Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS, reveals how psychedelic therapies like MDMA—criminalized in 1985 despite a judge’s ruling to reschedule it—could revolutionize trauma treatment, from Ukraine’s war victims to Beirut and Rwanda. His 25-year FDA battle for MDMA-assisted PTSD therapy finally secured a $10M DoD grant, but Phase III delays risk years of lost lives. Historical suppression, from the Catholic Church’s destruction of the Eleusinian Mysteries in 396 AD to Nixon’s politically motivated LSD crackdown, mirrors today’s prohibition-driven stigma. Doblin’s vision merges science and reform, arguing that controlled access could heal professions like EMTs and even society itself, while Rogan calls it "God’s work" for mental health. [Automatically generated summary]
So you were supposed to do Duncan's podcast, and then Duncan and I got on the phone, and he was saying, you know, trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event.
And then Duncan said, you know, hey man, you can have him on your show.
And I said, well, why don't you come on too?
It'll be really fun.
Then this morning, Duncan has a root canal, like an unexpected emergency root canal.
So it was just a crazy turn of events, and fortunately, you're here.
So Ukraine has enormous amounts of trauma, and so what I'm trying to do is to go to high-trauma areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how that could be helpful.
But over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their military, by other people to change that because they're aware that they have so much enormous trauma.
So a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation to change the law.
And so the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from throughout Ukraine.
We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous area.
But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens.
But then they look at their phone and they see the area that the air raid sirens are supposedly about and they could be like 100 miles.
Square, something like that.
So nobody seemed to care.
Nobody moved to shelters, and we just ignored these air raid sirens and heard nothing.
But it's just, it was so emotionally moving because we went to the cemetery in Lviv, and they have these in cities all over Ukraine.
And they have something that I've never seen before, is that they have just enormous numbers of graves.
Terrible.
They've lost about 250,000 people.
But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the person that's dead, the person that's buried there.
And I've never seen that anywhere else.
It has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures.
And most of them are younger and, you know, tragically interrupted their lives, a fair number of women.
And they put them in the center of the cities.
They're having to build new grave sites all over.
And this was next to a really large old historic cemetery.
And so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand some of these new technologies, meaning psychedelic therapies.
Do you ever get frustrated at the lack of progress?
With legalization?
Because it seems like so much headway has been made on the therapeutic front.
Like so many people have anecdotal stories of like a lot of soldiers with Ibogaine in particular, MDMA in particular, that these people have had incredible experiences, turned their life around.
They were all prepared to bust the Star Club that night.
And unexpectedly, J.R. Ewing and Larry Huckman showed up, and they canceled the bus because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him, and they busted it another time.
It's so funny when a guy plays this, like, straight-laced, greedy kind of psycho on a television show, a soap opera show, and then in real life, he's a stoner.
But about your question about frustration, yes, the answer is yes, but it's important not to be overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration, is just to continue plodding along.
We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th.
I had 1986 is when I started MAPS.
And when I started MAPS, I didn't really know that it would ever succeed, that we would ever make MDMA into medicine.
It was the height of Nancy Reagan and just saying no and the escalation of the drug war.
Working towards bringing psychedelics forward, whether it worked or not.
And that's what really gave me the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the frustration by how many obstacles there's been.
Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing.
We need this access to these experiences.
And it's been tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides, for example, that are happening every year.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, when they made MDMA illegal in 1985, they did that on an emergency basis.
We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an administrative law judge lawsuit, and we were challenging these arguments for making it into a Schedule I drug.
And we actually won the case.
The judge said it should be Schedule III, which means it should be available as a medicine, but it should be Illegal otherwise for recreational use.
But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're working in.
They don't compel.
You have to get out of that into the civil courts.
So the judge said Schedule 3, and the Drug Enforcement Administration said, no way, we're not going to do that.
And their rationale was so wrong, so we sued them in the appeals court.
What they said initially was that only the FDA could make a drug into a medicine, not the DEA.
But the law was clear that it could be the Attorney General could do that.
So the appeals court, when they review agencies' decisions, they don't tell them what to do.
They say, "You did something wrong, now rethink it." So then the DEA said, okay, we're going to rethink it.
And then they came up with a new reason why they were against it.
And this was this eight-part standard that was essentially the same as the FDA.
So then we sued them again the second time.
And we won again in the appeals courts.
And so they went back to the DEA and said, you have to come up with another rationale.
This one doesn't work either.
And then they came up with a five-part standard that was sufficiently different but still had Phase III studies, so it's essentially the same as FDA approval.
And finally, the courts upheld that.
And during this process, it was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as a medicine, that we would have to go through the FDA.
And that's where MAPS began as a non-profit psychedelic.
Pharmaceutical company focused entirely on donations, and the intention was to turn it into a generic drug.
Because MDMA had been invented by Merck in 1912, it was in the public domain, it was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it.
And then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was itself illegal.
It turned out that the Congress had given...
The Attorney General the power to emergency scheduled drugs, but the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA.
So they didn't have the authority to do that.
So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their lawyers figured this out.
So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say.
Wow.
But we're stuck.
