Rick Doblin - MDMA Is Medicine

Full transcript: Rick Doblin on London Real

5:13 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. That’s good, got that. If your goal is to help develop context for the legal use of psychedelics and marijuana, you are currently in Phase three of clinical trials testing the combination of MDMA and psychotherapy as a safe and effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

5:39 This has been in the works for you for about thirty years, and we’ll get into that. Yeah, ultimately you want to explore how psychedelics can be used to resolve some of the world’s biggest problems amongst religions and spirituality and for conflict resolution. Rick, welcome back to London Real for the third time. It’s a pleasure to be here, Brian, and to see the progress you’ve made and to be able to share with you some of the progress we’ve made. The culture is changing in some good ways.

6:04 It is, and I was just thinking to myself, you know, Rick Doblin is the OG gangster. You know, progress in psychedelic medicine, you really are the guy, and you were here four years ago and five years ago, and you know, a lot of people in this space, I got used to saying, wow, the tide is turning, and we’re really feeling something like a wave here, or the world seems to be aligning, but like more so right now I’m seeing it more than any time, you know. Yesterday we had Michael Pollan on here, and he’s you know, publishing a book, but he said it’s his fastest-selling book ever, right?

6:38 And this is a guy who’s made huge books in food and agriculture, now talking about psychedelics. You’re here to me with EMA. I want to hear about that, to talk about the Phase three of this MDMA trial. You’re still doing incredible work at MAPS, you know, in the US with marijuana, and with just this, is becoming a lot more of the conversation. It’s almost like the public wants to have the conversation, and I’m curious what it all looks like from your perspective.

7:03 Well, I would say that really we need to think about it as a 50-year process, with the backlash against the 60s and the psychedelics and the counterculture really starting around 65, 66, and really ramping up in 68, and the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which criminalized all these drugs, right? And you got to know the history a little bit to see kind of where we’re going. Yeah, it is, this multi-generational process. And so, with the backlash that basically wiped out psychedelic research for multiple decades, what we’ve done since then is as a culture we’ve integrated spirituality, in a sense: yoga, mindfulness, meditation, all of which were very weird in the 60s.

7:53 I mean, there was people that were worried if you did yoga you were gonna, you know, become a Hindu, or that you were gonna somehow or other adopt foreign religions. Meditation was, you know, the Maharishi doing Transcendental Meditation with the Beatles and wearing robes and Hare Krishna people and the whole mindfulness idea from Zen meditation, which was again very minimal and extreme. Now it’s widely accepted, and it’s even that the most traditional places are even teaching mindfulness to kindergarteners and in grade schools.

8:29 And we’ve also had a revolution, I think, in how we understand death and how we’d understand birth. So birth used to be medicalised, women or tranquilized men were kept out of the delivery room, and now there’s birthing centers, and it’s a more holistic situation. My wife still is kind of a little upset when I, you know, joke around how I was with her, you know, and I just call me coach. No, I love you. And of course she had to do all the work, right?

8:59 But also death, we’ve taken death out of the shadows, and there’s hospice centers that didn’t really exist in 1974 was the first one in the United States, and now there’s 6,000 of them. So we like, this is where you can kind of go to die and die with dignity. Yes, yes. And where they’re not trying to forestall death like in a lot of hospitals, at any cost, and putting people on ventilators and machines just to you forgetting about quality of life. Okay, so as a culturally we’ve really advanced.

9:27 We just put the psychedelic research on hold for 20-some years because of this kind of backlash to the LSD and Timothy Leary, and the government seen that as anti-government. It just got squashed. Yes, and now it’s coming back. I think it’s coming back. The culture has matured in a lot of different ways even in advertising and in movies.

9:47 I mean, you go to many many movies have sort of psychedelic scenes, or like you know, moving through wormholes, or it’s kind of different kind of psychedelic imagery, and so now the need is greater because in our culture we have a retreat to fundamentalism and a fear of the other, and incredible cruelty and dismissal of the other, and you know, shutting the doors of America to refugees, and just the way in which internet and global communications have caused different cultures and different religions to be bumping up against each other now in ways that they weren’t before, and the weaponry and the global-warming. You know, no matter how much you want to be a climate denier, you know, the reality is the reality. And so I think the level of crisis, the level of species extinction, the level of environmental destruction, and the melting of the ice caps.

10:45 There’s a lot of change happening, more so than in most periods of time it feels like, and I think people need a spiritual orientation, a sense that we’re all in it together, and we’re seeing these, some of these suicide rates going way up. We’ve just had a very public Anthony Bourdain’s to asylum, you know the rates are alarmingly climbing among, you know, even older people in America, which I guess is a symptom of detachment, confusion Yeah, well, actually there’s been some studies that have looked at the counties in America. So they’re, you know, they’re states, and then they’re divided up into counties.

11:26 So it’s, and cities are within counties usually, but if you look at the counties that have the most what are called despair deaths. So that’s deaths from suicide, alcoholism, and drug abuse, drug overdoses. Those counties that had the most despair deaths were more likely to have voting for Trump. So there’s a way in which people are the strong statement, McDonald. It’s a very strong mean that means ibogaine.

11:53 Okay, that means, well, if we need to do from the psychedelic community to help out is people are adrift and their worlds are changing, and, you know, we’re talking about driverless cars and just think of all these people that are gonna be out of work. We’re talking about robot. We’re talking about automation in different ways, and so a lot of people are insecure about the future and are running away in certain ways. They’re not healthy for them, and so I think I began as a treatment for opiate addictions that can both help people reset their biological tolerances to get them off of the with and through the withdrawal process even easier, and then spiritualize people, right?

12:33 So, I think what it means is that we need to help reduce the level of fear and anxiety that people have all over the world. Just to give you an example, I was at a conference recently in Oslo about human rights activists, and I happened to meet a fellow who was on the International Narcotic Control Board. So this is the group that monitors compliance with international drug control treaties for the UN, for the WHO, and he’s from Colombia, and he was saying that everybody in Colombia has PTSD, and he himself knows about 40 people that were murdered.

13:12 I mean, he’s in his 70s, but these are societies in turmoil, and we’re seeing that more and more. And so I think the psychedelics, in a safe, supportive environment offer the opportunity for people to metabolize fear in a way that they’ve been unable to do before, and then also to be reinforced, the sense of connection and unity, and from that come to a deeper way of addressing the world’s problems you know, Michael yesterday said that, you know, comes to the mental health pharmaceutical industry, there hasn’t really been that many breakthrough since Prozac. And you hear that, and you’re always thinking, but I thought I heard of the next drug in the next drug of the next drug, but they’re not actually making a lot of progress here.

13:57 And so I think when people are looking to some of these traditional psychedelics and even MDMA, it’s just like, wow, we really need to think about this different look about look at this different. And I think at some point today definitely you should explain, like, what is this combination of MDMA and psychotherapy, because it’s very interesting how it works, as opposed to take this pill and call me in the morning, you know, type of a traditional pharma approach. But I mean, if you see those same things, oh yeah, yeah, well a lot of these developments in pharma have been what are called me-too drugs.

14:29 So how many SSRIs do we have 15 different kinds of SSRIs. They all do essentially the same thing, and they’re all meant to be administered daily, and there were intended initially to be for a period of months, and then supposedly regain your balance, and you don’t need them, but actually, but they’ve been used for is maintenance drugs for years, decades, sometimes for people. And so they serve the pharmaceutical industry really well, because these are drugs that you take for an extended period of time, and then if you stop taking them a lot of times the symptoms come back.

15:08 They didn’t cure anything. They muted the problems, but they weren’t cures. They were palliative. And so what’s being considered the greatest breakthrough in psychiatry in the last 30-40 years is ketamine for depression, and that’s being used all over, a mare much throughout Europe. It’s starting to be used more, and there’s an immediate reset for people that are depressed.

15:31 Like, it doesn’t always last. It often lasts only a week or two, and then people get another treatment But it’s a new mechanism for treating depression. It’s an quick-acting, almost immediate act against depression, whereas these SSRIs and other drugs can take weeks, sometimes or longer, to build up to have an effect. So it’s clear that in the field of psychiatry ketamine is considered to be the most important breakthrough, and it’s got psychedelic aspects.

15:59 It’s a dissociative anesthetic, but at roughly 1/10 the psychedelic dose you can have. I mean, one time the anaesthetic dose, you get psychedelic experiences. So I think the field of psychiatry is primed for looking for new things and realizing that a lot of what they have, even with the SSRIs or you could say the bloom is off the rose. I mean, there’s people that say that, you know, the placebo effect is hard outweigh that, or even exercise can pretty much give me, like, these things live now.

16:29 If I was to play devil’s advocate and grab my grade my grandmother from Flagstaff, Arizona, and she would say, hold on, Brian, I’ve heard a ketamine, that’s the Special K that those kids abuse. I’ve heard of psychedelics, that’s that LSD stuff that they outlawed in the 60s. I’ve heard of MDMA, that’s that ecstasy party drug, that blah blah blah. You’re telling me that the solution to all my problems with depression and these kinds of things lies in party drugs?

16:57 If these kids do these magic mushrooms, I mean you have to admit it’s kind of preposterous if you don’t understand the science, right? Yeah, I think so. And so what I would like to say to your grandmother, I’m channeling her now. Yeah, is that actually our marijuana PTSD study is in Scottsdale, Arizona. Okay, yeah, she’d probably have something to say about marijuana as well.

17:18 So I would like to say to her that these are our tools and they can be used in all different ways. So if we are to say to her “Oh, think about airplanes,” and she would say, “Oh, those are the things that crash all the time and people died in crashes or oak cars, though, that’s the thing that drunk drivers use to kill people.” So everything can be used in a poor way, can be used in a wise way. It’s important. What the drug war has done is it’s invested properties in drugs regardless of the context.

17:49 These are bad drugs, these are illegal drugs, these are addictive drugs, and it’s like the drug is carrying all these properties, but it’s really how it’s used. So I would say to her first off that the party drug that she heard about, ecstasy, that people use at raves, it began as a therapy drug in the middle 1970s and around half a million doses were used in therapy settings from the middle 70s to the early 80s, and some of the people that used it in those contexts said, “This is a drug that a lot of people will want. I want to make a lot of money.

18:24 I want to help people. In some ways this is better than cocaine, and I’m going to turn it into ecstasy.” And that’s when public use began, and that’s when the government attention began. And in 1984 is when the DEA first moved to criminalize MDMA, and then in 85 they succeeded, right? He criminalized it, and then 86 is when I started MAPS, right?

18:44 Okay, it’s a direct result of that. Yeah, and we sued the DEA in 84, and we won a lawsuit, and the DEA rejected the recommendation of the DEA administrative law judge at therapy hue stay. But for your grandmother, I would say that it’s how we’re talking about using it, and it’s the same as true with cocaine. Let’s even just say that cocaine is a medicine now for a certain kind of nasal surgeries. I, when I broke my nose in Thailand, they reset it in London, and I got the bill, and there was cocaine on the bill.

19:15 I remember I was a banker, and I floated all of my colleagues. I said, “Check this out.” But that’s what they used in my general anesthesia to kill the pain. Yeah, yeah, he’s a drug. Yeah, so I would say to your grandmother that the largest group of people, the increase in the use of marijuana in America is elderly people, and it’s for pain, and marijuana is really good for pain.

19:40 Even my 88-year-old mother, who doesn’t even drink, was willing to try marijuana for pain, and it was helpful to her. It was only when I was home and I could help her with it, so she didn’t continue with it. But I think that for your grandmother, what we help, what we need to do is try to help her understand context, how these, and that we’re talking about a very different model than either pharmaceutical medicines or recreational drugs, and so the context that we’re talking about is really MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, where psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy, ketamine is not so much, because ketamine is being considered as a pharmacological drug.

