for addiction, and in a few square block radius we have thousands of people injecting, inhaling and ingesting drugs of all kinds and paying dearly for it.

7:18 These people are often outside the law, certainly beset by many medical problems due to injection drug use, including psychosis, including HIV, including hepatitis C, cancers, death of overdoses, and there’s also some very innovative services in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. So it’s really trench warfare, if you like, if the social thing is a war on drugs, which is another subject. This is trench warfare, and the people that are the frontline soldiers dying from it are the people affected by addiction.

8:00 So that’s where I worked for 12 years. Okay. And what I… what I learned could be summed up really very briefly by saying that addiction is not a choice that anybody makes. It’s not a moral failure, it’s not an ethical lapse, it’s not a weakness of character, it’s not a failure of will, which is our society… which is how our society depicts addiction.

8:23 Nor is it an inherited brain disease, which is how the medical tendency is to see it, but it actually is… it’s a response to human suffering. And all these people that I worked with had been severely traumatized as children. All the women had been sexually abused, all the men had been traumatized, some of them sexually, physically, emotionally neglected. And not only is that my perspective, it’s also what the scientific and research literature shows.

8:51 So addiction then is actually, rather than being a disease as such or a human choice, it actually is… it’s an attempt to escape suffering temporarily. That’s what I learned. How long did it take you before you figured that out? Well, by the time I went to work there, I had already been in family practice for 20 years. I’d seen a lot, and I was quite attuned to the impact of early childhood experiences on adult psychology and adult brain physiology, but I just hadn’t seen the depth and the degree until I went to work down there.

9:29 So really it… it dramatized and confirmed for me, made it very palpable, how addiction is our response to suffering and that what people need in response to addiction is not judgment and not simply symptom control. They need to be helped to heal from their trauma, because it is all about trauma. And what makes you, you know, at age 60 plus, walk away from a family practice and go down into the trenches? I mean, I’ve heard stories, but you’re really down there where it’s, you know, heavy hardcore drug use and you’re dealing with a lot of emotional trauma as well.

10:09 Well, so, uh, it’s not as romantic as it is, all that. You know, first of all, I do have ADD myself, which means that people, they want to move on, they do other things, you know, like you do one thing for a while, then you want to just get on and move into a different area. So that’s one general tendency that I do have, and even within family practice I would always choose different areas to get interested in: child development, palliative care and so on.

10:37 Number one. Number two, one goes into medicine at least partially inspired to ease the suffering of humanity, and in Canada there’s no greater realm of suffering than what I, in my book on the subject of addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts… There’s no greater realm of suffering than the realm of a ghost, which is that of addiction, where people are forever trying to fill this emptiness inside. So if one is interested in alleviating suffering, it’s a natural area to gravitate to.

11:12 And then the work is very interesting. It’s just interesting work and you meet interesting people. These are sensitive, interesting people whose tragedy is that their sensitivity was trampled on by the world. And then there’s the personal angle, that really it doesn’t matter how hopelessly hooked on heroin a client of mine was, and I never was a substance addict, but I could certainly see myself in all of my clients. I have the same hungriness, the same hunger.

11:44 I can be beset by the same emptiness, same desperation, same desire to fill myself from the outside. I just had more respectable ways of doing it. Respectable addiction with respect to addictions. Yeah. So in other words, I saw the resonance between myself and my clients, so that made it very comfortable for me to work with them.

12:01 Can you walk me through what, like, a typical day was, or a bad day down there? I mean, when you walk in, what are the types of people you see, the things they’re doing, and what might I be surprised? Because in most people’s mind it’s that, you know, bad Hollywood movie, it’s that TV show that showed that thing, and I… I found from my experiences that most of those, most those are completely wrong for what these people look like or what these situations look like.

12:28 The media, the television, cultural depiction of addicts is usually as desperate people, but without showing why they’re desperate. So all this shows is the desperation for the drugs. There’s no indication of what’s driving that desperation, and hence you see them behaving in all kinds of dysfunctional ways, aggressive or manipulative or unpleasant, but, but again there’s no three-dimensional sense of the reality of these people, as to what that’s really all about for them.

13:07 Let me ask about a bad day. A bad day is like happened in Vancouver maybe six weeks ago, when something like close to a dozen people died within a day or two of overdoses. That’s a really bad day. And we could talk about how it’s not a question of the drugs themselves being responsible for the overdoses, but actually social policy that creates the overdoses, but maybe it’s part of a broader conversation. But a bad day, people die.

13:40 A bad day, people come in with severe illnesses, bone infections or infections of their heart valves or their brains because of their injection drug use. So a bad day is simply when you see a lot of suffering, but that’s pretty much par for the course when you work in that area. And so, paradoxically, if you think that’s bad, don’t work there, because you’re going to get burned out very, very quickly. If you’re going to put yourself in that area to work with people, you just have to accept that this is what happens, and your job is to help elevate and, if possible, prevent suffering.

14:21 Is it possible to cure these people, whatever that means, or get them to stop using drugs or prevent, alleviate… Wrong question. Is it possible to cure people? You’re speaking from the Western model where I am the expert and you’re the one with the disease, and I’m gonna cure you, like you cure a piece of meat, you know. No, the answer to that question framed that way is no, it’s not possible.

14:53 If you’re asking, is it possible for people to heal from trauma sufficiently that they don’t have to keep escaping into addictions to lessen the suffering of the trauma? Yes, that’s entirely possible. But the question is, under what conditions is that possible? And under the conditions that obtain in London, UK, or Vancouver, British Columbia, or New York, New York, or any place, under the conditions that obtain socially, legally and from the perspective of medical practice, it’s hardly a likelihood, because we’re approaching it from the wrong direction and with the wrong perspective.

15:37 I think you once said that if you were able to… I won’t say the word cure again, but… prevent them from relapsing to addiction again, even five percent of your patients, you would be lauded as, you know, an incredible genius. As in, that would be amazing? Yeah.

15:51 If I could constantly demonstrate that with this particular population I could affect the five or ten percent success rate of getting people to leave the addictions behind, I’d be considered to be a genius, because our results are so poor. When I say ours, I mean are specifically in Vancouver. I don’t mean that, I mean the overall treatment model for addiction is so poor in succeeding with the most affected segments of the population. Right. So I mean, addictions are like everything else, on a spectrum.

16:26 So a lot of people do heal from addictions, but the most inveterate, most entrenched addicts, they have the hardest time, and they’re also the ones whom society gives the hardest time, so that it makes it even harder to help them. Right, so they’re the ones that are vilified more because of their intensity and their behavior, and then they don’t get the help they need. Well, never mind they don’t get the help they need, they actually get actively punished.

16:51 And so what you’ve actually got is traumatized children. When children are traumatized, that affects how they feel about themselves, which is deeply ashamed, because the child always believes that it’s about himself. So if I’m being hurt like this, I got to be a terrible person, or if I was sexually abused, why didn’t I fight back? I must be a very weak person. So there’s a deep sense of shame.

17:21 Then there’s tremendous emotional pain that occurs from abuse and neglect, tremendous emotional pain that is hardly possible for people to bear. Now they have to soothe their pain with substances, rather, compulsive behaviors. Then the trauma itself, given that the human brain develops in interaction with the environment, shapes the brain circuitry in such a way that the person will be more likely to find relief from the drugs. So the very physiology of the brain is affected by early trauma.

17:55 So then you take these traumatized people and you make their habit illegal. It’s not illegal to drink yourself to death. It’s not illegal to make yourself sick with emphysema or lung cancer by means of cigarettes, but it is illegal to use other substances. So now you take these abused, traumatized people, you place them outside the law, you put them in jails, then you hound them all their lives, treating them like criminals and bad people and failures and rejects and… and… and less than human, and then we wonder how come they don’t get better.

18:42 So it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of taking traumatized people and then re-traumatizing them and then hoping at the same time, why don’t they listen, why don’t they get better already, why don’t they give it up? Well, they don’t give it up because the more hurt they are, the more they need to escape. You once said that in order to understand some of these people, look at the reason they took the drugs in the first place, and that that’s kind of the key.

19:15 Yeah. And what are some of those reasons? Well, I mean, can I ask you a personal question? Of course. Yeah, so I’ll define addiction for you.

19:23 Okay. A standard, non-controversial definition. So addiction is manifested in any behavior that a person craves, finds temporary pleasure or relief in, but then experiences negative consequences in the long term and doesn’t give up. So craving, relief, pleasure short-term, long-term negative consequence, inability to give it up. That’s what addiction is.