And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many people's lives would have been saved?
How many people would have been able to benefit from psychedelics?
That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference, the 16th to 20th in June in Denver.
We have over 500 speakers.
We had over 1,500 applications.
There's an enormous amount of research taking place with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with Ibogaine, with MDMA, with 5-MeO-DMT, with a whole host.
And the healing potential of these are incredible.
And yet, they've been kept away from people by these prohibitionist laws.
And so it's enormously frustrating and tragic.
And yet...
If we let that overwhelm us, then we're not going to work as hard to make it happen.
So I've had to learn how to deal with that frustration.
Just as one example, my father was a pediatrician.
He's no longer alive.
But he worked on the first study with crack babies.
He and his partners did the pediatric evaluation.
And you remember this in the 80s.
This idea was that there's going to be this whole generation of super predators and these women that were pregnant with crack were having babies that were addicted and they were going to be mentally deficient and prone to violence and this whole...
Scenario that Reagan amplified.
And what my father and his partners found out was that really these kids could recover, that they could do better, that it was mostly malnutrition, poverty.
It's not like fetal alcohol syndrome, that it was really not this direct connection between the crack cocaine and the problems with these kids.
But what he found was that the women that were pregnant and were addicted...
Well, that's the important point, what you just said.
People were going there.
So what that means is that – and we saw this in Zurich.
So there was a place in Zurich multiple decades ago called Needle Park where they decided to provide – Access to healthcare, access to safe injection sites, things like this for heroin addicts and others in Zurich.
And it was working because when you treat people as humans like that, they will often seek other treatment.
And then if they're not necessarily criminals, but then people come from all over and overwhelm the capacity.
Because it's this one humane site, and then it became an open-air drug market.
Just people from all over Europe started coming, and then they had the backlash.
So I think it's something somewhat similar in Portland, where you try some of these things on a local basis, but then it attracts people from all over, and then it turns into the opposite of what they'd hoped.
Well, it's my feeling is if a guy like Rick Perry, who's this straight-nosed, conservative, right-wing kind of a guy, if he can open up his eyes to that and open up his heart to that, it's available for everybody.
And there's this very binary position that people take in regards to their...
There are thoughts on psychedelics.
It's either it's for losers and people that want to escape reality or, you know, if you're on the side of the people that have experienced it, you don't get any of that, which is so weird for me.
So the people that think that it's for losers and it's all just a bunch of people just trying to escape reality and they're lazy, none of those people saying that have ever done it.
So if you can get just a few of them to do it and tell their friends, if we had legitimate therapy centers, because everybody needs a little help.
I'm not saying you need to get off heroin.
I'm not saying you're coming back from Afghanistan.
I'm not saying anything crazy.
But everybody could use just a little therapeutic help to give you a fresh perspective.
And I think if that was available to a lot of people that are just generally depressed.
I think we could change the tone of the country.
I really do.
Because one of the things that bums me out the most about, especially the interactions that people have on social media, is like it's all negative.
It's all negative.
You're living in these rare moments.
You have a finite amount of time.
A hundred years is so quick.
It goes by so fast.
And you're wasting it, yelling at people on Twitter for what?
For what?
Like commenting on things all day long in anger and disgust and look where this country is.
Like, what are you talking about?
Everyone's perspective needs a little help, needs a little pick-me-up, just a little something to go, you know, I think we're okay.
Yeah, and then with the therapy afterwards, which we call the integration process.
So it's not just the experience itself.
It's the preparation to be open to whatever happens.
It's the experience.
I just was the other day with a woman, Gould Dolan, who is a neuroscientist.
And what she's talked about and what she's discovered is that psychedelics are these rare substances that open up what they call the critical periods.
So it's neuroplasticity.
It's this ability to rewire your brain that stays for sometimes weeks or longer.
With Ibogaine, it can be several months after you have the experience.
So that the therapy that happens afterwards, the work that you do to integrate it, has special potential to make long-term changes in your behavior, in your brain circuitry.
And so psychedelics are unique among substances.
People are trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics that do have this neuroplasticity property.
But they open up this potential for long-term change if you do the therapy afterwards, if you focus on what the insights that you had during the experience and then try to make them into permanent behavior patterns.
Well, one of the things that was really impactful for Rick Perry was Morgan Luttrell, who is now a member of Congress.
And so Morgan had very terrible trauma from his military service and eventually was able to experience Ibogaine.
And from that, he was able to get a lot better.
And there's a researcher, Nolan Williams, who will also be at the conference, who's done work with Ibogaine and a lot of the Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico, and he's done studies of their brains with traumatic brain injury, and has shown before and after that some of them actually do have this recovery from traumatic brain injury.
Yeah, there is actually a situation with cluster headaches.
So cluster headaches are like suicide headaches.
They're worse than migraines.
This is now back around 2003.
A bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches, which are terrible.
And so they contacted me and they formed this group called Cluster Busters.
And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore.
We would like to study this.
Can you help us study this?
I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School.
And I approached them and I said, would you want to study these people with cluster headaches?
And they said, sure, this is really interesting.
So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case, that psilocybin and LSD blocked.