20:24 It would be more effective, I think, if it were administered with psychotherapy, but it does have pharmacological effect, and so our therapeutic approach for MDMA is basically three and a half months of therapy, twelve 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions and only three MDMA sessions, one month apart. So there’s three therapy sessions before each MDMA session, and three after the last, and then we look at people two months and twelve months after the last MDMA session. Okay, and so we’re basically talking about an anti-drug strategy, because our goal is to help people with this intensive process of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to not need drugs at all, not to need MDMA.

21:12 After one of the issues that the European Medicines Agency asked us that our meeting yesterday morning is, we’re here to talk about bringing MDMA to Europe for PTSD. They were like, what about people that take MDMA in therapy and are they going to go off afterwards and become ravers? And so, fair question. It’s a fair question. I’m sure you’ve answered much sillier questions in yarn, like, oh well yeah, what about holes in the brain which is the total fabrication from Oprah and others with doctored fake, you know, imagery that she showed that people still have in their back of their minds, a lot of people, but they are still living with those implications.

21:49 Yeah, not so much anymore, though. I mean, the safety database that we’ve built up is pretty powerful, but the, what did you tell them yesterday when they asked that question? Well, what I told them was that only 8% of the people that were in our study went on to use MDMA afterwards, that 29% had used MDMA beforehand, only 8% went on to use it afterwards, and they didn’t, only two instances were in recreational context, and the rest, they were trying to recreate the therapy setting, and that what really drives drug abuse, for in many cases, is trauma, people running away from trauma.

22:29 And so when you reduce the trauma, you reduce their desire to escape and drugs, and so we actually have data about people’s alcohol use before and after MDMA, and it goes substantially down in a large percentage of people. And so I said that that’s not something that it’s not, not a big risk. And also, the people that have used MDMA afterwards have used it 1.3 times on average, and this is 12 months after. So that’s not a substance use disorder pattern of administration.

23:08 They’ve experimented with it a few of them. So, and then I also said that several of the people that were in our study, not a few, said “I don’t know why they call this ecstasy, because the process of taking MDMA in therapy is a process to help people deal with difficult, painful emotions that have been too difficult for them to process, to metabolize.” Okay, and so I mean, if we’re doing work in these sessions, going back to the IED, going back to the child abuse, going back to these situations where they can’t actually process on a normal conscious level.

23:43 Yeah, they’re grieving, they’re, they’re shaking. A lot of trauma is stored in the body, and so there’s a lot of times where people are just shaking, you know, and because a lot of times when the trauma happens, you’re thinking of survival, you’re not able to really address the emotions because then you’re not going to be focusing on whatever you need to do to survive, and then because the trauma is so painful, people have a hard time sometimes processing it and storing it into long-term memory as if it’s in the past, but it seems like it’s always still happening, and people have nightmares and intrusive memories and triggers all the time, and so there’s a, what we know about PTSD is that it reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex, where we think logically, it increases activity in the amygdala where we process fear, and it reduces activity in the hippocampus, which helps us process long-term memories.

24:40 And we know that MDMA does pretty much the opposite, in that MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex to help you think even more logically, it reduces activity in the amygdala so that fears are more tolerable, you’re not as hyper-reactive to fears, and it increases connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus, so that you can take fear-based emotions and move them through to where they become stored in long-term memory. Okay, and so one of the people, the vets in our study, said, “PTSD changed my brain and brain, and MDMA changed it back.” So there was just a funny paper this morning that someone sent me about how LSD increases neural plasticity and flies.

25:28 So, so flies, you give them LSD, they get mood neural pathways, and we’re not that different from flies in a lot of ways. We just did a study in art. We didn’t tweet, we donated MDMA to researchers at Johns Hopkins that did a study in octopi, giving octopi MDMA. Okay, and what they showed is that MDMA enhances pro-social behavior in octopi and humans diverged evolutionary 500 million years ago, and so what this was showing, sort of evolutionary biology, how the serotonin system, which is both in octopi and MDMA, that, that somehow there’s some consistencies in brain function that date back 500 million years that would produce similar effects in humans as an occupier are very a social unless it’s mating season.

26:27 Okay, understood. But you give them MDMA in there now. If I was to try to paraphrase what you said if it’s safe, for example, we took a soldier with PTSD and this event happened, and they’re feeling the symptoms of that which is those three areas of the brain and gone to extreme. That can mean you’re having every day can be difficult. Yes.

26:45 And from what I understand from even our conversations before, is, but by going through the therapy and the MDMA therapy, is that we can go back to that moment where it happened, and as opposed to in a normal conscious state when you remember, that the panic comes back. You’re there. That the IED went off, your buddy’s leg is flying through the air, your leg is gone, and you can never actually process it. Every time you go back there, you’re unable to actually process it and move on.

27:11 And so by doing this in this MDMA state, you’re actually able, maybe for the first time, to actually see what happened and actually relive that, and process that in some way to where maybe you can move forward. Is that’s a great way to describe it. And not only that, though, that people’s memories are enhanced for the trauma. So a lot of times the memories of the trauma are so painful that they become subconscious or unconscious, and were influenced them, but we don’t even have direct access to them.

27:40 And so, for example, we worked with a firefighter who was in a building where the roof collapsed and eight firefighters got killed, and so he remembered what had happened, and under MDMA he had the realization that he had skipped this whole section in his memory of some of the worst parts of it that he had just blocked out completely, and he thought it went from here to here, but you know, there was this whole part that, and so under MDMA the memory comes up from the unconscious. He’s able to sort of disentangle, they’re what’s called episodic memory and emotional memory get linked together. Okay, but under MDMA what’s happening is we’re changing the emotional tone which is fear, from when it’s really happening at the moment, to something that’s been processed, been metabolized, and it’s into the few, into the past, and you’re able to look at it with a little bit of a sense of peace.

28:44 And so it’s also called neuroscience. It’s called fear extinction and memory reconsolidation. So the way memory works, it’s distributed throughout the brain. You remember something, but it’s not like taking a book off the shelf, reading it, and then sticking it back. You actually are like reprinting the book.

29:02 You have to wreak. That’s why sometimes people’s memories change over time. You remember something, and it’s not like a computer file. It’s now to kind of get a few details, and then you recreate what happened on the day, and that’s why grandpa tells that story, you know, like, but grandpa, I was there, and that’s not really what happened and it was different than the last time you told me. Yeah.

29:20 And so what we’re doing is trying to help people have a more accurate memory of the episode, but to replace the emotional tone. So when you reconsolidate the memory, you’re reconsolidate from a sense of peacefulness that the MDMA can give you, and the sense that the episode happened in the past. It’s not always about to happen again. Okay, so then when you’ve reconsolidated the memory in that way, the next time you remember it, you remember the episode, but you’ve switched out the emotional tone to it, and that’s how you no longer have PTSD.

29:56 Does this repair the brain like forever, or does it just kind of minimize damage? Well, it’s more repairing the brain, because what we see is from fMRI brain scans before and after in some of the subjects that there has been a reduction in activity in the amygdala. And so what we learned with the fly is, you know, as it flies, LSD creates a neurogenesis, so you’re actually creating new neural pathways, and some pathways that are like, you know, habits are so strong, the habits of fear there, you’ve rerouted the way you recall an incident.

30:32 And so, yeah, that there’s neural growth, there’s neurogenesis, there’s, and sometimes this can happen in just one session. I mean, there’s been Vietnam vets that have had PTSD from Vietnam that have used MDMA and been able to overcome their PTSD. So there’s some ways in which we’re learning how to change the brain. I mean, that’s Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change the Brain. Yeah, this is an interesting title, and/or How to Change Your Mind.

31:02 Yeah, but, but I think when he talks about when we think about changing your mind, it’s like having a different opinion, right, but it’s actually rewiring, right, which is what we’re talking about here. Yeah, talk to me about your typical patient you know, with PTSD, is it the fireman, is it the Iraqi soldier, of the Afghan, the Vietnam, or is it someone else? I’m not, yeah, and what, what’s the real-world implication of this? Like, this is the population, this is where we want them to get, and if we can do that with them, that means we can do it to other people.

31:31 Yes, okay. It’s, yeah, so, so the typical patient, one of the things that we learned in the phase 2 study. So basically you have preclinical studies and animals, you’re trying to look at toxicity and look at what it might do, then you have phase 1 studies and healthy volunteers that are talking about just safety, and we rewind everyone just a little bit here. So I just learned today that Merck created MDMA in 1912. Yeah, and you also said that some Merck people have been helping you with this latest, ya know, introduction to the EMA, and they, it was it was known about.

32:04 They didn’t know what to do it really with it really, and then it became used in the 70s and 80s. You said with psychotherapy. Yeah, and then some people saw it and said, ok, we can use it for other ways. Yeah, and it got really big in the 80s. Even in Dallas, is that where you were, or no?

32:21 But I heard about it, ok, and at that point it wasn’t illegal, but people were taking it, and you said the first time you took it, you were like, there’s something different here. Yeah, I took it in 1982, maybe, his first time, at a time when it was still being used quietly as an underground therapy drug, underground because even though it was legal, similar drugs, MDA, were illegal, and we just didn’t want people to know about it, and it was also in the early middle stages of ecstasy. So I learned about it when it was clearly doomed, right, because of this growing, but it was invented in 1912 as a way for Merck to get around a patent of another competitor.

33:01 So they were looking for a different synthetic route to a certain drug and MDMA just happened to be one of the steps along the way. Okay, so they had no idea what they had and they didn’t do any research with it until 1927, around the time they’re starting to think about their patent rights and its expiring, and they did a bunch of studies and animals, and it didn’t seem interesting, and they, they, you know, the animals were like, wow, you know, I feel much closer to my fellow rat. They do in the human studies.

33:29 They didn’t do any human studies. Okay, then the next we hear about it is 1953 with the US Army chemical warfare service, and they were looking for mind-control drugs, and they did a test of eight drugs for toxicity, and this is kind of a good way to think about MDMA, because it was eight drugs in a sequence. One side was mescaline from peyote, and the other side was methamphetamine, and so MDMA is chemically kind of halfway between methamphetamine and mescaline, but different than each one.

34:01 So you get the alertness and the energy from methamphetamine, but without the jitteriness, without the sense I’ve got to clean up the house spotless, but you also get the openness of the mescaline without the ego dissolution, without a lot of the visuals above a high dose, like high dose psychedelic. Okay, so you kind of get the openness and the peace and the energy but with peacefulness, the openness without ego dissolution. So this was the army chemical warfare service, and that was classified, though, and they decided, you know, for whatever reason, that as far as we can tell they didn’t do any human studies with MDMA, and that was classified until 1972.

34:47 But what happened in 1970 was the backlash against the counterculture in the use of psychedelics, and a drug called MDA, methylenedioxypyrovalerone, is specific drugs. So if you could take a specific drug and modify it, then suddenly it’s legal. Okay, was MDA similar to MDMA? Yes, yeah, yeah, that’s chemically. So I mean, okay, again, MDA is more psychedelic than MDMA.

35:22 Okay, so what you start having is chemists looking for new drugs that are similar to illegal drugs that then would be legal, right? And so MDMA gets rediscovered by Sasha Shulgin. Okay, and so Sasha, though, was very interested in providing tools for a mind expansion and for psychotherapy, and so he had a process where he would develop a drug, he would share it with his wife, and if they liked it, then they had a group of 12 people that they would give it to, and then they would try to get all these different opinions about the drug, and then if there was a generally favorable opinion or a remarkable opinion, as there was for MDMA, then it would go to a fellow named Leo Zeff, who was what we called the secret chief.