19:49 I said any behavior, I didn’t say drugs. Could be drugs. So I’m going to ask you now, by that definition, Brian, have you ever done addictive behavior in your life? Yes, many. Okay.

20:00 So I’m not going to ask you what, when or for how long. I just want to ask you, what did you like about it? What did it do for you? It gave me temporary relief from the pain I was feeling, usually related to interacting with my fellow humans. Okay.

20:16 Or how I felt doing that. Okay. So you had the emotional pain that was triggered for you by interaction with people, and maybe even with being myself as well, how you experience yourself. I think I wanted to get away from this. You weren’t comfortable in your own skin.

20:30 I think so, yeah. Okay, fair enough. In other words, the addiction provided pain relief for you temporarily. Yes. Now, as a spiritual teacher said, addictions all begin in pain and end in pain, but we’re talking about the beginnings now.

20:46 In other words, the addiction wasn’t your problem. Your problem is that you had a lot of emotional pain, you didn’t know what to do with it, so the addiction was really an attempt to solve a problem. So when you say, why do people use substances or why do they engage in addiction in general, it’s because they have a problem they don’t know what to do with, and if you really understand their addiction, like with yourself, we have to ask, well, what gave you so much emotional pain, and how come you didn’t have the internal resources?

21:13 This is not a judgment, it’s simply an inquiry. How come you lacked at some point the internal resources to deal with that pain in a more creative, forward-looking way that would help you resolve the pain rather than perpetuate it? So really, really what it was is that the addiction came along to help you solve a problem you had no other solutions for at the time, and that’s the case for all addictions. So why do people use, why do people engage in addictions?

21:39 Because they have deep emotional problems they don’t have the means to resolve on their own. That’s why they use. Okay. And nobody could then… how come someone couldn’t help me figure this out? Well, that’s why I write my books.

21:52 Okay. Because… because the… because I’ll tell you why, because I’m here in London speaking at a conference on trauma, and the average medical student, I don’t know how many doctors you saw, but the average medical student until very recently has never even heard the word trauma in their education. It doesn’t show up. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about its impact on the brain, on the personality and on the emotional life of people, on its impact on people’s physical health.

22:22 It’s not a word that we mentioned. We’re trauma phobic, as a fellow doctor said to me. The medical profession is trauma phobic. So they leave that to the psychiatrist or psychologist. My god, the psychiatrists are the last people they leave it to.

22:35 Okay. That’s the whole other subject, because psychiatrists these days are trained mostly in this biological model of psychiatry, where everything comes down to a biological brain disease, here, let’s give you a pill. The last thing most psychiatrists know how to talk about is actually emotional pain or its urgency in human experience. Okay. You think they know how to do that, but they don’t.

22:59 They’re not trained in it. It’s not part of the predominant medical ideology. And you know, as a physician I can tell you, we like to think of medicine as a science, and it has certainly great scientific achievements to its credit and great scientific insights to buttress its successes, but it’s as much an ideology as a science, and ideology has certain hidden assumptions that are hidden from the people that believe in ideology. And so that if something is excluded by ideology, you just won’t see it.

23:38 And so that you can be talking to somebody about your addiction and the simple question, what did they do for you, and how come you’re in so much emotional pain doesn’t occur to anybody you know, trained in a classical manner. Now this is true not just for physicians, it’s true for a lot of psychologists as well, who are more interested in solving your problems and getting you to overcome the behavior than in asking, well okay, where does behavior come from and what are you still carrying inside that’s making you behave that way, and how can we help you resolve what’s inside you, not just how we help you change your behavior, but how do we help you change? Now that’s what healing is, and that happens inside a person.

24:27 So it’s never a question of anybody curing anybody else, but we can guide people to healing if we ask the right questions. Okay. And sometimes give them the right treatments, can help them, guide them? Yes, and yes. And there’s a whole range now of… not panaceas, because there’s no one treatment that works for everybody, but once we understand the origins of something in trauma, then there’s a whole panoply of treatments that can work for different sets of people.

25:01 Okay. But first you have to recognize the problem. So let me go a little deeper on what I was thinking about when it came to my addictions. Sure. So from basically the age of 18 to 38, in my opinion, I was probably a functional alcoholic.

25:17 I drank every day. Okay. And again, now that I look back at it, I’ve had a little wisdom doing London Real the last few years, and I’ll tell you a little more why. I think I was getting away from me, who I think was driving me to be the ultimate best at what he does, and I’ll get to that shortly. I’m very smart, I know that this was a stupid behavior, it was a temporary fix that I usually paid for dearly the next day and repeatedly paid for, and yet because of my resolve or whatever, I managed to, you know, eke out what most people would call a successful life.

25:56 And the more I did it, the more I think my self-esteem dropped a little bit, because I couldn’t control this about myself, whereas I could find success, whatever that means, in other aspects of my life. And so it was until I started doing this show and I had a first ayahuasca ceremony that I was like, okay, now I’m going into a realm I’m not familiar with. It was scary, but I… part of me knew there was something there, and I had my second ayahuasca ceremony, and while we’re being so honest, I was pretty much right here at the time on a sofa, and I distinctly remember laying down on this sofa after I had the plant medicine and I was crying so much that the tears were going down my eyes and dripping down off my ears, and I still remember the tears dripping off my ears, and I was going back, I was visualizing a seven-year-old boy, and this was me when my parents divorced, and this was this little boy that was building up all these walls around him because he had been hurt so much, and so for me it was like, no one’s getting in the rest of my life.

27:02 And maybe, based on what I’ve read about your stuff, my… was it my… my attempting to excel in the world was to show the world that they needed me, you know, as so maybe that’s why I went to MIT and got the job in banking, these kinds of things. And so seeing that in that ceremony just showed me how I would just shut off from the world, and I think that brought on more pain and more judgment on myself, and so from then on I kind of tried to make sure that I kind of opened my heart up to a lot of these things and also to try to reconnect to this world that I couldn’t connect to earlier. So that was kind of my story.

27:41 Well, it’s an archetypical story. Yeah. So first of all, you’re hurt as a child and then you have to compensate for it. So you compensate in two ways. One is by becoming a success, and like I said about myself, when you get the message when you’re a young child that the world doesn’t want you and need you, then one great way to deal with it is to go to medical school, because now they’re gonna need you all the time.

28:05 Right? And the more they need you, the more positive feedback you get, the more you get sucked into it. Right? But as for your success, quote-unquote, and mine, success, quote-unquote, there’s a subtext, which is a real niggling, not even spoken, but definite fear inside: do they really want me, or is it what I’m doing for them that they want? So this is where the hunger comes from.

28:37 You can never get enough, because by doing you’ll never be satisfied when your hunger is about being and not having been accepted just for being. No, that’s one way to compensate, when despite all your best efforts and your successes and your ability to impress people, the gnawing pain still shows up. Now you use something to soothe the pain. And what do you say about somebody who drinks too much, by the way? There’s an old expression, it’s someone just like you.

29:10 No, it’s someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you. Yeah, yeah, you know, fair enough. No, but this is… it’s more specific. When somebody’s drunk too much, they used to be all saying they’re feeling no pain. Okay, they’re feeling the pain.

29:23 Well, that’s exactly what it’s about. Right. Now look, in terms of what you said about escape from yourself, Keith Richards, who as you know had a ferocious heroin habit for a while, in his book Life, his autobiography, he says, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s very close, he says, the contortions we go through just not to be ourselves for a few hours. And that discomfort with the self origin is back to being seven-year-old, and even younger than seven, because the divorce happened when you were seven, but your parents were miserable and happy with each other for years before then, otherwise they wouldn’t have got divorced.

30:01 And guess what that misery was all about in your mind? It’s all about you, me, because children interpret the world in those narcissistic ways, that whatever happens is because of me. So you failed to make your parents happy, and of course you’re uncomfortable with yourself, not to mention the more sensitive a child is, the more he or she absorbs the stresses and tensions and upsets of their parents. That’s a lot to deal with, and it’s a lot to deal with especially when there’s nobody there to talk to about it, who can actually listen to how you feel and validate your emotions and give you some support.

30:47 Then you just develop this idea that I got to do it all myself, on my own, and this drives a lot of people, a lot of successful people in our society. That’s what they’re driven by. So that by the standards of a materialistic world, success looks a certain way, but look at the internal life of those people. You know, they think the world is a horrible place. I’m quoting Donald Trump.

31:15 He said the world is a horrible place. That’s the world he lives in. He lives in a world that’s a horrible place. How would you like to live in a world that’s a horrible place? It doesn’t matter how many billions you have, it doesn’t matter what powers you’ve accrued.