Cluster headache cycle and postpone the next cycle.
And so we did all this research, and then the next step would have been to actually give LSD or psilocybin to people with cluster headaches.
And the people at Harvard, like, oh, Timothy Leary, he was here.
Well, we're trying to get over that, but they did.
But then the people at Harvard said, well, we will do this LSD or psilocybin, but only if it's the last resort.
Only if everything else fails.
So the scientists, Torsten Passi and John Halpern, decided that they would use a non-psychedelic version of LSD called...
Bromo LSD.
And the plan was that they would give this Bromo LSD to a bunch of people with cluster headaches.
It would not work.
And then they would come back and say, hey, we need to do this LSD and psilocybin research.
So I said, okay, that makes sense.
We have no idea why LSD or psilocybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it.
And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany, and I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results, and they wouldn't.
I heard nothing.
And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the bromo LSD works even better than the LSD and the psilocybin because with LSD, you know, it's effective in micrograms.
You know, for psilocybin, you take 25 milligrams for a major, major trip.
But with bromo LSD, you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high.
And whatever it does, it's still a mystery what it does in the brain, but it works better.
You just flood the brain.
So that's actually a good example of a non-psychedelic psychedelic for a physiological problem that could make sense as a medicine.
And actually, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know, I'm interested in psychedelic therapy.
Also, what's best for patients?
So that if this bromo LSD is best for patients, that's great.
It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing, and I'm interested in the therapy part of it.
And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating, Cary Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make bromolasty into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that.
And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder that was identified over...
About 20 years ago.
And it's still not been made into a medicine.
And so those are the things that are frustrating because it's not even psychedelic.
I don't know why he did this, but Austin had decriminalized marijuana.
So apparently the Attorney General's office sued Austin.
And what is the ruling on that?
I don't know if they even have acted on this or if they're going to appeal or what it is.
Something that's not fully legal.
And I've talked about this before, so I apologize if anybody's heard this.
John Norris, who's a friend of mine who's been on the podcast, who was a game warden in California.
And he found a diverted stream and they were trying to figure out what's going on.
They figured some farmer fucked up and like, what's going on here?
And like, fish were dead.
And so he's a game warden.
So they have to track down what happened with this stream.
Finds this huge grow up in the middle of the national forest run by the cartel.
And then his entire operation in the decades future becomes a tactical force with bulletproof vests and dogs and guns fighting the cartel in the forest, in national forest, because they were growing it all in America.
And then just selling it, like 90%, I believe he said 90% of the marijuana that was sold in states where it's illegal was coming from California.
And they were using very dangerous pesticides and herbicides, stuff that's completely illegal if you were growing it naturally, if you were growing it normally.
And because it's illegal, you have...
Organized crime that's providing it to people like it if it was legal We could only buy it from like you buy your fucking groceries you buy organic fruit, right?
You buy organic vegetables you buy organic marijuana You would know the people who are growing it you could meet the farmers Just like you can meet people from white oak pastures you'd meet people from fucking happy green farm and You wouldn't know where you're getting your stuff.
You know, there's no fentanyl in it Which is apparently they're talking about that now.
Yeah, you're not help You're not helping anybody.
You're only hurting people.
Now, if your goal is just to hurt as many people as possible, yeah, make more laws.
Keep locking people up.
Lock people up for things that don't hurt anybody, even themselves.
When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, alternatively, you could have it as taxes, and it could make it easier on the rest of us.
I could see, as an argument, if you were the Attorney General, and you said you are propping up organized crime by allowing it to be decriminalized, and the people that are growing it and selling it in Austin, or the people that have it in Austin, are all committing crime, so they're probably cartel people.
I could see that argument, kind of.
But you know what the fucking solution to that is?
Make it legal.
This is dumb.
We could just buy whiskey anywhere, which I love.
Nothing wrong with it.
But you can go.
But I have a bar.
You know, I'm a drug dealer.
Literally, I'm a drug dealer.
I have a bar.
I own a bar.
I sell drugs.
Alcohol is a fucking drug.
It's just a sanctioned legal drug that we pay taxes for.
You know, the alcohol commission has to check, make sure we're doing everything right.
Well, this idea that we're all going to die one day, one of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying.
So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life-threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying and have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s.
That day on CNN, there's probably millions of people watching Larry Hagman saying, I'm not afraid of death because I had an LSD experience and I realized that it's all just connected.
Yeah, one of the things that I think has led to my interest in lifetime use of psychedelics was been the failure of my bar mitzvah to actually turn me into a man.
I wanted to avoid all the awkwardness of adolescence.
I'm the oldest of four kids.
So I had no older siblings to tell me.
And we did this rite of passage, and it's been used for thousands of years.
And I just had somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way, that I would be one thing the morning of my bar mitzvah, and I would be something different the next morning.
And I remember waking up in bed the next morning after my bar mitzvah, and I'm like, I'm the same.
And then finally, another week and another bar mitzvahed, Saturday came along, and I realized that if I was on a list, I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people bar mitzvahed.
And the rites of passage that we do have, I believe, probably worked in the past for a lot of people.