36:06 So he was the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement, and he was a clinical psych PhD, and he was about to retire when Sasha came up to him and said hey, there’s this new drug, MDMA, and so he came out of retirement to train hundreds of psychiatrists and psychotherapists in the use of MDMA to work with thousands of patients, and this is all in California. I’m guessing California but all over but mostly in California. Okay, yeah. And so from that, it kind of escaped.

36:38 Michael Klieg was the actual person that tried to develop it as ecstasy, and from Dallas, and what was that transfer from, and he made to ecstasy? What was that all about? Was that a marketing play? It was that it was a marketing play. Okay, you know, and also there was a fundamental recognition that these drugs that were all hurting in different ways.

36:57 You know, some of us have clinical diagnosis and some of us don’t, but we’re all suffering. We could all need more, you know, growth in different ways. And the recognition also that recreational use, in the best use of the word recreation, you know, relaxation, you know, it’s healing as well, right? People forget about that sometimes, right? Oh, they’re like, no, if you’re using it for fun or recreation, then it’s by definition bad.

37:24 It’s almost like this puritanical version of what’s okay for a human, and so that’s a weird thing. Even a lot of people in this economic movement are quick to say it’s not fun, so that means it’s okay, which is almost ridiculous in itself, completely. I mean, like, for example, you know, we go to Burning Man or you go to these festivals where people are doing psychedelics and dancing all night or raves. You know, we hear a lot of stories about how people did profound healing of different issues while they’re on the dance floor working through things.

37:55 Yeah, the recreational, you know, the way in which it’s been denigrated has been to, in the service of prohibition and in the service of justifying why we’re throwing all these people engages for trying to market something that so many people want, right? But, but then, okay, so MDMA kind of moved into the ecstasy. It became more known for recreation while this other thing was still going on with the therapy and still quiet, so quiet and all of the people on the inside knew that once it became slightly big recreational, it was only a matter of time until the government came in.

38:29 Yes, and so that’s where we started the strategy of preparing for the crackdown. So I learned about LSD in 1971 and 72, is when I was just 18 years old, and I was taking it at college, and I learned about it after the backlash. So I remember going to the guidance counselor at school and saying, I’m having trouble integrating all my LSD experiences, would you help me? And I was so lucky. I mean, as I was at New College of Florida, which was very sympathetic, you know, it was a nudist colony at the pool, donated to the college by a woman who’d studied with Carl Jung.

39:05 It was Nick, you know, Honors College of Florida now. Anyway, I went to the guidance counselor, and they were sympathetic, and so they gave me this book to read, Realms of the Human Unconscious, by Stan Grof about his LSD research in Prague and the Czech Republic and then at Johns Hopkins, and everything came together when I read that book, and I actually wrote him a letter in 1972, and he wrote me back, and but he was saying the research was all shut down. And so I felt like I had learned about LSD after the backlash.

39:40 And so learning about MDMA and 82, before the backlash, gave me an idea that there’s things we can do when the drug is legal. People that you can introduce it to, people, ways in which you can talk in public without risk that we could educate people and seed people in psychiatry and spirituality in the media to help them have these experiences in a legal way, so that when the crackdown came we would be prepared. And so what happened was we even did an experiment, a phase one dose response safety study, on Stinson Beach and north of San Francisco with doctors and everybody.

40:20 We kept it completely quiet. In the eighties, it is, yeah, it was in 84, as a way to gather some safety data, but to keep it quiet. And then in the summer of 84, DEA moved to criminalize MDMA, kind of as expected, has expected, and there’s a 30-day comment period. They have to publish something in the Federal Register, and then once they do that, people have 30 days if you want to object. And of course nobody’s ever objected to when they do these things to criminalize drugs, because the drug dealers don’t usually put their hands up.

40:51 No, but then we were able to do that, so we, I went to Washington and filed with it with just a few days left in these 30 days with major support from leading psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School, from a big DC law firm working for us for free, and I said I want a hearing. Did you have your Harvard degree? You know, no. Yeah, no, no, I was just an undergraduate okay at New College. You know, I dropped out for 10 years after doing LSD and went back in 82.

41:19 Okay, and I felt like I needed to get grounded. I needed to, you know, that the emotional balance was more important to me than being in school. And in general you could say that we as a human species are over developed technologically, intellectually, and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually, and that’s why we’re struggling with the technologies that we have and the weaponry that we have, and so we need to accelerate our emotional spiritual development somehow to cope with the incredible rate of technological change and the dangers that we all face as a species.

41:54 And so that’s where I felt, once I realize that that that continuing on this path that my parents had set me to go to school, that that there was something more important, and the world was in flames around me. I was a Vietnam draft resister. I was playing to go to jail, or I didn’t, you know, I assumed that they would catch me and put me in jail. Okay, I didn’t want to go fight, and I didn’t want to run away, and I didn’t fit the definition of conscience of objector, because you need to be against all wars and you need to be a pacifist, which I’m not, but at the same time, you would seem Cuban Missile Crisis, we’re going to the moon, more technology.

42:30 Yeah, you’re just feeling like a lot of change, and I’d learned about the Holocaust and I just thought, this vulnerability to insanity and to dehumanization is really what’s the bigger threat to me and my family, and so that’s what I would sort of start to focus on. And so when I was able to finally realize that MDMA and psychedelics were a tool for this, that’s where I decided, at age 18, so it’s really a lot more years than 32 years since I started after the 50-year plan. I mean, you’ve got this plan, and I think people can appreciate this, Rick.

43:08 I mean, you talk about this plan. This is coming up on 40 years, your plan. Yeah, and like you see Rick, and he’s got the biggest smile, 45 years, 45 yeah, this guy, and yet you’ve got like one of the longest games that has imaginable. I mean, I’m guessing you thought it might not take this long. I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but the key thing, and why I’ve been thinking a lot about how I’ve been able to sustain it for so long, yeah, yeah, long time, and that the key part was it didn’t matter if it worked, you know, I had to separate out the goal from the struggle, and we talked about that.

43:43 It’s about the journey, not the destination. So for me, because there was so much opposition, and because I thought the world is that’s an the survival, you know, depends upon us developing these tools for emotions and breaking multi-generational traumas and helping people not dehumanize others. I just felt like this was the best thing I could do with my life, right, and guard Lusa the goal regardless of if it ever worked or not, and trying to find satisfaction in effort rather than outcomes.

44:14 You know, there was one point I got easier said than done. Oh, completely. There was once at one time I was so frustrated, though. This was like the one of the worst times. I was so frustrated.

44:25 I said these, this was in the middle of 90s and all this holes in the brain and everything was, you know, accelerating, and so I just had to take a week off, and I painted my house, and that was like really good. I thought, oh my god, I can do something, and the world changes just like that. And so after a week of painting my house I was like, okay, I’m back, you know. I got my mood back, now go focus on psychedelics. Wow, well, that’s good to know you’re human in the essence.

44:50 Yeah, and and so I think what happened then was, in this, when we surfaced to try to argue with the DEA, they had no knowledge of the therapeutic use of MDMA. We took them completely by surprise. Yeah, and consequently, because of all the people that we had willing to testify, we were winning in the court of public opinion. There’s a Brother David Steindl-Rast, harassed as a Roman Catholic mystic, and he took MDMA in the monastery for meditation and was willing to speak about it.

45:23 So in 1985 was the first major media in Newsweek, and he was quoted and saying that people go to the monastery to spend decades trying to feel that the way that MDMA can help you to feel. And then we had Rabbi Zalman Schachter, who was a Jewish mystic, and he was in The Washington Post article, and he said MDMA is like the Sabbath. Oh yeah, and to where’s the DEA at this point, now with cocaine Wars, and is, I’m guessing, as an entity, it’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and is this drug war on American consciousness?

45:56 Oh, a lot. Yeah, because what we see now I mean, the tragedy is that last year more people died from drug overdoses in one year than in the entire Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I mean, I mean, maybe we should sit with that just for a second that you take all the people that died in Vietnam, all the people that died in the Iraq war, all the people that died in the Afghanistan were on the American side, and more people died last year from drug overdoses in one year.

46:29 So what’s happening with the DEA, and what’s happening in America is a slow recognition that the drug war itself has never really been about reducing drug abuse. It’s been about persecuting minorities. It’s been about jobs. It’s been about money, private prisons, and SWAT teams, and all of this. It’s, it’s not, it’s been from the inception in the 1880s or so when the first drug laws came out against opium.

46:56 It was against the Chinese laborers who were building the railroads, and now they’re kind of looking for other jobs and then they’re competing against American jobs, and then marijuana was the Mexicans after prohibition. You have all these, you know, prohibition agents, and now alcohol is no longer illegal, and what are they going to do? A few years later they criminalized marijuana, and it’s being used by Black jazz musicians and Mexicans, and then the whole backlash against the 60s was against the counterculture.

47:24 It was student protests against the government, the anti-war movement. So it’s a form of control. Yeah, isn’t have anything to do with our health. It’s not really about health. No, I mean, the idea is that you make it worse for the drug users so that they somehow or other scare others from not doing it, which we know, and that doesn’t work.

47:42 That doesn’t work. So I think there’s a general disenchantment going on in America about the drug war itself as a concept, and we see that first with marijuana. So when you talked about long-term plans, so now we’re sort of projecting 2035 is when I think psychedelics will become legal for anybody to experience on their own outside of medicine, outside of religion, 2020, mera dive in America, and I think it’ll be around the world. A how old 2000? I’ll be quite a bit older, maybe, but almost.

48:13 Yeah, but that’s when it will be legal. This is on medical or non? So I can walk into a clinic and book my three-day weekend in the forest, my psilocybin experience with two people, two therapists. Yes, I think what will happen is that you’ll, you’ll get a life. You’ll say I want to do this drug, and then they’ll say you have to like a driver’s test.

48:34 You know, you have to know a certain amount of stuff, and then you know that, and then you actually have to go to a clinic and take it under supervision, and this would be paid for it by tax money from all the people buying the drugs, and then once you’ve taken it under supervision and you know what it is, then you should have a right to buy it without having to do it at a clinic. You could do it at your home. You could do it out in nature, and then if you misbehave, you lose your right to buy it, and so I think alcohol is regulated too loosely right now, and so the best example is drunk drivers who go out and kill people while they’re driving, and they lose their driver’s license but they still can buy alcohol, and a lot of people are killed by drunk drivers who have already lost their license.

49:18 So we should look at it as you have a right, basic fundamental human right to explore your consciousness, freedom of thought, cognitive liberty, fundamental human right. There should be some kind of little bits of information you have to know in order to exercise that right, and then you’re free to use these drugs, but if you misbehave, you lose the right to buy them for some period of time, and I think the alcohol force but no, no, it won’t be difficult at all, just because we have credit cards. You, you can have, you know, this is my card, this is okay.

49:52 So you’ve got a card. I don’t buy the illegal drugs with my card. I do. No, but these will become legal. So I’m saying, in this legal context, it’s a whole new paradigm.

50:00 It’s not used to. Yes, and then it’s tracked, and then it’s, yeah, and there will always be a black market, but it’ll be tiny. So they talk about black markets in terms of the two different kinds of prices, the price of the drug and the search time, the price of the time to find the drugs, right? So the search time will be greater because there’ll be smaller markets that are underground after we institute these legal systems. And so I think that’s the way.

50:25 2035 is one that’s what are some of the, I won’t call them drugs or medicines, what do we call them now that they’re legal? Medicines? What are some of the things that I might want to explore on those? Well, and yeah, LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, all of those. You might want to explore all of those.