31:28 How would you like to live in a world that’s a horrible place? No. Why does he see it that way? Because he was a traumatized kid. His father was a rage-a-holic, demanding, demeaning, emotionally abusive person.

31:44 His brother drank himself to death. Trump is a huge success who lives in a horrible world. When you look at the lives of successful people, the billionaires, the CEOs, do you see the very same pattern recognition as the addicts you treat in downtown Vancouver? Very often, when I’ve studied the lives of some of them in depth, very often I… I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of people I’ve looked at have been that way.

32:15 And well, the only thing that’s different is the addiction is played out in, like mine was and maybe yours was, I’m not talking about the drinking, but I’m talking about the success and, you know, in a financial world that you may have had. The successes represent addictive drives whose negative impact in the world is tremendous. You know, who creates more suffering: somebody who sells an ounce of heroin to somebody else to feed their own habit, or somebody who destroys the Amazon forest for some financial gain?

32:56 Which addict causes the more problems in the world? So it’s very economically, socioeconomically defined as to what success is, and who’s the addict, and who we need to really look at. Talk to me about what you think about, say, North America’s relationship with drugs. Does it go back to some Puritan sense where we don’t want to allow ourselves pleasure to some extent? Is that where a lot of this whole battle in the mind that then becomes manifested as a war against drugs, etc., etc., whereas other cultures maybe are more allowing of that, maybe they’re more open to that?

33:43 How do you view it? Because it doesn’t seem to make sense. Well, when you say North Americans, I don’t see much difference throughout the Western world, actually. Okay. It’s fairly universal.

33:54 The so-called war on drugs, and again my mantra about that is there’s no war on drugs, because you can’t make war on inanimate objects. There’s a war on drug addicts. In other words, we’re warring on the most traumatized segments of the population, and that’s true as much here in Britain as it is in France or United States. Oh no, United States of course leads the world, so as we know, the world’s population, four or five percent of the world’s population are Americans, 25% of the world’s jail population are Americans.

34:26 So every fifth person in the world in jail is a citizen of the land of the free, and there is reasons for that, but pleasure seeking is hardly it, because there’s no more hedonistic society than the United States. I mean, you know, the the desperation to experience pleasure, the pursuit of happiness, as a pursuit, as if happiness was something external to you that you could pursue. I mean, that’s an interesting phrase right there. Yeah. The pursuit of happiness.

34:57 But maybe that sets the landscape from the beginning. Of course. I mean, the Buddha wouldn’t say that. No, he wouldn’t say that at all. Okay.

35:04 But pleasure seeking and the rejection of pleasure seeking, it may play some role in certain people’s attitude, but it’s not what drives it overall. Actually, if you look at it historically, it has very much a racial tinge to it. United States, minority peoples are much more likely to be arrested and charged with and convicted of drug charges than other people. For the possession of the same chemical, a black person will get 10 times the jail sentence that a white person will, for example cocaine.

35:49 Yeah, depending on which form. Yeah, you know, there’s a wonderful film I saw recently on Netflix called The 13th, which is the 13th Amendment, which is that slavery is outlawed. You can’t benefit from people’s coarse labor unless they’re criminals. That’s the 13th. And the minute… okay, so after the Civil War, when they could no longer use black slaves, now they created black criminals and then they could use them in the chain gangs, and it follows that whole miserable history up till recently.

36:30 And so I think it’s very complex in the States, but racial politics has a lot to do with that. So does pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical control. It’s a highly medicated society, but we just like the medications to be dispensed by people who can make profits of it. So it’s the most medicated society in the history of the world and certainly in the world today. So that does… many, many reasons, but the deepest reason I think is the denial of pain.

37:23 We’re a society that denies the pain that this society causes. Right. So on the one hand we engender pain. Look, I was riding the YouTube… and not YouTube, sorry, that’s an interesting phrase. I was doing the Tube in London today.

37:38 Yeah, not the YouTube. And reading the Metro, it’s locally published free paper. Yeah, free paper. On the second page, two items right next to each other. The one is that there’s a new British study that says that something like 65 percent of Britons had suffered some kind of emotional crisis or problem in their lifetime, some kind of mental health issue, panic attacks, depression, something, a new survey by one organization or another.

38:09 So next to those details is a little news item about the Queen who’s telling her family not to talk so much about their mental health problems and that their job should be to open ceremonial events, you know, cut the ribbons at museums and bridges and throw champagne bottles at ships, I suppose, but let’s not talk about mental health issues in the royal family, because apparently the grandchildren, is that Prince Harry, recently talked about his depression and anxiety that arose from what the traumatic childhood that he had. Right. Why do you have a traumatic childhood?

38:47 Because his mother died when he was very young, because his father and mother both had extramarital affairs, because they grew up in a terribly stressed household. Of course they’re traumatized, and so he does this fairly brave thing to talk about it, and Grandma comes along and says, uh-uh, just open museums, don’t open your heart. So that I’m saying that we’re living in a society that denies pain. Stiff upper lip and all that. Right, which just perpetuates the problem, which exacerbates it.

39:23 Right. Yeah. And when you look at the way we treat our drug addicts, it’s by the way we run our society, and so it’s, you know, these people economically they’re in an economic prison, is the way you’re talking about the 13th Amendment, and yet we wonder why later they become addicts, and then we still don’t know what to do with them and treat them poorly, and this cycle continues. Well, in Canada they… as in other former British colonies, which population suffers most from addiction is the Aboriginal population.

39:59 So in Vancouver Downtown Eastside, 30% of our clients were First Nations, Aboriginal Canadian origins. They make up five percent of the population. Same thing in Australia. Why? Because under colonialism, under the benign wings of the British Empire, the colonials, the Aboriginals were, had to be displaced, their culture had to be literally destroyed, and their self image had to be transferred, transformed into a totally negative one.

40:37 So they have the most pain, and of course the pain wasn’t just induced by the colon enterprise hundreds of years ago, it was reinforced by policies that reflected that until very, very recently, in fact maybe even until today. So they’re the most hurt segment of the population, naturally they’re the most addictive segment of the population, so that to deal with that we’d have to look at ourselves and say, well, what kind of society are we that engenders so much pain in vulnerable people and then punishes them for that desperation to escape from their pain? So those questions that pertain to addictions actually involve the very nature of the society that we live in and what we value and what we reward and what we ostracize.

41:31 These are hard questions. I’m saying they’re genuinely hard questions. Yeah. And so it’s easier not to look at them. What comments do you usually get from people when you drop this kind of science on them, you know, because it’s a, you know, it points… look at this problem, and it’s a, it comes right back to you and the way you behave towards all of these people and what perpetuating it?

41:56 Well, see, I don’t hear too much from the people that disagree with me. I mean, I do every once in a while, but it’s kind of self-selected. The people that read my books, they’re bestsellers in Canada and my book on addiction is in the top two or three best-selling books on addiction in the States, according to Amazon. Anyway, in other words, they have a lot of success. The Canadian Minister of Health is tweeting about the book now.

42:27 You know, and so that I get a lot of positive feedback. Now the people that don’t agree with me so much, they don’t come and hear me talk. Why would they want to? So it’s a self-selected audience, I suppose, that reads my books and comes to hear me address these issues, so I don’t hear too much negative feedback. What mostly happens with this perspective is that it’s not covered in the mainstream media.

42:58 They don’t want to hear about trauma and pain. This is true certainly here in England, it’s also true in North America. Why is that? Don’t we love a good trauma story? We love a good terrorist story.

43:12 How come we don’t love a good trauma story? Because in the terror story we’re the victims. We love being the victim. So that’s an interesting analogy, by the way. So yesterday my wife and I walked near Parliament buildings and on that bridge where that so-called terrorist attack happened.

43:27 I don’t think it was a terrorist attack. It was a terrible terrorizing event, but by my definition of terrorism, which is really an organized group setting it up and all that, was sounding like some very disaffected, yeah, fairly emotionally disturbed person. That’s what it was, who bought into a certain kind of ideology and used that as an excuse to vent his hatred on innocents, you know. Yeah, he probably had a trauma and maybe he was, I’m sure. You know, so there’s such a thing as terrorism, but I don’t think that was it, but we like to talk about it, because then we get to be victims and we get to be self-righteous.

44:04 Now what we don’t have to look at… I mean, I was in a bookstore today. I bought a book on Charles Darwin, looks to be interesting, but there was a book by an Indian writer from India and I forget the title now, but I’m rambling of it, but if you indulge me for a moment, yesterday I was walking into Trafalgar Square and there was a statue of, and I forget which British general, Nelson, the big tall one? No, I don’t mean Nelson. Okay, Nelson.