And they did have this demarcation between different ages.
People didn't used to live that long either.
So 13 was kind of a transition point.
But it was when I was 17, almost 18, that I first did LSD.
And one of my very first thoughts was, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been.
Well, and then in the U.S., where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine, but they tend to use stronger drinks.
So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition, that when you prohibit something, it moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug.
Because I know it's very common in the CrossFit world because people are competitive with exercise, which is not necessarily the great...
Like, a lot of people I know that are trainers do not like the concept of CrossFit because it's...
Doing exercises that are just supposed to strengthen your body and condition your body but doing them in a competition setting where it's like unlimited amount of repetitions.
As many as you can get in X amount of time.
And then they have these games where people play where they might not be conditioned enough to sustain the workload that they're putting forth and then they get rhabdo.
Yeah, but I think that's the critical issue is that people have got, as you started out by saying, you know, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits, you're hallucinating, you're running away from reality, you're not paying attention to what's really going on, you're making yourself more vulnerable, you're going to fly out a window and think you can fly.
Well, it's just like we need a comprehensive addressing of the actual real landscape.
Of what these things are, what the benefits are, and just this addressing of the impact of propaganda, the sweeping Schedule I Act of 1970, the whole William Randolph Hearst connection to marijuana illegalization, which was right after alcohol prohibition.
So they were looking to put these agents back out into the field.
All that needs to be, like, comprehensively explained to the American public to reinform people.
Because I think people are – they have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things.
You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda and they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data.
And also the problem with that, too, is there's real side effects of some of these things.
Those need to be understood.
How do you understand them?
Well, you have to make them legal and do tests and studies.
And maybe people have gene expressions that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing, but they can do that thing, you know?
Yeah, I think this idea that, for me, how do we break through the wall of propaganda?
And for me, the idea has been we go to where the suffering is.
We go to where the science is and we try to make things first into medicines.
And I think that's where people are willing to listen.
When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that overwhelms your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look.
And that's where you go to where the suffering is.
And that's where with post-traumatic stress disorder.
I think one of the things that we've been able to do...
Remarkably, is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days.
There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research.
And it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was, sympathetic patients.
Most of the people in our studies are women survivors of sexual abuse.
Most of the people with PTSD are women.
But most of the media attention goes to the veterans.
And people put veterans on a pedestal.
And if so many of them...
You know, there's different estimates, but it's, you know, 18, 22 or more per day commit suicide.
And you can end up avoiding a lot of that by helping them process the traumas that they experience.
The bridge is these, you know, hard-nosed right-wing guys who have these experiences, become better parents, become better friends, just like reintegrate into society.
Make peace with the past.
It's totally possible.
And that these tools are being so underutilized to so many vulnerable and needy people.
So there's a $4.9 million grant that went to Dr. Aaron Wolfgang at Walter Reed.
And it's going to be giving MDMA-assisted therapy.
There's another $4.9 million grant that went to a group called Strongstar that's in San Antonio, here in Texas, elsewhere.
And they're connected with Emory University.
And so they're going to combine MDMA with a therapy called prolonged exposure, where you talk about the trauma over and over.
But that's very re-traumatizing.
There was a study that the Veterans Administration did.
That took them about six years.
It was 916 veterans, and it compared two therapies that they use, both non-drug therapies for treating PTSD.
One was called prolonged exposure.
The other was cognitive processing therapy.
And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study drop out because the therapy itself is re-traumatizing.
Because you're just forced to go over the trauma, over the trauma, over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you.
And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it re-traumatizes so many people.
So what we've shown is, working with the MDMA with veterans, is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of our brain, that once you can approach these things that have felt like will tear you apart, that they'll be overwhelming, you can't...
Really go away from them, but they never really leave either, then you can process it.
So this study that will be done here in Texas with active duty soldiers, again, is going to be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure.
The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches.
And I think that MAPS has started funding studies combining MDMA with cognitive processing therapy as well.
But the one that I think is potentially the most valuable is called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy.
Conjoint means couples or diets.
And so what happens is the designated patient, the veteran with PTSD, Is where the attention is focused.
But when they have PTSD, it affects their families.
It affects their partners.
And so cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy was developed by this woman, Candice Monson, at the Boston VA.
And that's where they bring in the partner as well as the veteran.
And they both get therapy.
And so back in 2014, when finally I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and they finally convinced the VA to be willing to let MAPS support research with MDMA.
They said that they wouldn't refer veterans, they couldn't do it inside the VA, we had to pay for it, but that the first thing they wanted us to do was combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy.
Where both people now get MDMA.
And the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD, but also in strength of the relationship.
So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992.
The very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992.
And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85. And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about a serotonin depletion.
And so when you take 5-HTP, That can be helpful.
But when we started with the FDA, they said, all this information that you've got from before, from underground use, or from before when it was still legal, doesn't matter to us, really.
Everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA proof studies.
And they said, don't assume that you're going to have problems and you're going to use MDMA plus 5-HTP or something.
Just start with the MDMA, see what problems you get, and then you can start.
So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one-day thing.
It's a two-day in the sense that the second day is for rest.