50:42 You might want a microdose of LSD. You might want to take MDMA with the lover. You might want to say, oh, I’ve heard about five methoxy DMT for this brief overwhelming kind of spiritual experience, or I want to do any number of things. I think there’s a certain tyranny of religion, you could say, you know, or any group process. There’s a freedom in religion.

51:04 We need all that as well, but you, I think we should be out of medicine and out of religion as another option. There should be religious access. There should be medical access. Medical access should be covered by insurance. But I think if we look at what’s happened with marijuana and the legalization of marijuana in the United States, basically the first Medical Marijuana initiatives passed in the states of California, Arizona in 1996.

51:32 So now we’re 22 years later, and a majority of the population is in favor of the legalization of marijuana for all uses, and how many states now have legal uses? There’s about twenty-seven states or so that have medical marijuana, and there’s about eight states or so that have legalization. Okay, and they’ll be the own direction. They’ll be more coming. Michigan is gonna be voting on legalization in this election coming up in November 2018.

52:00 Okay, did that shock you? Have fast that changed in the last four or five years in America? Well, not really, because again, when we talk about, you know, fast change, because I’ve been in this for so long, I see, you know, and there’s all sorts of exponential functions, so I have seen the long work beforehand to change people’s attitudes, right? A lot of which MAPS has been doing. Yes, you should talk about more, and because you have a whole nother marijuana process and all that.

52:33 Yeah, I’ll just briefly say with the marijuana that there’s a 50-year cycle of marijuana that we’re hoping to break before the election, and so that is in 1968 because of an interest in this research into marijuana, and because marijuana was taken out of the formularies that medicine in 1942, the Marijuana Tax Act was 1937. So now you’ve got all sorts of people in the 60s starting to use marijuana, and there was some interest in doing research about what’s bad with marijuana, so the federal government contracted with the University of Mississippi to grow marijuana for research, and that production facility in the University of Mississippi has been a federal monopoly ever since for 50 years. So even though we have all these states that have marijuana legalization, in medical marijuana, and there’s production going on, none of that marijuana can be used in FDA-approved research, and this is hindered you for the last 10, 20, completely.

53:35 Yeah, weird legal loophole, which means you can’t actually grow the stuff to test it. Yes, and there’s weird laws, which means you can. So this is just them winning a little bit longer, and you having to stay persistent. Yes, yes, yes, and so from a policy point of view, when it comes to psychedelic and marijuana research, this is the last fundamental obstruction that’s built into the system. And you know, here we are in England, and I’ll just say that we’re very jealous of the Home Office, which licensed the company called GW Pharmaceuticals to grow marijuana in 1998.

54:07 That company is now worth over a three billion dollars, and they’ve got product called Epidiolex, which is CBD for childhood epilepsy, and they’ve just been approved in June by the FDA Advisory Committee, and the FDA will probably approve the drug very shortly. Okay, so we’re years ahead of the curve here because we don’t have this whole, such a hardcore war on drugs state and federal system. May be a history of this. Well, our willingness to let this science go forward over here, more over here, more.

54:40 Yes. So but still GW is the only company doing it. Okay, so there’s not really a competitive situation. Okay, you’re breaking this in the states this year before the election, we hope. Okay, so we have since, similarly, we have sued the DEA in 2005 and won.

54:56 The DEA administrative law judge said it would be in the public interest for us to have, for there to be, other sources of marijuana that can be used for drug development, because the thing about the government source is it’s only for research purposes it’s not for commercial sales. And what we’re finding now, working with FDA for MDMA, when you move into what’s called Phase three, which is the final stage of making a drug into a medicine, you have to test the exact same drug you want to market, the capsules, the exact everything, the printing on the capsules, all of this has to be the exact same thing that you want to market, and because the US government marijuana cannot be marketed, we can’t use it in Phase three. So for your grandmother in Scottsdale, Arizona, where we have our marijuana PTSD study in 76 veterans, and again it was sort of veterans.

55:52 You asked a question before that he didn’t quite answer, which was about who’s the typical patient. Yeah, so someone we just given briefly is that one of the things we learned about in Phase two in this 16 years of different Phase two studies is we tried to find out who doesn’t work for. Is it childhood sexual abuse, which is complex is good, because then you’re living in this environment where you’re being redrawn Atty z’d all the time. A lot of times that’s complex trauma.

56:20 Is it for war-related trauma? What about workplace accidents, automobile accidents, hospitalizations? So what we discovered is that our therapy works regardless of the cause of PTSD, and the currently available medicines, Zoloft and Paxil, SSRIs, worked in women more than in men and failed in combat-related PTSD. So we have this general sense that it’s for anybody with PTSD. Similarly, for marijuana, so we were able to start this study with in Arizona, in Phoenix, Arizona.

56:55 It’s called the Scottsdale Research Institute, by Dr. Sue Sisley is the lead experimenter, and we got two point 1 million dollars from the state of Colorado from all of their marijuana taxes. Okay, and that study, we’ve enrolled 60 out of the 76 veterans, and hopefully we’ll get the rest of them before the end of this year. And you know, one group is getting 12% CBD and virtually no THC. This is plants to smoke. One is getting 12% CBD with virtually no THC.

57:28 One is nine percent THC with no CBD, one, like 8%, 8% a mixture, and then one is a placebo. But once we get the results, we can’t do anything with them. We cannot go further into Phase three without a new source of marijuana. Right, then that’s when you’ve always talked about that when you’re here. Is they, that’s your kind of weird roadblock that you’re always trying to fight through in a minute.

57:49 Yeah, yeah. And so there was just a great article in Businessweek that said America is giving away a thirty billion dollar industry. All right, so you’re trying to GW Pharmaceuticals, right? So the Canadians, the Israelis, address. Yeah, so I think that there’s, there’s a lot of senators, Republicans as well, that are now trying to change that.

58:09 Attorney General Sessions is the one that’s blocking it. Trump might even be sympathetic to it. Okay, and so it looks like that will change, so that’s the final regulatory obstacle for marijuana. For marijuana, can I talk about MDMA? Real.

58:23 Yes. Michael Pollan didn’t talk about MDMA in his new book, right? Terence McKenna notoriously had arguments with you about not respecting MDMA as part of the psychedelic family. I think you told me yes. Yeah, you are probably the most well-known guy when it comes to, you know, the the fight for using it, and then your whole life being dedicated.

58:43 Yeah, you’re the MDMA guy. Yeah, yeah. Why, why is this happening with other people? You know, why, why didn’t Paul an address it? Why did Terence have those issues, and what what does it come with, what kind of baggage, and things like that?

58:55 Yeah, well, Michael Pollan didn’t address it in – for two reasons. First off, there was a book that was written by a fellow named Tom Shroder, that was called Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, and that’s about our work with MDMA. And so that tells the story of the psychedelic history, the psychedelic Renaissance, but it focuses on three people and how their lives intersected, and one of them is Dr. Michael Mithoefer, who was our lead psychiatrist.

59:23 Okay, the other was myself, and the third person was Nicholas Blackston, who’s one of the veterans who we treated. So Michael said there’s already a book about MDMA. I want to do something different. The other thing is that his doctor had told him, because he had a heart issue, yeah, so that he advised him against her MDMA. So we have since spoken to Michael and had him talk to other doctors, and he realizes that if you take a beta blocker, which is to reduce your activity, the and reduce hypertension, that you can successfully take MDMA.

1:00:02 So there’s a way for him to take MDMA if he wants, and you’re on a mission until he does. And well, yeah, you’ve seen him tonight. So when I’m seeing him tonight, well, he’s saying that he wants to wait till he could do it in a legal context, right? You know, he did several illegal psychedelic experiences that he’d writes about in this book, which does not really put him at legal risk, because he cannot, you cannot be witness against yourself. Okay, and there’s, there’s no evidence.

1:00:29 So, so I think that from Michael’s point of view, he really didn’t really treat much about MDMA because it had already been treated, and he wasn’t ready for some experience. Okay, I think with Terence McKenna, there was this kind of romantic notion that if something’s from nature it’s good, and if something’s from the laboratory it’s bad, if it’s the product of the human mind, it’s somehow not natural and it’s bad, and if it’s from nature it’s good. Now, there are mushrooms that will kill you, and they’re from nature, and there are drugs that are from the lab that will save your life, a certain kind of anti ture medicines that have been drummed up by big pharma that don’t necessarily appear in nature.

1:01:18 So I think there was that romantic kind of man, and I think Terence was kind of ridiculous about it, and he actually, we were at a meeting at Esalen, and he was going on with this theory in 1984, and it was good, because I was like, you are so ridiculous, Terence. We need to study, and that’s how we started that first study. Okay, at this meeting, and I said I’ll put up $1,000, and then Dick Price, who started nestlings, and I’ll put up $1,000, so then before you know it we had enough money to do this study.

1:01:49 So I think that with MDMA it’s the most gentle of all the psychedelics. So first off, psychedelic means mind manifesting, that’s the original definition of the word, and that can be for dreams, that can be for meditation, that can be for Stan Grof. He developed hyperventilation to bring things to the surface, which doesn’t, you would say, doesn’t use a drug at all, but it does change the gas and concentrations in your brain very much so. And I’m breathing can do incredible things.

1:02:22 I’ve been, yeah, I didn’t believe it after my first ayahuasca experience. The breathing could get me in any kind of state, but I’ve been, my mind has been changed. Yes, yes. Yeah, so we used the word psychedelic in a broader meaning, in its original definition and mind manifesting, not necessarily d certain compounds. Yeah, now there’s the classic psychedelics, right, that are mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine, ayahuasca, the MTD, MTD much, Hiawatha’s basically, and it’s pretty much it.

1:02:52 Yeah, yeah, well, and there’s, you know, there’s Morning Glory seeds, lysergic acid, LSA, is in Morning Glory seeds. So LSD is similar to LSA but different. Okay, so they’re there, but you would say that the classic psychedelics, what they do, and I don’t know if you’ve had Robin Carhart-Harris? Yeah, okay. So but the default mode, so the sort of ego orientation, these classic psychedelics weaken the default mode network, and they weaken your sense of yourself as an individual, and you kind of can open up to a broader identification, right?

1:03:30 It kind of slows down the control center in the mind. Yes, and I guess with Carhart-Harris and David Nutt’s research, they thought that it would, it would show like all this increased brain activity, because that’s what it feels like when you’re in these substances, which is, we both know, but what they found was that default controlled network was kind of reduced, and so each part of the brain could kind of act independently, and maybe, and would more come to your awareness and sense, but without the you organizing it. Yeah, so that there, there is actually, yeah, increased connectivity but not increased activity.

1:04:02 Okay, all right, and so the classic psychedelics will act in that way. MDMA is not like a classic psychedelic, in that it, I mean, we actually have videos of therapy sessions that we showed a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and we’re sending it actually into the EMA of people under the influence of MDMA, and it’s not what people imagine. I mean, people are sitting there and they’re talking, but they’re talking in an emotionally open way. They’re, they’re very grounded in their biography, in their who they are, and they’re open-hearted and less fear, and they can describe things, and new ideas are coming to them.

1:04:40 So it doesn’t match what people think of as a psychedelic drug where you’re seeing colours, and you, you know, one of my favorite albums of all time is from the psychedelic 60s. It’s by David Crosby, you know, and Crosby, Stills, from the eye again, and this was an album, I think it was like 1969 or something like that, and it’s with everybody who is in the Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all everybody sitting in on this album, but the album is If I Could Only Remember My Name. So that’s a really good way to describe you know, the weakening of the default mode network.