44:38 I mean, one of the ones was Viceroy in India. Okay. And he he led the British forces against the Sepoy Rebellion, one of these attempts by the Indians to rise up against their oppressors, against their colonial masters, and glorified for a master king, Indians who just wanted to be free in their own country. I’m talking about from India. So and I was thinking, I was saying to my wife, I just wonder how the average Indian tourist to Britain feels about that statue.

45:11 So yesterday, so today I’m in a bookstore and there’s a book by an Indian writer about Inglorious Empire, maybe the title, I forget, what the British did to India. Now I’m talking about terrorism broadly speaking. If you look at the areas of the world where the terrorism emanates from, how many hundreds of thousands of them have been killed by Western bombs going back to the 1910s, and the, you know, the 8 million Congolese that were killed by the Belgians.

45:45 Do we even know about it? You know, the the tens of thousands and by now hundreds of thousands of Arabs who’ve been killed by Western arms in their own countries. In other words, I’m not saying that therefore we justify terrorism or we don’t protect against it, but I am saying, are we really interested in understanding the source of it, or do we just want to be victims? And how would our response be different if we actually were actually going to the trouble of informing ourselves of what creates people like that and what has been our role in creating people like that now as human beings, and this includes me, it may include you.

46:38 We have a hard time looking at ourselves. So when I’m in a conflict with my spouse, it’s so much easier for me to see myself as the victim. It happened today, you know, and rather than, well, what am I actually doing here personally, like when there’s what… what I’m… what am I, what am I doing, how am I being, what is my stance, what is my body language, what are my words that help to create this situation? That’s just hard for people.

47:11 Psychology, that’s hard for people, and this is true personally, it’s true politically, and it’s true when it comes to addiction or any other issue. Right. So you kind of have to try to be selfless, look at it, try to look at it objectively. We have to look at it objectively, and objectively means not just from our own point of view, but actually from the point of view of everyone involved. And so then especially, especially if we talk about addicts, addicted people, well, what is their point of view?

47:43 What is their experience? What is their actual experience? And then how do we help them, you know, how do we help ourselves, actually. Trauma, childhood trauma, if I play devil’s advocate, can I not say that there will always be childhood trauma, and can I also not say that if you dig back far enough you can always find some traumatic event that could explain an addiction? Well, so first of all, yeah, you could say that there’ll always be trouble.

48:15 You’d say, until we have a perfect world, which I’m not expecting to witness anytime soon, we’ll always have trauma. Yes, we will. But what’s behind that question? Like I’m asking you, so what, what would you say, why are you asking me that? I guess I’m asking that because I want to know if we want to make this world better and we want to reduce this trauma, to maybe ease the suffering and create fewer addicts, I’m wanting to know, is it possible?

48:48 Well, sure. If you don’t know if it’s possible, the answer is yes, it’s possible. Will it happen anytime soon? No, it won’t. But is it possible?

48:58 Yes, it is, by understanding something. When you understand something, it’s possible to prevent it and to heal it, but first we have to understand. Now you want to prevent addiction. The problem is saying there’ll always be trauma, it’s kind of, maybe didn’t imply it, but there’s often an implied resignation about it, or or so what. Not everybody who’s traumatized gets addicted, which is true.

49:28 You know, but if you’re looking at a seven-year-old Brian who’s crying, crying because his parents are getting divorced and he’s bewildered and whatever else you’re going through, and you’re telling me as a seven-year-old how much it hurts, how compassionate or helpful would it be on my part to come up to you and say, well listen, kid, you think this is bad, think of the starving millions in India, and there will always be trauma, get over it, you know, and sometimes that phrase “there’ll always be trauma” is used in that sense. I get that that’s not what you mean, but this is why I’m going to ask you where you’re coming from. Now if you’re asking is it possible to prevent, yes, and how you do that is you start preventing addiction at the first prenatal visit when a woman is pregnant, because we know that already the stresses that a pregnant woman undergoes has a negative impact on the infant in the womb.

50:32 In the world? Yeah, because of hormones that are the stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, that the woman is secreting from her adrenal gland under stress, which then has an impact on the developing nervous system of the child. We then prevent trauma by not medicalizing birth the way we do in the Western world so much, so that birth becomes a much more human experience than it has now become. We do it by supporting young parents to be with their children, and if they’re at risk, we help them understand how you’re at risk, not because you’re a bad person but because you were traumatized, you have a risk of passing it on to your children, let’s help you not do that.

51:24 By de-Thatcherizing society, Thatcherism, and I don’t just mean her political policies but everything that that faith stands for, the destruction of communities, making people economically insecure, the loss of contact between people, all of these go into creating the social context for for engendering addiction. So yeah, we could, so we need to up our humanity probably like 10x. We have a lot of work to do, basically. Yeah, we have a bit of work to do.

51:59 Okay. Okay, I understand what you mean. Yeah. My next question was, do you think that addiction is a modern phenomenon? Well, that’s an interesting question.

52:15 By and large it is, that doesn’t mean that it never existed before. The addiction has probably existed ever since civilization is addicted. But if you look at, see, the example of Britain, like there was just, they always used to be drinking, but alcoholism as a mass phenomenon showed up with the gin craze in the 18th century. Is that when it showed up or when it was properly documented? That’s when it showed up in a massive way.

52:44 Okay. And 18th centuries, why? Because of the loss of the communes, people had to leave their lands, move into the big cities, work in these satanic mills, as Blake called them, you know, these factories, and people lost families, lost community, and all of a sudden suffered a lot, and that’s when the gin craze really took off. So there’s a colleague of mine, a friend of mine, a psychologist, Bruce Alexander, who’s written a book called The Globalization of Addiction, which is about how when the more dislocation there is in our society, in other words people lose their place in a family, in the community, in the neighborhood, in society in general, they lose their connection to culture, to meaning, to spiritual values, the more dislocation there is, the greater the addiction phenomena arises, in the greater, with the greater force the addiction will arise.

53:53 And we can see this around the world right now as globalization succeeds, bringing more and more addictions at places like China, for example, and elsewhere. I could argue that even having our access to media and these devices almost kind of globalizes your mind, even a little bit more. So even if the industries aren’t there at your doorstep, you’re looking at this kind of society and you’re living in this kind of other world and you’re becoming more disconnected from the people around you, as for every Instagram post you read.

54:25 Oh yeah, there’s no question about it. There’s a real waning, there’s a real waning of human contact and increasing alienation. The more friends you have on Facebook, the more alone you are. Right. And the more people like you on Facebook, the less lovable you feel you are, because the things that people like you for on Facebook are simply an image that you’ve posted on a screen, a very concocted and artificially constructed self-image.

55:04 Now people may like that, but that same question, would they really like me if they knew me for real? It magnifies itself. So actually the media is terribly addictive and terribly alienating for the most part. It couldn’t, doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s how it functions. And, you know, based on that example with the Royals and Harry and all that kind of thing, yeah, you know, where do we go from here?

55:31 Where do we go from here? Yeah, where do we go from here? Because, you know, you have Harry with his trauma, with the Queen saying, please don’t talk about this, you know, what are the next steps, you know, if people aren’t gonna listen to some of the things that you’re talking about? Well, you see, I’m less concerned with Harry as a person than in the impact, not that I’m not, but the impact of such a message from such a revered figure as the Queen, because implicitly she’s saying that’s not what’s important.

56:10 She’s not only saying that’s not our role as royals, and by the way I don’t know why not, but she’s also saying what’s really important is form and appearance rather than emotional reality. That’s the message, and as long as that’s the message, where do we go from here is more of the same. That’s where we go from here. Can addiction happen with traumas in adulthood, and when does the childhood-adulthood, you know, separation go, in your opinion? Well, first of all, let me make a clear point.

56:48 I’m not saying that everybody who’s traumatized becomes addicted. Okay. I am saying that everybody’s addicted was traumatized, though. Trauma has different ways of manifesting itself, addiction being only one of them. However, the defining traumas are always happening in childhood.

57:06 So if you take, say, soldiers who develop post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of having in siem to Afghanistan or Iraq by politically manipulative and utterly dishonest leaders, as happened in your country, or as your country Britain, I mean, or in the original country of origin, United States, we all know this now. But so these people go there, then they expose the battle and they see their friends grievously injured or killed, they might suffer injury themselves, but not all of them will become, will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and the ones that do are the ones that were traumatized early in childhood. So that the… now there’ll be a fair proportion of that in the military, because who joins the army when you’re not conscripted?