It's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapists come back and do more integrative therapy the next day.
And also, we do the therapy during the day.
It starts at 10 in the morning.
It's an eight-hour session, so often people can get sleep that night.
And we don't see more low mood.
Or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA.
So we never felt the need to introduce 5-HTP.
We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this.
But I think it's because we talk about it as a two-day experience.
The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or parties and things like that, often they're drinking, they do it at night, they don't get full sleep.
I think that this concept that we've developed is this really thinking about it as a two-day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience or the PTSD or depression or whatever it is.
Now, there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland.
And they've worked with cancer patients who are anxious about dying, and they have brought in their partners to the therapy, and both of them get MDMA as well.
And they found that that was tremendously effective as well, because when your partner's got a life-threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them, it affects you as well.
And often the therapy is focused, again, on the designated patient.
So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is that is going to be treated and bringing in people's partners, I think, is going to be very important.
Marcus and Amber Capone, who've done work with vets, they've brought probably by now about a thousand veterans down to Mexico for Ibogaine.
And they have also started bringing their partners as well.
They realize that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat the entire family context.
This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy.
So the scale of the trauma, in America, there's 13 million PTSD patients.
This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration.
You know, in Ukraine, we've got an entire country.
When I was there, practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed.
And so you've got massive population-based trauma.
And to think about treating people as individuals is really important, but it's going to be hard to scale.
Because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that.
So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, 5-MEODMT, to start on an individual basis.
But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy.
So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA.
And it was four therapists for six veterans.
And it started out where each one got an individual session first, and then they got a group session.
And there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military.
One is war-related or accident training-related, and the other is what they call military sexual trauma.
There's a lot of sexual abuse by military active duty people of other people in the military, and they call that military sexual trauma.
And so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy.
Because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military, you might not feel safe if you're in a context of group therapy.
So they've done separate the groups, but they've found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process.
And so what they've done is they've realized, though, that...
The design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session.
And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session, and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual.
There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate-related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate, and so they're going to be doing group therapy there.
And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel that's for people traumatized on October 7th.
And there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants.
But the Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application.
It's funded by charitable donations.
The MDMA is coming from Canada.
But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy.
So everybody is ready to have one or the other.
You get randomized to either individual or group, and it will be a direct comparison.
And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support, I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy because you have more.
Focus.
You're not thinking about other people.
You can go deeper.
But when you're in a group setting, you can kind of bond with the other people.
You can kind of hear their other stories, but then you can support each other in this integration process.
So I think at the end of it, it could be that the groups do just as well as the individuals.
And then that will dramatically reduce the cost of the treatment and help it scale.
So that's where we're at this.
And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances, that are bonded in groups, that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice.
But I think the way the FDA is going to be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first that will have to be gone through the system and approved and then...
There will be this additional research with groups.
The project at the Portland, Oregon VA is going to be done pretty soon, but it's really just been four or five cohorts.
It's very small numbers of people, and so there will need to be more.
I think that there's been some efforts to do What people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group is that they've done some of this at Sunstone also where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time, but each in a separate room, each with one therapist.
But then near the end of the session, they bring them together and then they talk about what happened and then they also have the group integration.
So it's kind of a modified.
So I think in terms of time frame, it's probably...
Four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy, maybe longer.
The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee and before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
And the advisory committee recommended against it, and the FDA voted against it.
This was August of last year.
And so that was heartbreaking.
Because I thought that the data really did justify approval and it did demonstrate safety and efficacy.
But there was enough doubts that were raised.
One of the big problems to do research with psychedelics is how do you do a double-blind study?
When you take a powerful drug, you know you've taken it.
And if you give an inactive placebo, people can tell the difference.
A lot of my dissertation, which I did in 2001, was how to do a double-blind study with psychedelics, particularly with MDMA.
And my solution, which made sense, was to do therapy with low-dose MDMA versus therapy with full-dose MDMA.
So everybody knows they're getting MDMA.
They all have the same expectations.
And they might not be aware, though, which dose.
You know, is it a full dose?
Is it a lower dose?
So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion, but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell the difference between the groups.
For 16 years, from 2000 to 2016, MAPS did a series of what are called Phase II studies to try to figure out how to do Phase III.
And we looked at therapy with no MDMA, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150.
So sort of like a dose response.
We did all these different doses.
And what we discovered, fortunately, after I got my PhD, was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong.
That a microdose of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell.
So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses, 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams, did indeed cause a certain amount of confusion.
But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable.
So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA.
They still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit.
So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning and then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing.
So it's kind of like that with MDMA.
But the part that we discovered that was...
Very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams, and one group got 125 milligrams.
And in that particular study, it was about 26 people.
When you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal.
It just means it's random.
So the people that had 125 Milligrams with PTSD had more depression than the people that had 75 milligrams.
But the 75 milligram dose group did better than the 125.
But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated.
So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA or...
It tipped over into being very effective.
So in November 29, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of Phase 2 meeting, after we got approved to go to Phase 3, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy, I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this.
We shouldn't go directly to phase three.