1:05:15 Right? Okay. Who am I? You know, you can’t even formulate, if I could only remember my name. But MDMA, you totally, not only do you remember your name, you remember everybody’s name, you remember your mother’s name.

1:05:27 You want to talk to your mother. You want to talk to your, my mother actually called one time when I was doing MDMA. She didn’t know it, and I had a really, really open-hearted conversation with her. She didn’t really know I was on MDMA, but you know, you can talk to your mother. That’s a good way to describe.

1:05:43 You have an MDMA experience with, you with your grandmother? I did. Yes, she was in the hospital, she had unipolar depression, and she had been given electroshock several times, and it hadn’t worked for her, and she was trying to stop eating, and my parents had a different view of the law, and they said you can only give it to her if we get legal permission. This was in the 80s, when no permission. I tried.

1:06:08 I almost, I got close, but I never could get permission, so I decided to work on the contact high. So I took MDMA and spent the day with my grandmother. She was in her home, so it wasn’t in a hospital, but she was in this very depressed state, and it was a remarkable situation. The, as at one point, what she was saying was that she was ready to die. That life was a burden, that she didn’t enjoy a life, she didn’t want to leave her house, she didn’t want to see her old friends.

1:06:35 She was ready to die. She wanted to die, and she’d done everything that she had wanted to do, and the MDMA gave me this kind of peacefulness to pick up on one thing that she said, which was you’ve done everything you wanted to do. I said, what a thing to celebrate. Look at this. You, you were married to my grandfather for 49 years before he died of heart attack.

1:06:58 You had children. You had grandchildren. How beautiful it is that you’ve done everything you’ve wanted to do. How great that is. That’s something.

1:07:06 Let’s celebrate instead of, so it kind of got her thinking a little bit, and then she said, well, there is one thing that I wonder about, and she left the room, and she came back with this book that she showed me, and she explained that when she was in her early 20s, she was in Israel with her father and her siblings. They’d moved there from Chicago, and they were pioneers in Israel and their house is a historical site on Rothschild Boulevard and Tel Aviv, and she said that she started developing a romance with someone that her parents didn’t like, and that they shipped her back to America, and that a year later she met my grandfather, and they had a having marriage, but that this book was a wedding present from this prior romantic interest, and it was the Song of Songs from the Bible, the most erotic part of the Bible.

1:08:02 It was with rice paper between the pages, and each was like a hand-colored drawing with a section from the Bible. Is this eloquent book? And there was a note from him, and there was a rose that he had given her that she’d saved all these years, and nobody knew about it. It was always puzzling to me. Why do I have all these relatives in Israel?

1:08:24 And I’m here and my mother didn’t even know about it. None of her children knew about this romance before my grandfather, and that came out under the influence of me, sort of, this contact high in a way. Yeah, and after that, that end of the day, my aunt and uncle came to see how we were doing, and they didn’t know what I was doing, but I was, said, we, I did MDMA, look at, they were shocked, and they said give her MDMA right now. And unfortunately my mother was the older sister, and I felt like I should listen to my mother, but I always wonder what would have happened if I would have given her MDMA.

1:09:03 And that’s been a very powerful motivating factor for other people who were stuck in depression, that maybe MDMA, you know, ketamine we’re now using as for refractory suicidal depression, psilocybin is being studied for depression I wonder, and it was the law and the policy that blocked a potential healing. Now it might not have healed her at all. She might have just had a good day. More things might have come up. We don’t know, but that’s been very important.

1:09:34 I don’t want other people’s grandmothers who are suffering like that not to have all the options that we know exist, and even a good day. I mean, what’s the value of a good day? I mean, yeah, be massive, you know well, it in my grandmother’s situation, I actually, she moved down to Florida. I had a lover of mine that was, we were gonna take care of her. She had been a nurse, and so she lived there for three months while we were waiting to see if I could get permission to give her MDMA, and one day somehow or other she got better, and it was like she was her normal self again, but she started making all these plans, and then the next day her depression came back.

1:10:16 So she actually said that it was in some ways worse to have that recent memory of a good day, and then to have. But what that told me is that her biochemistry is in such a delicate balance that something, who knows what changed, but she woke up and it was good, and that’s what made me think maybe one day MDMA could tip the balance in the other direction. Yeah, and I don’t know, and I find this contact high fascinating I think I was telling someone your story about it, your grandmother, even a year or two ago, and yeah, and I explain the story, and they said, oh, so he gave it to the grandma?

1:10:52 I said, no, he took it himself. Yeah, and so she was reacting to a human, kind of on a different frequency, with a different mind and non-judgmental, and let’s just go down this conversation, and she’s like, that’s my grandson Rick, but he’s not Rick today, and that way I feel like I can tell him a secret I’ve never told anyone before, and so yeah, that’s the power, I guess, of this substance. And I can see in psychotherapy having these conversations, or couples therapy, and being able to have conversations that would never manifest themselves.

1:11:20 Yeah, I mean, one of the first study, well, the first study that we’ve done with the Veterans Administration therapists is a couples therapy study, and so it’s actually called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy. So conjoint means couple, and it’s where one of the couple has PTSD, but it affects the relationship. Okay, and so they’ve tried to bring in the spouses in order to help with the process, because people with PTSD are reactive, and it’s very difficult to live with someone that has PTSD particularly if they’re your partner.

1:11:52 Yeah, I’ve seen it depicted in movies with vets, and yeah, I can totally see that. Yeah there’s a napping, they’ve got the different parts of the brain active and not nice to be around. Yeah, and so we got permission from the FDA and the DEA and the institutional review board to give both members of the couple MDMA, not just the person with PTSD. And it’s been remarkable. Divorces have been averted.

1:12:13 People are making great progress, and so now there’s going to be a new treatment developed, which is a combination of MDMA and cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy, and so this was sort of an informal alliance with the Veterans Administration that came about through our work with Richard Rockefeller. Dr. Richard Rockefeller was from the Rockefeller family, but he was the chairman of the Board of Advisors of Doctors Without Borders, and he was in Kosovo and Serbia and sensitized to all these people, refugees. I mean, it’s even worse now, but all these people that were suffering, and there’s not enough doctors, not enough therapists, and he started thinking what other solutions might there be, and so he got interested in MDMA, and we started working together, and his cousin was Senator Jay Rockefeller on the Senate veterans’ affairs committee, and so we actually arranged a meeting at the Pentagon for a Michaelmi offer and Richard Rockefeller and myself and Richard died around four years ago in a plane crash.

1:13:13 It was just tragic, because he was so much potential. But in a way he’d opened some doors that there were crucial for us that we’re still working. Well, then, particularly it was that with the US military, because I had started in 1990 trying to work with the Veterans Administration, and they had rejected it, and every three years we’d get a different team at a different VA. So it was only about three years ago that there was permission for us to pay for a study.

1:13:43 I mean, the irony of that is that right now, well, let me just say this: as of June 30th 2016, which is almost 2 SOT two years ago, there was eight hundred and sixty-eight thousand veterans disabled with PTSD receiving disability payments from the VA. The last time they put out a number, an average annual cost was in 2004 of $20,000 per, that’s roughly seventeen billion dollars that the VA is paying every year, and there’s probably a million vets now disabled with PTSD, and whether 20,000 is even the number anymore, they won’t even put it out, and there’s another 550,000 that’s disabled from depression and anxiety and other mental disorders. So it’s roughly 30 billion a year that the VA is putting out as the cost of war, and they have not given us a penny.

1:14:41 So, so where we were paying to educate VA therapists about MDMA, but strategically that was the way to go. And in October of 2017 I had the final meetings with the National Institute of Mental Health. They said they’re not gonna pay a penny. With the Wellcome Trust they said forget it. With the why, it’s not, well, not politically correct, and well, you make comes up, and they got to put their money else.

1:15:09 Well, what, yeah, I mean, years ago the Wellcome Trust said that it was a reputational risk okay, and I said it’s a reputational opportunity, and they said, well, I came n see what you’re saying, but we think it’s a reputational risk, so get out of here, right? And it’s a British, the Wellcome Trust. Yeah, oh yeah, it’s the largest charity in England. It’s here in London. It’s incredible, and it’s about neuroscience, but in any case, all these groups, the VA, the Department of Defense, National so mental health, and Wellcome Trust all said no.

1:15:39 The Wellcome Trust and the National Mental Health said that they’re sympathetic, but they want to do what’s called mechanism of action research. They want to see how things work, but from the FDA’s point of view and from the EMA’s point of view, it doesn’t matter at all how it works, right? If you can help somebody, it’s about safety and efficacy. Okay, you don’t have to have the test theories. It’s just about, well, it’s more about our people getting better.

1:16:05 Who knows why they’re getting better? But it, you don’t have to know why to help somebody. Okay, so Wellcome Trust and NIMH said, well, we’re sympathetic, but we want mechanism of action research, and that’s not what we’re doing. We’re doing drug development research in any context of a non-profit pharmaceutical company. Okay, and so where are we right now, and where you want to be in the next few years?

1:16:28 Well, let me just say, I’ll tell you where right now, but, so, I recognize that no funds are coming from these traditional sources So I was relieved in a sense, and then I said, in a way, this is good, because now we can say that MDMA is going to be a gift to the world, the therapeutic use from the psychedelic community, and now all of that changed in December. And so what happened in December was there was a fella named Pine who put a notice in Reddit saying that I’ve created the Pineapple Fund, and I’m gonna give away 5,000 bitcoins, and anybody can apply, and so we applied. I didn’t even know about that.

1:17:09 Set point, some people saw it, send in an email to MAPS. A felon on our team put in a one-page application the next day, and then the day after that we got an email saying I’m sending you a million dollars’ worth of bitcoins, and then two hours later they showed up in our wallet. All right, so then we talked to this fella through email. I have no idea who he is, and then he said I might be open to giving you a matching grant. I said great.

1:17:35 Well, then we talked about, he said, well, I’ve previously decided that most I want to give to any one group is five million, so I’ll give you a four million dollar matching grant. So we were able to, and this started January 10th, and by March 10th was the deadline. We had two months, and we got. After he gave us the first million and we put out a media about it, somebody else sent us a million dollars with bitcoins. We have no idea what was.

1:18:00 Then I mean, do you know who this guy Pionen? I do not. I assume that nobody does. So it turns, a lot of stuff happens to you, Rick. Well, this is energy coming back to you.

1:18:09 Is what this? Yeah, this was shocking. So what ended up happening is that we’ve now raised about eight million dollars from cryptocurrencies. So what I say now is that MDMA therapy is a gift of the world from the psychedelic and cryptocurrency world, but we’ve got a twenty-six million dollar fund for Phase three. Okay, so what’s happening right now is is important.

1:18:31 I mean, come on, I mean, this isn’t, this is real money for you, and Matt, believable. I mean, you have to run MAPS, and everything you do is, it’s expensive. Yeah, this doesn’t not, I’m guessing, not a big history of people cutting you checks for millions of dollars. Very. That’s true.

1:18:45 Yeah, I mean, we’ve had that. We have thousands of donors we mostly, you know, well, it’s turned in that most of our money does come from the larger donors, but we have a broad base, and so, so far MAPS has raised in its history over fifty million dollars. Wow, which is kind of shocking, but it’s, and there’s no ownership. I don’t own anything. It’s all gonna go towards more research if we make MDMA into a medicine and make money from it, but what we’re doing right now is, and they can go to MAPS org, and you’ve got your QR reader, and they write on there, but going right now, thank you.