58:05 People who are kind of lost, people have no meaning in their lives, people need to have a sense of belonging, they need to have structure, they need to be told what to do. People’s resources are limited to get a better education. In other words, the army is likely to draw people that are already at risk, and then they’re exposed to something terrible, but a person who’s resilient, who had the support in childhood to deal with the emotional pain who has confidence in themselves, they can actually take active steps to support themselves and also to reach out for help when they need it because they trust other people, they’re not going to suffer PTSD.

58:54 So yes, the basis of it, in my view and in the view of a lot of the literature, the, you know, the current consensus of those that know… underst… of those who understand trauma, is that the template is set in childhood. That’s a bold statement. So people, only people that get PTSD are the ones that had that trauma in childhood? And it’s wrong, I would say. So now if I lose my friends in a battle, I may have tremendous emotional pain, I may grieve, and maybe for a long time, but I will not have PTSD.

59:30 Okay. And is there evidence behind that? Oh yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah.

59:35 Let’s talk about solutions. Yeah, for me, I happened to have a plant medicine ceremony, you know, and it was the ayahuasca, I believe, that helped me get a different perspective on something that I couldn’t figure out for 20 years, and I’d like to think I’m a pretty smart guy. So what perspective? The perspective that, you know, alcohol wasn’t a great solution for me, and it gave me a new way of looking at my old trauma, and it almost was like something coming to me and saying, Brian, this is why you’re doing that, it’s because of this, and if you stop doing this or acting this way, you might not need to medicate yourself.

1:00:15 And I think that, combined with all the connection and meaning and purpose that London Real gives me, I didn’t have to go to an AA program, I didn’t have to do all these things, I just found that I just didn’t really have the need to do that anymore. So, but you know, I was lucky, I could have gone on to the rest of my life drinking every day, I believe. Talk to me about solutions or other ideas to challenge perspectives of either our society or an individual addict.

1:00:44 Well, can I broaden the discussion beyond addiction for one, please, and then come back to the solutions, if that’s okay? Yeah. Because all the addictions are very dramatic and very salient example of what happens to people as a result of trauma. It’s not the only manifestation. I’m saying with something much broader than that, I’m saying that most chronic illnesses also originate in trauma, including autoimmune disease and cancer and degenerative nervous system disorders and so on.

1:01:13 That’s harder to prove, but the reason I’m mentioning it is because the solutions that we’re going to talk about pertain to all health issues, not just to addiction. Okay. And these are bold statements, to say that trauma causes cancer? Well, I didn’t exactly say that. Okay, right.

1:01:38 What did you say then? Well, if I see, when you say, I don’t say that trauma causes addiction in the sense that if trauma causes addiction, every time you saw trauma you should see addiction, but you don’t. Okay. What I’m saying is that everybody with addiction was traumatized, so trauma is one of the salient causes, but it’s not a direct one-to-one relationship. Okay, just to be scientific about it.

1:02:04 Okay. Now I’m saying the same thing about most cancers and most autoimmune diseases as well and most chronic degenerative nervous system disorders as well. So if you look at both the lives of people, as I have many, many times, would say autoimmune disease, the significant childhood trauma, based on that childhood trauma then there’s certain behavior and emotional patterns that the person adopts as a result of the trauma, and those emotional and behavior problems then cause stress in their lives, and that stress then brings on the illness.

1:02:42 That’s my book When the Body Says No. When people don’t know how to say no, they’re stressed in their lives, the body will say it for them, you know, from some kind of illness. And typically, just as you and I have become workaholics and success-holics as a result or as a compensation for the sense of not being good enough or not being wanted, so people can also cope with the same sense by becoming extra nice, by always supporting other people’s emotional needs and ignoring their own, by never being angry, by repressing their anger.

1:03:31 Now when you do that you’re actually messing with your immune system, and the reason you’re doing that is because, again scientifically, this is just pure science, our emotional functioning is not separable from our physiological functioning. The brain centers that regulate emotions are connected with the hormonal apparatus, the nervous system, the gut, the heart and the immune organs. In fact it’s not even that they’re connected, it’s all one system. So things that happen to people emotionally will immediately have a physiological effect, as you would know if I screamed at you, because your physiology would change like that.

1:04:11 Well, this happens 24/7. Those interactions go on 24/7. Now emotional patterns are laid down in childhood, and so when you look at people with physical illnesses, and I don’t care what I looked at, famous people like Jonathan Swift and his Alzheimer’s, Ronald Reagan and his Alzheimer’s, or Betty Ford, the former American First Lady, under breast cancer, or Jacqueline du Pré, the great British cellist, with her multiple sclerosis, or any number of patients that I interviewed, it’s always the same story of severely stressed childhood, self-repression as a way of coping, not as if personal fault but as a way of coping, and then some kind of disease process in which does self-repression, repression manifest itself because of the unshakable unity of mind and body.

1:05:07 So lots of studies have shown that kids who are abused have 50 times the risk of asthma. 50 times? 50 times. 50 times. The more stress your parents are, the more likely to have asthma.

1:05:25 If you look at people with what is, what in Britain is called motor neuron disease, in America it’s called Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS, like Lou Gehrig himself, the baseball player, or Stephen Hawking, the physicist, emotionally deprived childhoods. And by the way, Hawking is an interesting example because he was told, I think well over 50 years ago now, that he had one year to live, which kind of shows you that maybe we as doctors don’t know everything and that maybe the body has a way of… he’s not healed from his disease, but he certainly has lived with it and thrived in many, many ways. Now there’s all kinds of reasons for that, but it just means that our narrow mechanical understanding of illness is insufficient, and when they tell somebody they’re wanting you to live, what they’re saying is we, with our limited awareness, have no other way of helping you, but instead of acknowledging that we make it about the disease, that this can’t be helped, this can’t be healed.

1:06:39 Then you have all these stories of people getting better from so-called terminal illnesses, you know. Now which means, which means by definition we don’t really understand it. That I know, I know, that’s exactly what it means. And again, if we only had the humility as physicians to say, well, you know what, this is as much as I know, you have not reached the limits of my knowledge, I personally don’t know what to tell you anymore, and in my view, given what we know how to do, your chances aren’t very good, but that’s because of the limitations of what we know.

1:07:12 Now that might, that would be an honest statement, but of course we don’t. We mistake what we know with reality, so we don’t know it, it’s not real, because if it was real we would know it. I mean, I just, circular thinking, but that’s how we as doctors look at things. So what I’m saying is that I could give you a whole set of statistics on relationship between childhood trauma and autoimmune disease, a Canadian study that shows that if you’re abused as a child your risk of cancer goes up nearly 50 percent, and actually, and abuse, by the way, is only one form of trauma.

1:07:46 So yes, I’m making a bold statement, but there’s all kinds of scientific reasons for me to make it. Okay. A lot of research behind it. Okay. So I asked obviously about some plant medicines to give me a new frame of mind, but you’re saying, look, this trauma is manifested in not just addiction but all sorts of other physiological aspects, physiological and mental analysis and so on.

1:08:06 So trauma manifests in addiction and mental illness of all kinds, anxiety, depression, ADHD, which I’ve been diagnosed with, addictions, and in physical analysis as well. And what you experienced under the impact of the ayahuasca really, when you break it down, and tell me if this is not accurate, but I see you in that experience as having identified two aspects of yourself previously unknown to you. One is the her child. You were there and tears were flowing down from your eyes across your ears because all of a sudden you had empathy, compassion for the seven-year-old and asked the seven-year-old that you could recall.

1:09:02 What you can’t recall is the one-year-old living in a stressed household, but you’ve been carrying those emotions all along. So actually the plant gave you a sense of this is what my pain is about, but the experience gave you something else as well, and then something else was, something else is possible. I don’t have to keep running from this, I can actually be with my pain, not run from it, and stay with myself, and that means not escaping into certain behaviors, into certain substances, not living according to a false self-image.

1:09:50 So it gave you both a glimpse, it gave you a glimpse both of the source of your suffering but also of your real self, which by the way, when we talk about recovery, what does the word recovery mean? It means that you find something. And what did we find? We find ourselves. So that experience, the powerful impact of the the plant was to give you those two aspects of yourself, both the suffering child accompanied now with the compassion of the adult.

1:10:29 Yeah. Which, had there been any conscious, compassionate adults around, by the way, you never would have become an addict. But no, you were the compassionate adult present with your suffering child, and he also said, I don’t have to be this way, there’s a different me, there’s a more real me, more connected me, or not more, but just real and connected, that I can actually be and strive to be from henceforth. Now that’s a dramatic experience, but it’s the essence of healing, whether with plant medicines or with many other modalities.