The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take called special protocol assessment.
And it can take, for us, it took eight months.
And so pharma companies are thinking, there's nothing unusual what I'm doing.
My patent life is expiring.
But I knew we needed to do that to discuss how to deal with the double blind.
And so we presented this information to the FDA.
We said, we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's going to make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses because it's going to compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all.
And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want.
And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me.
And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experiment or bias, because the whole purpose of the double-blind is to sort of reduce bias, that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same.
They said the first is this random assignment.
What that means is everybody's similarly motivated, and they will work, and the therapists don't know necessarily that.
So you do this random assignment.
But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapists or the patients rate themselves on how well they've done compared to baseline.
You need independent raters that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in.
So the raters don't know, did this person get the placebo?
It's like an hour-long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened.
You pick this.
This is my index trauma.
And how do you respond?
So we had these independent raters.
And then we had this random assignment, and that's what the FDA said is how we should do the Phase III studies.
What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 then left the FDA.
And then new, more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry.
And they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding.
And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA.
When they reviewed whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy or not.
And so the pharma company, Lycos, did not really proactively explain to the advisory committee how this design was developed, why FDA chose this design.
And so the people in the advisory committee are often more academics and they're more focused on this double-blind.
But they're not practical, in a sense.
So that the FDA realizes that the double-blind fails in practice a lot.
It's a theory of how you want to do things.
It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times.
Even with SSRIs, you think that Prozac or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double-blind.
But they're not, because when people have sexual side effects, they have other side effects, and they report to their therapist what's going on, Then they can tell from the side effect profile.
So the double-blind fails in practice a lot.
But the FDA is saying, we can't just only approve drugs where the double-blind is perfect.
We have to weigh these different things.
So that was one of the big issues that the FDA Advisory Committee objected to, was this functional unblinding.
So when you asked about the time frame, there was other issues.
But where we're at right now...
Is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA with the new FDA, with the new people at HHS, and there's the proverbial fork in the road.
Either the FDA will say, we believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another Phase III study.
They might require what's called a Phase 4 study, which is after approval, you gather information about safety, about durability, different things.
And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months, the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
If the FDA says we want another Phase 3 study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so.
So the two Phase III studies that were done, the first one was severe PTSD.
And what we showed is that two-thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions, one month apart.
12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions.
Two-thirds no longer had PTSD that got therapy plus MDMA.
And those people that got therapy without MDMA, with the inactive placebo, roughly one-third no longer had PTSD.
And then another, roughly 20% had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms.
It means that their life has changed.
Their symptoms are not as burdensome, but they still have PTSD.
So they're called responders.
So we had 88% responders, only 12% non-responders.
Wow.
It's the best treatment.
In the second Phase III study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD.
Three-quarters of the people did have severe PTSD.
One quarter had moderate PTSD, and it was 72.6% no longer had PTSD.
Almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two-month follow-up.
And what was even more remarkable, and this relates, I think, to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional unblinding, is that 46% of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having a PTSD diagnosis.
That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD.
And so what that demonstrated is that the therapist, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people whether they got the MDMA or not, and we got extraordinary results in the control group.
And I think one of the things that...
The explanation is that when you have an eight-hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings, and the other half they're talking to the therapist in no particular order, you're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy.
That's what I said was re-traumatizing.
In the studies that the VA did, roughly half the people dropped out.
We had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just, we support whatever's emerging.
That's the essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people when they're going through MDMA therapy.
And it's very similar to what can be done with psilocybin or LSD or even ibogaine, that you just support whatever's emerging.
You have the sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious.
We all know that our body has a certain wisdom.
In that it moves towards wholeness.
We get cuts, it heals.
It's below our level of awareness.
So there's some kind of wisdom to what's emerging.
You could think about it as this barrier, this permeable barrier, semi-permeable barrier between the conscious and the unconscious.
And it all happens, we all know, at dreams, that material rises to our awareness at dreams.
And it's like that with psychedelics.
And so we just support whatever's emerging and people can go to some happy memories or to layers of trauma, whatever.
They're not forced to just focus on the trauma.
So we have very low dropout rates.
But the people that got the therapy without MDMA were able to make incredible progress.
We also have what are called fidelity ratings, which is we videotape all the sessions.
And then we have raters who are called adherence raters, and they look at, are people adhering to the therapeutic method?
And then that's called fidelity.
We had over 90% fidelity, meaning that the therapists really were doing the same, whether it was placebo or not.
So the results were outstanding in that way, and the side effects were very low.
We had nobody commit suicide that received MDMA.
That was one of the concerns.
We had one woman.
Tried to kill herself twice, but she was in the placebo group.
And we had another woman, such severe suicidal ideation, she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself.
She was also in the placebo group.
Because when you help people with terrible trauma, it's difficult for them.
And, you know, I'm always hoping that people come around.
Do you ever really consider, though, the burden of responsibility that lays on your shoulders?
Like you have been at the forefront of this for decades.
I imagine a world where a guy like you doesn't exist because it's real easy for you to not exist.
I only know you.
You know what I'm saying?