1:19:22 Yes, get on it. Did claim Ethereum? I’ve never asked London Real there. Oh, that well is because now we need money for Europe, so basically we have raised the money we need to make MDMA into a medicine in the US. I mean, we might be wrong in our estimates.

1:19:35 I don’t think so. We’ll find out, but I think we’ve raised the money that we need for MDMA for United States to get to where you want to be in 20 years. 20 21, 21 is when we think MDMA will be legal medicine, and there’s something happening even sooner, which there was just a law called Right to Try that was passed in America, and Trump signed it, and the idea of this law is that if you have an illness that has not been cured by the available medicines, and there’s a drug that’s being researched for that illness, and it has to be serious or life-threatening illness, then you should have a right to try it before the drug is approved, even not knowing fully the risks, and you should be able to try it.

1:20:21 The pharmaceutical company doesn’t have to pay for the treatment. You can pay for it yourself. Okay, all right. So it’s a little bit controversial, this law. The FDA doesn’t really like it but they have a drug, they have a program called expanded access, which is similar for people who have a disease that that is being studied.

1:20:40 The drug is being studied for that. So we’re gonna be starting what’s called expanded access in the summer of 2019, one year from now, where people will be able to pay for their treatments because there’s no control group the FDA doesn’t consider the data for efficacy, and because you can vary the inclusion criteria, and you can treat people that are riskier than your narrow inclusion-exclusion criteria for Phase three. They don’t even really consider the safety data.

1:21:10 It’s just about providing people compassionate access to it. So we’ll have the ability for people to start psychedelic clinics in the summer of 2019 we think it will be approved as a medicine in 2021, and now we’re trying to raise between eight and ten million for European research, and why it’s so cheap in a sense. I mean, not that eight to ten million is cheap, but it’s that most of the data that we gather for the FDA, the EMA will accept, so it can be.

1:21:39 We’ve probably spent thirty-five, forty million to get to this point for MDMA in the US, and for another eight to ten million we’ll be able to get it approved all throughout Europe. Okay, and how do these two compare? Because for some things you want to go through Europe to get the, does he get the FDA to take notice, and nonsense? The other way around how do these two entities interact with each other when it comes to the MDMA? Yeah, well, there’s what’s called regulatory competition So one of the things that has helped us so much, and that, that also politically has shown us that the political risk is, is relatively minimal, is that we applied to the FDA for what’s called breakthrough therapy designation, and that’s for the most important drugs that have the most promise that could be breakthroughs, and you apply for it when you’re still trying to research it, and then you get all sorts of special help from the FDA, and you also get shortened timelines for them to review it.

1:22:36 And so we applied for that. I wasn’t sure if we would get it. I thought we qualified, but it’s so public to get breakthrough that Trump would see it, Sessions would see it, that the, that members of Congress would would notice. I mean, I don’t know if Trump really noticed, but Sessions looks at these kind of things, and so the FDA said yes to breakthrough. So between the FDA and the EMA, the EMA is particularly sensitive to which agency approves breakthrough drugs first.

1:23:05 Okay, who is most open to innovation? Because that might help the economic impact on the back end, and could help their economies. Yes, and also it shows that the regulators often get criticized for slowing things down, and for, you know, being too focused on avoiding risk and not looking at potential benefits. So what we found is, for us at least, the door was open by the FDA, not by EMA, not open by Trump. Well, no, I mean, it was hoping to actually under Bush in 1992.

1:23:33 Okay, but under Trump we did get this breakthrough therapy, right? But even more importantly, practically, not symbolically breakthrough therapy, but there’s another program called Special Protocol Assessment, and so that’s a new innovation at the FDA, and what that means is that once you get approval for going to Phase 3, if you want to, and most pharmaceutical companies don’t want to, but if you want to, you can delay the start of Phase 3 and engage in a discussion with FDA about every aspect of your protocol design and all the other information we’re gonna want to see to approve the drug, and if you get an agreement letter in this Special Protocol Assessment, you losing me in the legal hearing? Okay, all right.

1:24:15 If you get this Agreement less if you come to agreement with FDA, then they’re legally bound to approve the drug. Okay, if you get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and no new safety problems arise. Okay, so we got that too. Okay, so now how did the EMA say, the EMA today, or yes, yesterday? So we met at the EMA with that.

1:24:34 Like, is it like own Supreme Court where you got an hour, and they’ve already reviewed it, and you got to give your best thing. You said they were practicing exactly. You have an hour and a half. Okay, so first off, you submit some documents about your case and what you want to do. Then they submit you a bunch of questions.

1:24:51 Then you submit your. Well, then after these questions, we had a teleconference with them where we discuss some of it, and then they submitted more questions Okay, and then we submitted both a response and a request for a meeting in person. Okay, and it’s here in London is here, on dinner or something? Well, EMA is gonna be moving to Amsterdam. Okay, but right now it’s still here.

1:25:14 Okay. So it is like the Supreme Court in a sense. There’s like, you know, rows and rows of the EMA officials, and then you come there, and you’ve have presented your answers, and you have to go through it with them, and with them to ask questions. Okay, and so they’re not used to nonprofit drug development. They’re not used to people having spent 32 years.

1:25:37 So I opened the meeting, and it said it’s taken me 32 years for us to get here. You know, six years from the start of MAPS in 86 to 92 for our first safety study. Another eight years to start our first study with MDMA with PTSD. 16 years Phase 2 studies where we figured out it works for everybody, and then two years more or less of this, going through the Special Protocol Assessment, breakthrough, getting ready. And so I said, you know, it’s taken us all this time to get here, and we’re really grateful that you’re willing to give us this time and your attention and now you’re already different than the pharmaceutical guy that comes up, and it’s just being pushy.

1:26:15 Yeah, did that get their attention? It did, and I think that they’re, they were particularly sympathetic, I think, to the need for new treatments for PTSD, and I think that, and also the fact that FDA had said it’s a breakthrough, they were paying even more attention because of that. And so they had some questions about, you know, will people become addicted to ecstasy and then use it afterwards, or, you know, will people have these, you know, we hear about it in terms of recreational use?

1:26:43 Those who, the suicide Tuesdays or the mid-week blues, and right, does that happen after you take it? Yeah, and we said that really we don’t notice that in the therapeutic setting, the way we do it. They were particularly concerned about diversity throughout Europe. So we came in there with a proposal to do studies in the Czech Republic, in Germany, in Netherlands, and in England. And they said they want us to add some more countries around the borders, around the borders.

1:27:15 They were concerned about refugees. Might this work for refugees, and could this be helpful for refugees or migrants? And what happens is that you have the meeting, you discuss it. It’s the obligation of the pharmaceutical company to write the minutes of the meeting, which we have to hand them in by Friday, and then two weeks later they’re gonna give us their written advice, and then we take that to the individual countries and say, here’s our protocol, will you let us do it?

1:27:45 So we’re hoping to start European research in the summer of 2019, and conceivably, because we have to do two Phase three studies in the United States for FDA, and we’re doing them in the United States, Israel and Canada, so we can use a little foreign data. We only have to do one Phase three study for EMA, so hopefully 2021 we’ll have it approved in both the US and Europe now that depends on can we raise this 8 to 10 million that we need additional. Okay.

1:28:14 Bitcoin price has dropped a high, and here you were still holding bitcoins? Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Wait, no, we liquidated them right away really? Yes, yeah. I mean, because what I realized is people are not giving us these bitcoins to speculate in bitcoins.

1:28:28 They’re giving us this to do research. So, you know, you kind of have that desire, like, oh, oh, maybe it’ll keep going up, but we started getting them as the price was falling. So anyway, we’ve liquidated them all. Okay, and so we I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to raise more in these donations, and right now that’s what people need to do. They in Europe, if they want to see this move forward, then they need to help you with this eight to ten million Yeah, yeah.

1:28:51 I mean, this is, I mean, this is amazing. I mean, if you can really do this in the States by 2021, and even something similar in Europe, if not earlier, the same timeframe. I mean, that’s incredible. It is option for your grandma, for anyone else. Yeah, my grandmother is now dying, but still.

1:29:06 Yeah, I mean, yeah, for that, for that woman and anybody else’s. Look, and what I told the AMA, the way I ended my talk, did you tell them that this was brought to you by the people and the cryptocurrency? No, I didn’t talk about that, but what I did say is that not only are we trying to bring a new innovative approach to treating mental illness, which is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, but we’re also trying to demonstrate a new innovative way to market pharmaceutical drugs, and so in the United States we’ve formed what’s called the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation because selling MDMA for a profit, which is something that I want to do, because I’m constantly asking people for money, but we’re a rare nonprofit in that we’re actually talking about having a product at the end.

1:29:55 And so if we can raise money from the sale of MDMA to fund further research, that helps the donors when I say I need 26 million for FDA or ten million, eight to ten million for EMA. If I say to people also, this is, I’m not going to be continually coming to you for money. If you can help us get this approved, then we’ll be able to market this, but we’re marketing it in what’s called a public benefit context, which means it’s a, it’s an innovation of capitalism.

1:30:23 Okay, and so we have, look, like, well, capitalism in a normal corporation, you have to maximize profit, and if you have shareholders, the minority shareholders can sue the management for not maximizing profits, and you see this all the time, of shareholder revolts, because you’re doing this strategy that they don’t like, or you’re paying, you know, your negatives too much money, or that hardly ever happens. You know, but you know, different things. So what it looks like, is a new corporate form that’s approved in California and Delaware, where you maximize public benefit and you articulate what the public benefits will be, and you have to evaluate how you’re reaching those public benefits, but you don’t have to maximize profits.

1:31:07 So, like, your charter, your charter is different. Yes, ting. And so our corporation, it’s still a corporation, it’s still taxable, right? And you still have investors? Well, we don’t have investors, so we, well, the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation and the MAPS Europe BV, each has one investor, which is the nonprofit.

1:31:26 Okay, right? So the nonprofit owns these vehicles, and so when I spoke to the EMA about how we’re gonna market it in a way that is socially responsible. Yeah, I think that also helped make them. Is a really interesting point, because I think if you’ve done all the work that you’ve set out to do your entire life and then you just hand it over to the FAR’s political companies, the execution can ruin everything. Exactly, and you’ve seen this happening countless drugs in Scituate could be another backlash, right?

1:31:57 Exactly. Yeah, so you have to control this, and they and all the applications, ideally for the next 20, 30, 40, 200 years. Yeah, make sure it goes with the same spirit Yes. Okay, yeah, now again, Rick Doblin, thinking 100 years ahead. Yeah, now that there is another thing that happened under Ronald Reagan, which was because MDMA was invented in 1912, so it’s off patent, so we have no patent protection, and in the ’80s and early ’90s I hired a patent attorney to develop an anti-patent strategy because I didn’t want us to be doing research with MDMA, and then somebody else comes along and patents it.

1:32:34 So what I learned is that to have a patent, you have to be the inventor of something. You have to be the first to know something, and so what we’ve done is we’ve called out to everybody. If MDMA has helped you in some way with some problem, unusual problem we’ve had somebody with rheumatoid arthritis, went away after MDMA, whatever it is, write it up, send it to us, info at vast org, and then we post it if it’s new on our website, and then nobody can ever claim that they invented it for that use.

1:33:07 Okay, right? Okay, so we have an anti-patent strategy. Okay, for the use. So and then there’s composition of matter patents, as I said, that expired. Use patents, there’s certain kind of process patents, but those don’t matter that much, because there’s so many different ways to make MDMA.

1:33:23 Okay, that you do it. So, but what Ronald Reagan did is, under, to provide incentives for developing drugs that are off patent, they created a new law that says data exclusivity. So what that means is that no one in the United States can use our data for five years to market a generic. Okay, now, if you do studies in pediatric populations, meaning adolescents or children, you’ve got a six-month extension, and I think for those people that are kind of worried about, you know, what about the kids?