1:11:12 There’s no, there’s no one modality that’s, again, a panacea for everyone, but that’s the essence of it. Why did you experiment with plant medicines, and can you tell me how that played out and where do you see the future of that? Well, after my book on addiction was published, and again it was a bestseller and attracted a lot of interest, and as you say, I was well into my 60s, I was what, 65 I think when the book came out, but people kept asking me, well, what do you know about ayahuasca in particular, and in the treatment of addiction?

1:11:55 And I knew nothing. Why would I, as a Western-trained physician, you know? And the question began to irritate me after a while, because people kept insisting on asking me, and my attitude was rather churlish. Listen, I’ve just written a 400-page book on what I know about. Why don’t you ask me something I know about instead of asking what I don’t know about, you know?

1:12:21 Until I actually was asked a question one more time and I said I knew nothing about it, never had the experience, and somebody came up to me and said, you know what, you could actually participate in the ceremony not far from where you live, you don’t have to go to Peru. So I did, and like you I had… I’m not… I don’t compare experiences. My sense is you had a more profound, transformative experience, but it was profound and transformative enough for me to see the potential in it right away, and again, given the limitations of Western medicine, I thought if there’s anything at all that’ll enhance my capacity, that can add to my skills or methodology to working with people, that would be a benefit.

1:13:14 Why would I not go for it? And so I began to investigate it more, and that’s how I’ve come to it. Okay. And how did it work? I mean, did you use the plant medicine with addicts, with drug addicts, and what did the government think of that?

1:13:30 Well, so of course the plant is illegal in North America, so there’s no possibility of using it in any consistent, legally acceptable way. So but where I have led retreats with that outside of North America, we’ve had people with addictions, we’ve had people with autoimmune disease, we’ve had people with autoimmune diseases that we’ve been told that they’ve been told would kill them, there’s no further treatment, now they’re walking around just fine. When I say they, I’m talking about one person.

1:14:11 I don’t want to exaggerate that I’ve got a whole lot of great success stories to tell you, but I have some very dramatic stories to tell you about how much better people can get from all manner of conditions, from autoimmune conditions to multiple sclerosis to addictions, depression, anxiety, even ADHD. Why? Because if I’m right and all these conditions are rooted, significantly rooted, not singularly caused by but significantly rooted in trauma, as people heal their trauma, why would their conditions not get better, given that the mind and the body can’t be separated?

1:15:04 Now quite outside the plant world again, there are these spontaneous cures, there are people who survived their prognosis by decades. There’s a great story that was in The New York Times a few years ago, about a Greek fellow who comes to United States after the war, he was a resistance fighter during the war, left Greece, becomes a factory worker in Chicago somewhere, develops lung cancer, and now you have to… and the doctors tell him that with treatment you’ve got nine months, with treatment, without treatment you got six months to live. So now you have to decide where to live.

1:15:58 Should I live in the States where my children are, but then I have to spend 30,000 on my funeral, I won’t have any money left for them, or do I go back to my island in Greece? So he goes back to this very famous island Greeks that he’s from, where people live longer, they’re healthier and so on, they’re active longer, and he’s there with this terminal cancer and he’s in his bed and he’s in his deathbed, and his friends and neighbors and relatives, they all come and visit him and they interact and so on. After a while he decides, well, why should I lay in bed, I might as well go on the porch and enjoy the sunshine and look at my garden.

1:16:37 And so it’s an approach, and people visit and after the time of that he says, well, am I sitting here for? When I just go down and just putter around in a garden. To make a long story short, this cancer completely goes away. And the island has been studied, people live longer, they’re healthier, they’re active longer. It’s what they eat, it’s what they don’t eat, it’s their commonality, it’s the meaning, it’s the purpose, is the interaction, it’s the connection to the people, all that.

1:17:13 They don’t run by the clock. If somebody says I’ll come up for lunch, they could show up at 12, they could show up at 4 pm, they just live a different life. And the end of the New York Times article is he goes back to the States and some decade, a couple of decades later, and he just wants to say to the doctor, well, what do you think happened here? Because I couldn’t find them, they had all died. No, well, you’re gonna say he got back to the States and after three months there he died.

1:17:42 So what I’m saying is that plant medicine or not, no plant medicine, is a powerful interaction between our emotional lives and our and how we see ourselves and how we connect with other people and our physiological health. So we’re talking about healing much more than just addiction here. Okay. All right. And so the plant medicines are just an indication of that.

1:18:09 They’re an indication of that and a particular powerful modality. Right. Yeah. Would you like to see more exploration with ayahuasca or with the iboga with addiction and another… for other reasons in the US and Canada? Well, I just came from a conference three weeks ago now in Oakland, California, where there were many people from all over the world, 24, 2,800 people, serious scientists, physicians, researchers, enthusiasts, people of all kind, all about psychedelic science and the rejuvenated, renascent research projects that are happening internationally into the role of psychedelics.

1:18:55 Of course I’d like to see more research. There’s no downside, we might find out we have successes, we have limitations, but what’s the downside? And certainly some of the plant modalities offer much more than any Western medicine that I can think of. Right, so it’s worth investigating. By all means let’s study them.

1:19:19 Don’t take people’s words for it. No, I’m not waiting for that, because I mean, if I did I would not be around to see it in action. But at the same time, yes, there’s great research programs here in Britain. Amanda Feilding is well known for supporting that kind of research, and it should happen on a much broader scale, again not putting all our eggs into what’s best one basket, not thinking that psychedelics will save the world. I’m not an evangelist that way.

1:19:54 I just think they’re helpful, useful and unreasonably neglected modality. Right, and for the downside they have, it’s a no-brainer to try these things because the upside is the website is potentially still positive. Yeah, exactly. We’ve had Amanda here and Professor David Nutt and Dr. Carhart-Harris as well.

1:20:16 Yes, and they were all at this conference, at least two of the three, three names were. Yeah. Okay, tell me about your own trauma as a child, and can you walk us through that day in January when you were born and where you were born and what some of those circumstances were? Yeah, well, it’s pretty straightforward. So I was born a Jewish infant in Budapest, Hungary, in January 1944, and in March of that year, two months later, the German army occupied the Wehrmacht occupies Budapest and Hungary, and now the genocide that has succeeded in exterminating the Jewish population of Eastern Europe in other countries now begins in Hungary.

1:21:01 Eichmann comes to the past with his SS commando and with the enthusiastic participation of the Hungarian authorities, within five months, four months, deports half a million people to their deaths in Auschwitz, mostly Auschwitz but elsewhere as well, my maternal grandparents being amongst them. My mother and I live under German occupation, and you can imagine a state of terror and dismay that would have characterized her emotional states for that whole year of my life. And then I’m… when I’m precisely a year old she then, and I desperate at them to save my life, hands me to a stranger.

1:21:48 So I’m abandoned and I don’t see her for a month. So that’s the essence of my traumas is a terrorized and depressed mother who’s struggling to find food, who is a Jew, you can’t go into the street in June, for example, until a certain time, by which time in the lack of, because of lack of refrigeration, the milk in the stores would have gone sour already, and he’s supposed to find me food. So that’s how that’s how it was, and the impact is attention deficit disorder and a lifelong tendency to is kind of a morose default resistance to the world, you know, which is how I often have experienced myself and still sometimes experience myself that way.

1:22:43 It’s just that experience sets your brain in a certain way. Now again it’s not insuperable, it’s not beyond healing, and it’s certainly something I’ve worked with quite a lot, but that was the template. It doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It’s enough for an infant to experience his mother’s postponed depression to increase that risk, kids’ risk for attention deficit disorder, for example. So mine is a very dramatic story, but in a certain sense the trauma was externally imposed.

1:23:26 My parents, once my father came back from forced labor, had a remarkably functional marriage. They were not perfect for each other or as individuals, but they had a functional, solid marriage. A lot of kids grew up in environments where the trauma is not externally imposed, such as it was mostly in my case through my mother, but actually is through multi-generational trauma in the family, and the trauma then is present throughout the childhood. See, I would say you come more from back background, you know, like an example of multi-generational generation.

1:24:09 It might not have been as dramatic historically speaking as mine was, and certainly as emotionally wrenching as maybe my first year was. It’s hard to compare, but at the same time it didn’t have a historical beginning and end either, so it would have continued. Right, you know, not that mine was over at one year either, but all I’m saying is it doesn’t take that degree of of dramatic misfortune to have an impact on children, and again the more sensitive the child is, the more affected they are.

1:24:47 You don’t seem to have a morose default. Now why don’t you speak to my wife? Okay, you know, and you know, but no, look, I’m talking to you now, so I’m talking to a person who’s, as far as I can best tell, keenly interested in what I have to say, is attuned with my message and is interactive with it. It’s a very comfortable circumstance for me. I’m not in my default mode right now.