You have been responsible for so much research and so much pushing for legislation to be passed and pushing for people to understand these things and so much education.
And I think one of the things that has kept me going was a dream.
We've talked about dreams a little bit.
It was a dream that I had when I was in my early 20s.
So when I was 18, you know, I had decided to focus my life on psychedelics.
This was after I realized, oh, LSD is what my Bar Mitzvah should have been.
And I was able to see these tools as really hopeful.
And there was two parts.
One part is sort of this...
Working through trauma, depression.
The other part is our interconnectedness.
I think sort of the essence of what people talk about, the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things, you feel that we're not just isolated individuals.
We're connected with all of life.
And so at 18, I said, it's a crazy world.
I was a Vietnam War draft resister.
I was planning to go to jail.
I'd studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance.
My contribution to my country was going to be to not register for the draft and go to jail as a protest for Vietnam.
And then I thought, you know, my dad was and my mom was saying, you're going to have a criminal record.
You're never going to have a real job.
You're not going to be able to be a doctor or lawyer.
You'll be a felon.
And I thought, OK, well, I'm not willing to go to war because of that, but I can be an underground psychedelic therapist and you don't need a license for that.
So that was my plan.
So then this dream happened in my early 20s.
I should mention that I was so...
I had the real wrong idea at 18. The idea I had was the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve.
And the guidance counselor said, I need help with my dripping.
And it's become more important to me than my studies.
And he said, well, you know, I understand what you're doing.
That's really...
It makes sense to me in some ways.
We're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually.
And he gave me this book to read.
And I loved it.
And it was by Stanislav Grof, the world's expert LSD researcher.
And he was MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins.
This is now 1972.
And the research was being shut down.
You talked about the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
And my guidance counselor had got this book directly from Stan.
And I said, could I...
Write a letter to Stan.
I want to become an LSD therapist.
And he said, sure.
So I wrote this letter and Stan was just leaving Hopkins and I'm this confused 18-year-old.
And to my shock, Stan wrote me back.
Stan is now, by the way, almost 94 years old.
And he is still going around the world to educate people.
But this book was...
A pivot point in my life, reading this, I said, I really want to study psychedelics.
So the dream was, a few years later, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, near the end of it, there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all-white room and he's on his deathbed.
And so the dream was, I'm in this all-white room, and there's a person on his deathbed, and he's...
Looking at me, he said, earlier in my life, I was almost killed, but I was saved.
And I knew I was saved for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was.
He said, let me show you what happened to me.
So this is all in the dream.
So we go, and it's in World War II.
And he was a Jewish guy, and it was outside of a village, and there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave, machine gunned by the Nazis.
The crematoriums and the concentration camps, they called it the Holocaust of Bullets.
So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead.
And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days.
Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes.
And then he wakes up and he's not dead.
He climbs his way through the bodies and nobody's there.
It's the edge of town.
He runs into the woods.
He survives the war with the partisans.
And then...
I see all this, and then we're back in the room, and he's on his deathbed, and he's looking at me, and he says, now I know why I was saved.
I'm like, oh, tell me, why were you saved?
He said, it's to tell you to study psychedelics, that I want you to bring back psychedelics, that if we can all feel our interconnectedness, it will be harder to dehumanize others, it'll be harder to do this mass murder, that we need to understand how we're all more similar than different.
I said, in my mind again, in the dream, I said, I've already decided to do this.
This is sort of reinforcing it.
I will say yes, and you can die in peace.
You will have carried this message.
And then he dies in front of my arms, in front of my eyes.
And then after he's dead, and then I'm thinking, what do I do next?
And I walk out the room.
And now I'm somehow or other on a stream.
I'm sitting down watching the water go by.
And then I notice that there's this young boy sitting next to me.
And I look at him, and I realize I know him.
In real life at the time, I had a big LSD stash, and I was worried about getting busted.
And so his father was a friend of mine, and he stored my LSD stash at his house.
And when I connected this guy with this little kid with LSD, then I woke up.
So that's what's been a big motivator for me.
My entire life and made it so that I don't feel that I've been able to just give up.
It's like this sort of message from what humanity can do to each other if we don't really evolve in our consciousness.
And so that's what's helped me to continue.
I feel this enormous good fortune in that...
I was born in this generational...
I won the generational lottery, is the way to say it.
My great-grandparents on my mother's side were refugees from Russia, came to America in 1880, fleeing anti-Semitism.
My father's father, my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather fled from Poland in 1920, also from anti-Semitism.
They arrive at America, and it's the American dream.
And it actually, on my mother's side, it was the classic rags to riches because they had a rags business.
And they turned it into a paper company.
And so I was born in 1953 after the Holocaust, after World War II.
And my parents were just so supportive.
And my dad was a doctor.
And I was told, we want to help you do whatever you want to do.
And I felt like I was born at the height of American power, American exceptionalism.
I was white.
I was male.
My family was well off.
I was the chosen people, Jewish, American exceptionalism.
The only thing I wasn't was tall.
But I got every other sort of lottery thing.
And I just was raised that I could make a difference.