1:34:00 You know, you know, is this gonna be bad for kids, or what’s the message to kids? What the FDA has found is that many drugs are tested in adults never tested in children and are given to children without a lot of knowledge from scientific studies. So now the FDA is requiring not just us but most new drugs to agree, post-marketing, once the drug is approved for marketing, to do studies and children. So we’re gonna have to do studies in 12 to 17 year olds with trauma.

1:34:29 Okay, which we want to do because the earlier you can treat somebody with the trauma, the easier it should be to treat them, and the less suffering they have in their lives. Okay, so that’s coming. So that’s it. So, so we’re gonna have data exclusivity. Okay, in Europe it’s ten years.

1:34:43 Okay, so they’ll be a peer. Now that what this is, is just to make the point because I want to ask a couple more questions. Yeah, this is important, because this will help then with the company, and this will help us sell MDMA and raise money for other research. Okay, because, like, MDMA is good for couples therapy. MDMA is good for possibly anxiety, depression, eating disorders, social anxiety, any number of different things, all of which we’re going to have to do new studies.

1:35:08 And so the same way that it’s less expensive for us to do EMA research once we’ve done FDA, right? It’s similar. You’re gonna be less expensive for us to expand the uses of MDMA. Okay, but we have to do different uses for insurance companies to pay for it. Okay, so this is your life’s work.

1:35:26 This is it. Yes, and what I’d like to leave MAPS is with a stream of income from the sale of MDMA to fund all sorts of other things when I go off and start a psychedelic clinic. Okay, and that’s coming soon, because you want to be a therapist as well. That’s the main thing. That’s your plan.

1:35:41 Yes, that’s my retirement plan. So you’re not allowing yourself to indulge in being a therapist until you know that we’re on such a strong path. Yes, you go take your eye off the ball a little bit. Yeah, so I think maybe by, you know, age 68, 70, I’ll be able to start my real career as a therapist, really. But now I’ve just switched to social therapy.

1:36:04 Okay, so that’s what, you know, my PhD from Harvard, from the Kennedy School of Government in public policy. It’s really sort of, sick public policies. I’m good. I’m trying to work. What I mean is communicating to mass audiences and telling, explaining the story.

1:36:16 It means talking to you. It’s helping the way that you’re helping educate people. It’s tremendous. That’s so. I originally thought that the original barriers were regulatory.

1:36:27 Then we’ve managed to overcome them, except for this marijuana monopoly, but we’ll get that. Then the barriers were fundraising, and we’ve done that in the US. We still, and then the, and this is to answer your question, what are we doing right now? Right at this very moment we’re in the final stages of training the therapists, and it’s difficult to train therapists with MDMA because the way in which you train therapists is you have them work with patients under supervision, and they get feedback, but because MDMA is an illegal drug, we can only train therapists in the context of a protocol.

1:37:03 So we’ve created a special protocol for therapists that we’ve already trained by watching videotapes of therapy sessions, learning our method. We even have a protocol that the FDA’s approved where we can give therapists MDMA where they’re the patient in a setting. One day they’re the patient with getting MDMA, then there’s a break, and the next day they get it with a placebo, or it’s a crossover. So it’s, and it’s double-blind. Either they’ll get MDMA or the placebo the first day, then a day of rest, then they get MDMA or the whatever they didn’t get the first time.

1:37:37 So now what we’re doing is every new co-therapy team, and so it’s a male/female team that gets the best results. Yeah, no, I mean, you can have two women too, but, but for women who have been sexually abused, it helps a lot if there’s a woman in the room. Having two people is very well. First off, it’s eight-hour sessions. It’s very exhausting.

1:37:57 You always want somebody in the room. Also, people can see things in different ways. There’s a lot of dialogue. Also, people get in regress states, you know, early childhood traumas. It tends to be we all get traumatized by different things, but most people recover, but the people that don’t recover, that get long-term post-traumatic stress disorder, tended to have prior traumas that just sort of build up and build up, and then you get one, and then you’re sort of stuck in this place.

1:38:29 Okay, so people get in regret states and behave like a successful male-female team, you know, and I know people are now talking about being non-binary, and, and you know, so there can be different compositions, but our general model is male-famous. So for your training, these people, how many people do you need, and how many people do you have? And yeah, so tell me. So we’ve got about 90 therapists that we’ve trained, and we’re gonna have 16, 15, or 16 sites, two in Israel, in the United States, and no, in Israel, in Canada, and twelve in the United States.

1:39:01 And what we’re gonna be doing in Europe is probably six or seven countries. We’re having a training September 27th to October 3rd, about an hour outside of Amsterdam. We’re just taking applications from different therapists where we’re gonna have teams, different teams in different cities in different countries. And so in the US, we’re now in the final stages of training these therapists, and in August of this year we start Phase three, and in two years we should have all the data, and then we start assembling it and the ghost with FDA, and then hopefully one year from now we’ll start in EMA and the European studies.

1:39:46 And so what we want to do is start the training. You know, we’ve already trained some European therapists, but we’ll train more. Okay, hopefully in early 2019 we start these open-label Phase 2 studies where they get training and then they’re ready. Okay, so much people are interested in that. You go to the MAPS site and apply, and it’s happening.

1:40:05 Yeah, September, early October, I’m sure, use it oversubscribed. Err, well, I mean, it is, and it’s, but we’re probably gonna have more trainings, but the sad part is that we have 20, more than 20,000 people on the website who have signed up and said I’ve got PTSD, I want to know when your studies start. The good part is we have over 5,000 therapists who have said let me know when your training starts. Okay, and so we’ll train a bunch of people for expanded access.

1:40:31 Okay, not just for the Phase 3. So we’re very hopeful. The way things are going, that’s super exciting. Let me talk about politics really quickly here, because you know it’s not obvious what the right and the left think about this stuff. Granny, you, yes, got a donation recently, and I wonder if you could speak on that.

1:40:49 Obviously you know Trump has certain populist policies and certain ideas, and yet at some times he can sign something into law that can help you. So tell me about, you know, how you see both sides here. Yeah, well, I think healing from trauma is not a Democratic or a Republican issue. It’s a human issue, but it tends to be that most of our support has come from sort of the left-wing kind of, the, you know, they’re more, you could say, innovative, open. They’re not as wedded to the drug war, so that’s where most of our support has come.

1:41:29 But one of the things that, or I’d say the thing that I’ve done over these 32 years of MAPS that’s got me the most criticism, really unexpectedly, was that I was introduced to Rebecca Mercer and Rebecca Mercer’s family, her father, and she owned Cambridge Analytica. Oh, they are minority shareholders in Breitbart.com. They were the main funders of Trump, right? And so the work that we’re doing with the veterans was something that was of interest to her, and so we had a conversation, and this is actually just a few months ago.

1:42:10 This was during this match period for the bitcoins from Pine and hi, now that line, now we still don’t know who that is. know he gave away in the end 55 million dollars for the bitcoins in roughly two months, and now he shut down the Pineapple Fund, and that’s it. Then, and it was MAPS and a few other, oh no, a bunch of other organizations. Incredible what he, what he did. So anyway, I’m speaking with Rebecca Mercer, and, and so I wasn’t enough to give her confidence.

1:42:37 She wants to know who in the official world she could talk to, and there’s a, Brigadier General Laurie Sutton, who was the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the US Army, and when she was in the Army and the Pentagon, she started the Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. So they have Centers of Excellence for looking at different things, and this was for looking at PTSD and TBI, traumatic brain injury, and she called me out of the blue in 2010, when she’d read one of our articles about our first study, mostly women survivors of childhood sexual abuse, but we had one or two vets in that. So anyway, she’s become our major ally.

1:43:18 I’ve kept the relationship with her, and now she’s in charge of the Commission on Veterans Affairs for the city of New York. Okay, and so I arranged for Rebecca Mercer to speak with her, with me, on the phone. We had this discussion, and after that Rebecca said, okay, I’m in for a million. Wow, and I thought, what a tremendous success. We now have broad bipartisan support for you, and she, the only restriction that Rebecca put on this was that it’s only for veterans.

1:43:44 Okay, and I’m like, no problem, because we’re gonna have a load of veterans, right? And it’ll cost us more than a million dollars to treat these veterans. And so yeah and when you just told me when we sat down here, my first reaction was that’s incredible, because you have to assume that most of your donations have been coming from the hippies in California, or this sympathizer, wherever they are, that the Burning Man, the people I’ve met at Burning Man, or you know, yeah, from people that have, and in many of them have had personal experiences with ayahuasca or MDMA or LSD, or back in ecology.

1:44:19 Yeah, and this is a great kind of independent, you know, is a stamp of approval from people that are not in this group think, are not in this line of work and not in these experiences. They’re saying, wow, this is, this is, it’s almost like a scientific analysis, and we were, this must be important regardless of the politics. And culturally I thought this bridge. Yeah, what was what I was tremendous well. I’ll just say one of the consequences of the bridge was that we just published a paper at Lancet Psychiatry about our work with veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and that was also kind of a political strategy.

1:44:53 I knew we would get veterans, but I didn’t know we’d get firefighters or police officers, but I just said, let’s put that in the title of the study, just to show that we’re trying to reach out to these first responders and the police. Yet, don’t sleep on Rick Doblin, he’s crafty, I think, and we did get a, we did get a police officer. Okay, actually did, and we got several firefighters and mostly veterans, but we published at Lance’s sake. I think you can actually will the future, right, well as soon as we realize it through.

1:45:19 So you just did that. Yeah, so anyway, so this paper was, we gave him exclusive to The New York Times, and The New York Times wrote a great article about it, and in it they put a sentence about a million dollars from Rebecca Mercer, and then that led to Fox News, and we had the most positive discussion there was six minutes with Jesse Watters and Greg Gutfeld. Okay, five. So these are, this, you know, I’m not in America, but I guess they’re these, that, yeah, these are Jesse Watters, the one that talks to Trump a lot of the time.

1:45:51 Sean Hannity is the main one, but Jesse Watters, anyway, they had this extremely positive discussion about the potential of MDMA. They also talked about ketamine and marijuana and how these things should be medical tools. Wow, it was sort of the libertarian streak of the right wing, but getting those words out of their mouth on Fox is a pretty incredibly, it was incredible. So I feel that we have the open door from the society, and I thought was terrific, but what happened was a lot of the people, not a lot, but I’d say a significant group of people thought, how could you possibly take money from Rebecca Mercer?

1:46:29 She and her father responsible in large part for Trump. How could you do that? And I’m like, well, you know, what is she gonna want you to do? All she wants me to do is study veterans. She didn’t say a single thing about, you know, stop saying the drug war is stupid, stop saying the drug wars counter, you know, and people don’t recognize that it’s a two-way learning process.

1:46:52 She’s also open to learning more, but the idea was that there’s these what are called now toxic donors, okay, that have such a reputation that you’re somehow you shouldn’t work with them, and so what I explained to her was that I was very glad to get this donation. I was completely comfortable working with her, and when I’ve had to explain to the critics, was that this was a good thing to do, that we’re in the bill, we’re in the business of building bridges, not burning them, and if we can build these bridges across these ideological divides, that’s what we need to do, and that’s really, I think, the essence of democracy. Is that you build alliances.

1:47:35 They shift. You have alliances on certain issues. You don’t have to agree with everything that they do or anything else that they do, but you have a common interest, and you work together, and what we have now is this hyper partisan environment where people are demonizing the others on the other side, not building any bridges, and we have America splitting apart in a lot of different ways, and so I thought that people from the psychedelic community, who we talked about unity and connection, and, you know, not other inge people, that this would seem obvious to everybody, that this was a triumph, that Rebecca Mercer wanted to help us.