1:25:16 Right. But you know what, when I talk about these things I still notice, if I pay attention to my body, there’s kind of a twinge of sadness and sometimes even felt certain tension in my facial muscles as I was talking to you. So it’s there. Okay, you know, it’s still there, and some people watching this will pick up on it, okay, and others will not, depending on how sensitive they are or how intuitive they are. I find it kind of fascinating that you’re talking about all these things which are much more wide-ranging than what you saw, you know, at a methadone clinic in downtown Vancouver, because this has connotations to how we are as a society and how we raise our children, but there seems to be some kind of… well, while you’re delivering what is probably shocking information to people and about their own belief in medical science, there seems to be this optimistic glint in your eye, as in, isn’t it amazing that we can see this now, that we can see that there could be so much more that would explain this stuff?

1:26:20 Am I reading you wrong? No, you… no, you’re right. You know, Eckhart Tolle, who’s the spiritual teacher, lives in Canada, internationally known, he said that the greatest achievement of humankind is not its architecture, art or scientific glories, but our ability to see our own insanity, you know, and that’s what the healing is. So I have a totally optimistic message, really. I think healing is entirely possible.

1:26:51 I just don’t think it’s possible without being realistic. So if we’re gonna heal, and by the way, healing comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for wholeness, if we’re gonna become whole, let’s look at everything, and including the pain, including the trauma that informs so much of our behaviors and our medical conditions and our parenting and our experience as children and how we spend our time and what we watch on television, what we consume and how we consume it and what we eat and what we don’t eat. That has a lot to do with how are we related to trauma.

1:27:25 Right, right. Those are all small pieces that put together what the trauma is or isn’t, or subject of it. Absolutely. Where are we headed with this cold war on drugs? Where are we going with this?

1:27:40 What can we do, what should we do? Well, in terms of the war on drugs, again just to clarify, there’s no war on drugs, there’s a war on drug addicts. You might say there’s a war on drug dealers, but actually there’s a war on drug addicts, because they’re the petty dealers who sell a bid here and there in order to support their own habit. They’re the ones most likely to get caught. The big drug-selling cartels never get taken down.

1:28:13 Some of their leaders get taken down or they get killed by one another, but that corporate structure never gets taken down, any more than the corporate structure of its a little shadow never gets taken down either. Leaders might change, but the system is not taken down. So take something like, and I don’t want to malign the right com… the wrong company here, it’s either Purdue or Pfizer, I think it’s Purdue, but if it’s Pfizer I apologize to Purdue. Okay, but they marketed OxyContin in the States as a non- or less addictive alternative to other opiates, knowing full well how addictive they are.

1:29:03 The drug was… as a result hundreds of people died in overdoses, entire villages in Appalachia were wiped out. Now they sell, I don’t know how many billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics every year. A crusading district attorney, so many states actually, went after them for this subterfuge, this little innocent subterfuge that killed that many people and destroyed our homie lives. They paid the 800 million dollar fine, which they could take out of the left hip pocket.

1:29:45 Nobody went to jail. Nobody. No. We sell an ounce of heroin on the streets of London, you’re going to go to jail. So what war on drugs are we talking about, first of all?

1:30:00 You know, and there’s no end in sight in that, there’s no end to this. Now is there no rational solution? Yes there is. So first of all, we decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use, as has been done in Portugal, and all they’ve seen is a slight reduction in drug use, no increase at all, and a lot more people in treatment and much less criminality among people on drugs. Number one.

1:30:26 Number two, here in the UK you’ve had successful clinics, but just as we do have one in Vancouver where people are prescribed and administered, not administered, but self-administer heroin, pure heroin, not adulterated by fentanyl, which in North America is killing dozens of people every day now. Yeah. How bad is that? Well, it’s terrible, you know. The fentanyl is a hundred times as powerful as heroin or as morphine, and therefore takes very little bit to kill you.

1:30:59 Now what if we actually prescribe pure heroin to people under supervision, they will be dying of overdoses? It’s a very simple, well-documented, well-researched, successful modality that has shown benefits only in terms of diminished criminality, better relationships in people’s personal lives, better health outcomes, no negative outcomes at all. It’s been demonstrated here, demonstrated in Switzerland, demonstrated in Holland, now demonstrated in Vancouver.

1:31:30 Why aren’t we doing it? You know, so that we could aid the criminal lives for personal possession, not legalized. I don’t see legalized, I don’t… I don’t mean selling in corner stores like cigarettes. Yeah, which are, by the way, far more health damaging than heroin is as a chemical entity.

1:31:53 If you use heroin but don’t overdose for 30 years as opposed to smoke for 30 years, your chance of being healthy are much better on the heroin than they are on the cigarette smoke. But I’m not asking for heroin to be legalized, but I’m saying it should be decriminalized and it should be provided to confirmed addicts, and then we need to bring a trauma-informed perspective into the treatment of addiction so that we don’t just try and get people off their drugs or off their behaviors but to actually heal the trauma. You found quite spontaneously that when you identified your trauma and found some healing for it, your addictive behavior evaporated, you no longer had to indulge in it.

1:32:42 So what if that was generally understood? That would be powerful. It’d be powerful, and, you know, yes, it would mean that. And yet the world has a whole lot of raft of hang-ups about psychedelics because of the 60s and 70s as well. So well, they have the hangover psyche, there is some for legitimate reasons because it was misused and overused and used inappropriately by a lot of people in the 60s.

1:33:07 Still can be, but mostly it’s the Western arrogance that we have nothing to learn from indigenous peoples, and after ayahuasca is an indigenous plant modality, also the Western addiction to the left-sided rational brain, which just refuses to see the whole picture, which surely includes people’s emotional and spiritual sides as well. We don’t recognize that in Western thinking, and then what I said about the resistance to dealing with trauma. So these are severe handicaps that limit our openness to other ways of looking at things.

1:33:58 There’s a lot of parents watching and listening, and I became a parent. I have a one-year-old boy right now. I also have a step-daughter who’s 13, and so I’d like to not cause trauma in their lives. What can I do? Well, when I give these talks and people say, I’m afraid I screwed up my kids, I said, don’t worry about it, I’m sure you have, you know, because we do, you know.

1:34:25 So it’s not a question of can we be perfect, it’s a question, like the great British psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott said, can we be good enough? Good enough does not have to be perfect. Well, the most important dynamic in human life, and this is why it hurts so much, is attachment.

1:34:48 Attachment means the seeking of closeness with another human being. The human infant is an attachment machine. If she, he seduces you, they make big guys like you, they make cute girly sounds, they just want you close to them. Why? Because they don’t live without it, they can’t survive with a day without attachment.

1:35:11 An attachment that doesn’t just mean your physical presence, it actually demands your emotional presence and your ability to sense what they sense and to attune to it and to respond. That’s what’s needed for healthy personal development, for healthy physiological brain development and for a healthy sense of self. So what parents can do is they can really take care of their attachment relationship with their children at any age. My infants basically teach you how to do it if you’re willing to learn.

1:35:43 Yeah, if you’re open-minded and not too stressed to listen and to pay attention, if you’re not too busy being a workaholic physician or broadcaster or broadcast or whoever you are, you know. If you actually attend to your child, be that, be there with them, they’ll teach you. Infants will. Older children, it gets a bit more complicated because they’ve already been programmed in a certain way, then they act out their programming, and of course acting out, is that phrase used in Britain, by the way, as much as they’re acting out?

1:36:21 Yeah, it’s that kind of a misbehaving term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know if they use it in business. I know they do in North America. Right, so acting out kids will then act out, and then as parents we’re told, well, if your kid acts out this is what you have to do to control their behavior, which means we don’t understand English very well, because acting out actually means to portray in behavior something you haven’t got the words to say in language.

1:36:48 So when all the children act out they’re actually giving a message about the emotional realities. Instead of reacting to their behaviors we need to react, not react but respond, to the emotional message that they’re giving us, and basically the emotional messages that they give us have to do with some troubled aspect of their attachment relationship with us. So whenever we see our kids acting out, wherever we’re puzzled or troubled by the behavior, we need to look at the relationship and how have we not given them, despite our best intentions and our deepest love for them, how we’ve not given them what they needed, and how do we then restore that.

1:37:32 And so that’s the subject of a couple of my books, the one on ADHD which I see as not as a disease but as a response to infant and early childhood stress, when the parents are emotionally disconnected and the child is in too much pain, how does she deal with this? She tunes out, becomes absent-minded. Now they’re diagnosed with the medical condition, so it begins simply as a compensational mechanism. But more importantly, another book I co-wrote, it’s been published in many continents, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, because in our culture there’s a great tendency of our children to get pulled into the peer group.