1:48:11 I was introduced to her by a human rights activist, right? It wasn’t even a right-wing person that introduced me. There’s a right, but it still wasn’t obvious to them. So of all through the things I’ve done in 32 years, this has gotten me the most criticism, right, and surprised you the most, but now that you think about it a little bit more, maybe it doesn’t make sense. Yeah, because it’s actually just showing you that’s a symptom of the bigger the greater problem, because if America as a whole was advanced in this thinking and was totally on the same page, then we wouldn’t need you anymore, and so it makes sense that a small percentage of the people that are funding you would still have some weird, you know, tribal thinking pieces away.

1:48:50 It’s maybe, but yeah, this wasn’t mostly from the people that fund us. This was people that are therapists that are interested. That’s, so as usual, what we need to do is get people in the room and have some MDMA and remember our common goal, and you know, forward. Yes, exactly. Okay, exactly, and hopefully they’ve had enough MDMA that they could do that afterwards without it, that, but yeah, I was taken by surprise.

1:49:14 I won’t, glad you addressed that, and then the deal is, is this, that first of all, you welcome donations to move this discussion forward, period. Yeah. Second of all, if it’s a way, Ted, start having a conversation with the right, whatever that means, yeah, that’s further welcomed, and so you see this as just more of a understanding, bridging the gap, and look, I know how hard it is, this, and every dollar counts. Yes, and time is of the essence, and you don’t know what’s gonna happen, and so yeah, so that’s your response to that.

1:49:43 Yeah, yeah. Rick, anything else major that we need to be aware of, and things that we need to be doing ourselves to help you that we want to talk about right now because I know how to get it. I gotta get you. Yeah, off to see my other lens. Yeah, well, I’ll just say that one of the other things that we’ve done, which has been a initially a little bit controversial, is that we do what’s called psychedelic harm reduction at festivals.

1:50:09 So, so when we talk about where might a backlash come from, it’s not going to be political for people that think of us as counterculture. It’s gonna be from parents worried about their kids. So I think you were saying earlier that, you know, the DMT episode was your most watched episode, and the ayahuasca one we got you a lot of reputation at the beginning, so let’s just assume that a bunch of people listening are interested in psychedelics. I think all of us have a collective responsibility to be as responsible as possible about our own psychedelic drug use, and to help others that are having problems, you know.

1:50:48 So don’t, you know, if friends, if you’re doing it with a group of friends and somebody is starting to deal with difficult stuff, don’t say, oh, this is, we’re supposed to just have fun, you know. Help them through it. Be responsible, because we don’t want there to be casualties that could inflame public opinion, you know. We all know well, I guess many people hear about Leah Betts and the girl that died from ecstasy. Okay, and she was massive, you know, media about her.

1:51:15 Turned out, actually, that she drank too much water and died from what’s called hyponatremia. Okay, so she didn’t actually die from the ecstasy by itself, but, but I think people need to learn as much as they can, to, and we all have relatives that, you know, don’t always agree with us, so people should be talking to their parents. You should be talking to them. You’re Scott’s not here, so yeah, I took my dad all the time about this. So yeah, so had the conversations.

1:51:41 You were one of the first people that ever said come out of the psychedelic closet. Yes, and I remember you saying that to me for years, and five years ago, and I said it’s so many times, so many people, and we’ve lived this on London Real, and I can put on a suit and tie and hang out with a fifty billion dollar man. Yeah, and yet, you know, it’s, we talk about ayahuasca as part of our who we are. Yeah, and so come out of the closet, act responsibly, and make sure that you help other people along the way so we don’t have an episode in a backlash.

1:52:09 I think that’s, I think the public education is the most important thing. That’s why, in my limited time here, I was so glad to come to speak to you again, because I think we really have to do as much public education as we can to prepare people ahead of time for the mainstreaming of psychedelic medicine, right? And as usual with Rick, he’s got like the hundred year plan overlapping under your plan. I don’t know your plan. I mean, you know, it, people know that you know, you and people that you associate with spend time at Burning Man, and you have the opportunity to come in contact with people that are sometimes experiencing multiple different substances and have them try, you know, having difficulties, so you’re kind of on the ground helping and training at the same time.

1:52:52 Well, interesting that you mentioned this hundred year plan, so I was just at what’s called Fly Ranch, so Burning Man has just purchased some property, 3,500 acres, not far from where Burning Man takes place, that has hot springs and a geyser and so they had this little meeting, their first meeting on the land to envision how they might use it in the future, but Marian Goodell, who’s the CEO of Burning Man, was there, and what she was saying is that they’ve found it to be exceptionally helpful to think about it in terms of a hundred year plans, that when you think about it as a five-year plan, you know, we all assume we’re gonna be alive. We’re not all of us, but most of us assume we’ll be around five years. Even you think about a 20-year plan, but when you think about it as a hundred-year plan, you know, you’re gonna be dead.

1:53:40 It’s not about you anymore. It’s about passing something on. It’s about what we do down the generations, and you have a different kind of attitude when you think about things in terms of a hundred-year plan, and you can sort of say, okay, it’s gonna take these people 30 years to get comfortable with this, but I’d might as well start now, right? Because you have a long-term plan. Yeah, and you’re enjoying the work and you’re seeing the progress, so yeah.

1:54:06 I’m, I visited Barcelona about four years ago and six years ago, and there’s a church called the Sagrada Família. Yes, and you know, it was built by Gaudí, and he started in the in the 20s and the 20s, and he basically had a hundred-year plan, and he always said that my, my benefactors not in a rush, and it was God. I mean, he literally spent his whole life building one wall of this church, and I was always massively inspired. It’s still under construction.

1:54:31 If you ever go, yeah, I just was there. That’s a lot, and so for the first time about a year ago I came out with the London Real hundred year plan, and it was the same kind of sense of, yeah, what can we do for a hundred years to where it’s not about the ego and it’s not about even the legacy. It’s just about where, where can we just keep going with this thing, and so you really embody that ring, and also just you just seem to always be thinking of this long game, you know, and when something happens, you see that in a weird way, you’ve been planning for that for ten years or a contingency.

1:55:02 Yeah, which is super helpful to us in the movement, and that’s gonna empower that grandmother to have an option, you know, and that’s what we really want. Yeah, yeah. Well, actually, one of the things, just to say this, is that the work we began in 1990 trying to interest the Veterans Administration. It turns out that the person that was the head of the San Francisco VA that said no to us then is now a head of psychiatry somewhere else and has just said yes.

1:55:32 So many years, ready to want, yes, exactly. 28 years later, changed to the idea and is now with you. Yeah, yeah, that’s early and yeah, yeah, yes, quick. That’s quick. Did great.

1:55:44 Rick, if people want to know what you’re doing, they should follow. Well, go to MAPS. Out-of-work all you want. Twitter is good. Well, what’s the other way that they can either support?

1:55:53 Well, the Facebook page. You know, just learn, we sell books there. There’s all sorts of books that they could purchase and learn more about this. Okay, you know, and we will be probably doing more and more in Europe as well as time goes by. You know, so I actually go home on Tuesday to Boston.

1:56:12 No, excuse me, I go home tomorrow to Boston, but then I come back on Tuesday to Prague. There’s a psychedelic conference there. I was just at this human rights conference in Oslo. So people can look at the MAPS website, MAPS.org, and also think about Zendo Project.org, which is part of MAPS but that’s for Glastonbury Festival or other festivals where people are gathering, you know, and it’s ways to make them safer. Okay, very good.

1:56:38 Yeah. All I have to say is Rick Doblin is gold. Rick, I haven’t seen you in four years and I felt like I was yesterday. Yeah, and that’s the kind of person you are. Yeah, except you’ve got more elaborate surroundings here.

1:56:49 Sam, great to see the progress, right, that you’ve made. Yeah, well, thank you for that. You know, about trying to move things forward, and it’s just great to keep having these conversations. You know, yeah, and all I have to say is that for everyone listening and watching, like, come out of the closet, have those conversations with your parents. I remember when my dad, who’s in his 70s, a Caltech engineer, you know, you know everything technical about him, saw my ayahuasca episode he said to me on the call, he said I would do that for him, and my dad doesn’t drink and smoke doesn’t, and I was like, what?

1:57:18 And you would be surprised the open-mindedness of people that maybe you are being tribal about. Yeah, right. Maybe the Trump administration, maybe these people have a conversation, talk about things that affect them. Like, everyone knows someone with trauma. You know, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t know race or country or sexuality.

1:57:35 It’s like that’s what can unite us. So and again, I also want to say to anybody listening, like, this fight isn’t over, and we need to all keep pushing the hardest part is ahead. I mean, Phase 3 is the biggest. Can we replicate this on a bigger scale? It’s more complicated, you know.

1:57:52 A lot of ideas fall in the implementation, and you know, you can be destroyed by success in a way. You have to grow it, not too fast a rate. It’s very Douga. So yeah, it’s definitely challenges ahead. Yeah, so let’s stay vigilant.

1:58:06 Let’s get the funding. Send your extra bitcoins to MAPS and be part of this. Have the conversation. I’ll get other people to have the conversation, and the beautiful thing about this community, and I’m just going to finish on this thought. Okay, go ahead, say one thing.

1:58:18 I’ll finish. Well, you, you leave this whole big question, like, whatever happened to your dad, did you actually do ayahuasca with him or so? No, I did not. Funny enough, I actually have planned, planning on going in for another ayahuasca ceremony the next couple months, and I might be doing it with Dennis McKenna, and yeah, we’re gonna be doing a movie about this, because we want to talk about this, cuz you know, he is so divisive. This backlash you got.

1:58:41 Is it an endemic of what’s happening now, and gotta have these conversations? So no, I haven’t had that experience. My dad actually just sent him a copy of Michael’s book, and I need to do this and I would say, if it’s a submission, this book, Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, by Tom Shroder, that if he might be interested in that book as well, because ayahuasca is more challenging in some ways than MDMA. Yeah, and so maybe that might be a gentler way for him to start.

1:59:09 Okay, yeah, and I agree, and it is so. Okay, that [expletive] your watch on this. He’s not a two-episode, Evan talked about, and that’s coming to you, and think about MDMA experience, and again, it, just to maybe give you a different point of view. Yeah, and look, finally, I just want to talk about this community, and I’ve noticed this about you, and about Rogen and Dennis McKenna, is that this guy Michael Pollan walks into this community who’s got a background in cooking and AG, and he’s got shows on Netflix, and he tells about his own experiences with psychedelics, and what does the community do?

1:59:41 Most communities would say, yeah, we’ve been talking about this for 30 years, you’re late to the party, how come you didn’t help us earlier, what do you know about it? But this community says thank you so much. Yes, and that says everything. You know, these are people that have a, you know, the hundred, you’re playing, you know, it’s not about me. I’m right, you’re wrong.

1:59:58 This team, it’s about, like, advancing humanity, and I think that says everything about it, and the fact that you’re you’re not gonna go see him tonight. Yeah, it’s incredible. This is important stuff. Rick Doblin, I’m just honored to have you here, like, let’s, let’s keep helping you do this great work. Keep us posted on what’s going on, and London Real, we say it’s about the journey.

2:00:17 Keep fighting, Rick. Really, you’re just an amazing gift to us and all the people you have it, MAPS. We’ve correspondent with them over the years. They do an amazing work. Yeah, so thanks so much for that, right, and thank you for helping us.

2:00:31 That you can’t give me a hug too, right? The