1:38:13 Kids are creatures of attachment, they have to belong to somebody, and when they’re disconnected from the adults, because parents are having to work, they don’t see their kids the whole day, whose parents are stressed, because parents watch television, because they don’t have family meals anymore, because everybody’s caught up in their gadgets, when we don’t give those relationship necessities to our children, they’ll turn to whoever’s around. Who’s around? Other kids.

1:38:45 Now children become attached to other kids. Now it’s all about measuring up to other kids’ expectations, following their lead, conforming to their perspectives and opposing the parent, because you can’t attach to two people with opposite points of view at the same time. So once you attach to the pig, you start resisting the adult group. Then we call that the rebellious child, the oppositional child, we increase the pressure, which, if you put your hand out for a minute, if this shows up on the camera, what do you do?

1:39:24 What do you do as soon as I push on you? You push back. You push back even harder, and then our kids are pushing back at us, and then we could label them with oppositionality, and we label them with acting out and recalcitrant and rude and all the stuff, none of the sword. They just don’t have the relationship with us. It’s our job to restore it.

1:39:44 So from infancy onwards, beginning from the first prenatal visit, people can start connecting to their infants, maintain that connection, and if you do, difficult things may happen. It’s not that painful things will not happen in life, but the child will not be traumatized. So trauma fundamentally comes down to a lack of attachment with nurturing, attuned, not loving, parents can be very loving but if they’re not attuned and if they’re not emotionally available in a way that that specific child needs, that child is then potentially a subject to be traumatized.

1:40:27 Okay, that’s good advice. Can I have some questions about you and just the way you view the world, you know. When you think of the word success, who comes to mind in your point of view, living, dead, colleague, parent, who are the people that inspire you? And what about you, what’s the next five years look like for you?

1:41:18 You no longer work in downtown… Well, I’ve retired as a physician six years ago now, simply because the request for me to travel and speak has become very powerful and frequent, and I love talking about what I talk about, you know, I mean, I just love I have also developed a certain view of what’s true and believe in it, and I love sharing that, and that seems to resonate with a lot of people. So all right. Now undermine, on the other hand, there’s another book in me that wants to be written, I just can’t get it out.

1:42:02 I just haven’t found the words for it, I haven’t found the pathway, I also haven’t haven’t sanctified the time for it, and maybe that’s still something we would still be wanted, and, you know, it’s yeah, I can be here in London and speak to a few other people and that’s great, but I could be home at the same time on my own in my room just writing. That’s a harder choice, you know, so that’s not was not quite resolved for me yet. But you know, I’m also looking for a more, a deeper inner healing.

1:42:41 I’m not where I want to be, at least if I am I don’t know it, and I intend to spend more time with that in the next year. And yes, I’m going to go to Peru and I’m going to go to the jungle and I’m going to participate in some ayahuasca ceremonies, not simply like I usually do to help others but in this case also for my own healing. Okay. And maybe do some other plant medicines as well, that’s a particular in the meanwhile it also means every day dealing with when my morose default setting shows up, and that is an impact on my relationship with my spouse.

1:43:28 I need to deal with that on a daily basis, and I need to keep up my yoga practice, which has been a tremendous support to me. So I do see external activities, book writing and continuing to teach and speak and do retreats is important, but a bit more of an emphasis to the internal process. It’s nice to know at 73, with all that you know and seen, that you’re still working on yourself. Well, I think we do until we… until we don’t. You know, Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher I mentioned, he points out very accurately I think that for some people transformation is an event, it just happens.

1:44:11 It happens by grace, some kind of spiritual visitation. I know, I’ve met people like that, he’s one of them. There’s an Indian yogi I met recently, Sadhguru’s name is, I think, he had an event where it happened, but as Tolle says, for most people it’s not an event, it’s a process, and that process I think for most of us, blessedly, is a lifelong one. I think you’re right. Dr.

1:44:40 Maté, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you, if you could pick up the phone and make a call to the 20-year-old Gabor and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Where was he getting his medical degree? No, he wasn’t, he was at that time, his ADD was too powerful, he couldn’t go to medical school yet because that took more concentration and discipline than I was ready for. I didn’t go to medical school till I was 28.

1:45:12 So what do I say to a 20-year-old? Look inside. At that time I was going to save the world through politics. Not to ignore the politics, but be at least as much attention internally or more. When you’re casting on the outside and you don’t have to work so hard to be liked and loved, you’re okay.

1:45:41 Just relax, kid, you know, and allow life to come to you. You don’t have to force it, and open your heart. Don’t just focus on your clever brain so much, you know, open your heart and see what possibilities reveal themselves to you, and that it’s not your fault, the way the world is and even the way you are, it’s not your fault. It’s not a fault, just accept yourself. Thanks for the opportunity to tell me with my stuff that, by the way, I just would love to get that 20-year-old on the phone.

1:46:27 Yeah, maybe I’m starting the healing process that’ll continue in Peru. That’s some good advice. On that same note, what is the best advice you’ve ever received in your life from a colleague, a co-worker, a quote-unquote addict, anyone, something that stood out for you, you know? I’ll tell you two things. One is I had an aunt who was a physician herself, and she had not wanted to be a doctor, she wanted to be a writer, but complying with her father’s wishes she went to medical school and she was taken to Auschwitz, where you saw, she saw her parents taken in one direction to the gas chambers and she was sent in another.

1:47:22 And very sensitive, very wounded soul, but she saw me much more clearly when I was younger than I could see myself, and once she quoted Shakespeare to me, and I know it’s a cliche and I know that it’s in the mouth of the character Polonius, in whom Shakespeare puts this phrase, it’s even hypocrisy, but it’s so true. And she said to me, she wrote to me, to thine own self be true. You know, I wish I had understood what that meant, but that’s the best advice I got.

1:48:07 And then when I was a physician and but the part of me that wanted to write hadn’t really expressed himself, because that was really in me, to write and to share something with the world. And I had a patient who used to be an English professor at University of British Columbia, he was quite a well-known Canadian poet, Warren Tallman, and I said to him when he came to the office once for a medical visit, I said, Warren, I want to write but I don’t know what. And he said, don’t everybody say, don’t worry about it, he said, you were right when you’re struggling to teach the world.

1:48:46 And that’s what happened. So those were the two. Let me ask that question, those two incidents are evoked for me, they’re both very good. Yeah. Last part of that is to that 20-year-old that’s out there listening to us right now, you know, who wants to grow up and do some good in the world, to maybe help advance some of these thoughts and agendas and things like that, what advice do you give to them?

1:49:12 I’m not sure I understand your question. Now to that 20-year-old that’s listening to us. Yeah, no, no, not myself now. Yeah, not yourself. Oh yeah.

1:49:18 And someone that wants to, I don’t know, get out there and make some of these changes we’re talking about, to try to open up the world’s eyes when it comes to the war on drugs, the way we consider addiction, the way we look at addicts, the way we look at our own behavior, and they want to make a difference in the world, what advice would you give to them? Yeah, well, I would say that there’s a lot of people out there who see the truth, but they don’t control the media and they don’t write the scripts for most movies, so therefore you might not get validation out there, but you have to believe in your own truth and you have to deepen your relationship to your truth, and you’ll connect with people that are also seeking the same truth as you are, even if they don’t see it the way you do.

1:50:06 So never be afraid of your own truth and to explore it. Also don’t be afraid to let go of it if you find that there’s a deeper truth that speaks to you, and at the same time, whatever you do out there in the world, do an equal amount of work internally, because if you don’t, your work in the world will not be as effective. Yeah, well said. Very well said. Dr.

1:50:36 Maté, thank you so much for coming. I’ve been looking forward to this for a couple of years. We could probably go on for a few more hours, but hopefully have you back again sometime. You’ve helped me clarify a few things about myself. I’d like to think that 100 years from now when someone watches this clip they’ll be like, oh, that’s how we started becoming more observant of what’s really going on in this world, and I think it’s important that we start looking at you know, these people that don’t look like us and don’t behave like us and have these behaviors we don’t understand as consequences of our own behaviors and our own choices in life, and maybe just to become a bit more open, aware, humane, empathetic, look in the mirror a bit more, realizes that that could be us or that is us, or these people are all our children as well.

1:51:26 So that’s what we’re trying to do here. It’s going to take a long time, but we’re not going anywhere. So thanks for everything you do. On London Real we say it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours.

1:51:38 Keep writing, keep speaking, and come see us again soon. Thank you. Thank you.