And so I had this sort of luxury There's actually a Holocaust writer named Primo Levi, who was one of my father's heroes in a way.
And he wrote something very interesting that I think has relevance to where we're at today in America.
And he talked about how we tend to think of that the revolutions start with the oppressed.
And that the oppressed throw off their chains and they end up amassing all these people and they try to work for a better world.
He said, but that's not actually what happens.
The revolutions don't begin with the oppressed because often that's the purpose of oppression, is to make it so they can't do that.
They're so focused on survival.
He said the revolutions usually begin with the privileged, who for one reason or another use their freedom, use their privilege.
To argue, to work towards a better life.
So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege, you have the obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do.
It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs.
Many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And the bottom one is survival.
That you have to work on core survival.
We've had these surveys that say a vast proportion of America cannot afford a $500 or $1,000 unexpected expense.
So you're living at this edge of economic anxiety.
You can't really think about many other ways to protest because you're focused on survival.
So I felt that I was born into this privileged And it took multiple generations from refugees from the American dream.
And so I felt I've had this mission of this use the privilege for making it a better world.
So I've not been focused on making money.
I've not been focused on bringing these healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics back to the world.
And one of the things that was so...
Reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this, is that once FDA said no to MDMA-assisted therapy, that they weren't ready to approve it, that they wanted to see more data.
I was incredibly, you know, depressed and frustrated and all that.
But it took me a couple months to realize that this psychedelic renaissance, that MAPS, Lycos could disappear.
But that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics that the field was moving forward regardless.
That something had been accomplished.
That this psychedelic renaissance was really moving forward.
And that that was this wave that I think is unstoppable.
That we're seeing the healing potentials in so many different ways with so many different drugs.
So that gave me this...
It was kind of reassuring, yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't ready, things are moving forward in a great way.
Let's imagine a world where there was no restrictions on psychedelics.
Because I'm of the belief that it's probably responsible for a lot of religious experiences that we've documented.
It's not an uncommon theme in many, many cultures that you have these psychedelic experiences and then through that these great revelations come and then through that great change in the culture.
I mean, this is Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece that Brian Mirorescu talks about so well.
Without restrictions, if we didn't have these fucking insane laws, we would have progressed past where we are now.
If we had gone from 1970 to 2025 without those restrictions in place, who knows what this culture looks like?
Who knows what the world looks like?
And it's amazing.
That one administration, one presidential administration with one sweeping act that was essentially put in place to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti-war movement and to stop the black rights movement.
Like, if they had done that, if they had not done that, if that had not gone through, we might be looking at a completely different world where we have culturally accelerated evolution that mirrors our electronically and technologically accelerated evolution.
And when you talk about Brian Murescu and the Immortality Key, which, by the way, is being made into a documentary.
Phenomenal book.
But the Ellicinian Mysteries is the longest-running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world, roughly 2,000 years.
It involved a psychedelic potion called Kikion.
It's not exactly clear what was in it, but it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality.
And often religious systems want to be the intermediaries.
When we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, you know, we talk about what happened in the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, but it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Ellicinian mysteries.
And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people.
And then we have the burning of the witches.
When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote because they were the center of the communities.
Now, these communities were not all, you know, peace and love.
There's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hesse.
And it's called The Glass Bead Game, Magister Lutie, The Glass Bead Game.
And it helped Hermann Hess win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he wrote it during World War II.
And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war.
But the book was a post-apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these...
Competitive energies into what they called The Glass Bead Game, which was this...
It's a beautiful book, but The Glass Bead Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe.
And they would have this different kind of...
Who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive?
And this was kind of the...
The antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse.
And he's writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing.
But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract and it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people.
It became more of this elite.
And the head of it, the Magister Lutie, decides that he has to leave.
There has to be some way that we do compete with each other, but we have to do it in a way to learn nonviolence.
And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive.
The nuclear proliferation is taking more.
So I ended my TED Talk with this, which was 2019.
And interestingly enough, it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage at TED about Ibogaine.
So it took six years from my first—that was the only ever TED Talk on psychedelics in 2019, and then Nolan Williams talked about Ibogaine just recently, and he'll also be at the psychedelic conference.
But this idea, I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe.
I mean, as you just talked about coming back from Ukraine, today, I don't know what's happening right now, but today India and Pakistan started bombing each other.
He did have a violent past because that is the whole point of combatants for peace.
They were combatants.
They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together.
So there's an incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Lior Roseman at Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians.
And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session.
And with different measures of how you see the other.
And once you do see this commonality, you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself and you can recognize their pain.
It's like a residual effect of tribal culture from the ancient times, that you had to other these people in order to commit horrific crimes, because they were going to commit horrific crimes on you.
You had to protect the people around you, and unfortunately, that's baked into our genes.
You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements, Adam Kinzinger, who was the Republican on the January 6th committee in the House to look at what happened on January 6th.
He said that he's learned from his investigations that there's something that people are more scared of than death, and that's being kicked out of your tribe.
That we're such social beings, that this idea that we would be isolated and alone, that's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them, because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe, and they ostracize you.
And then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions.
I think this is very true, that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions.
And the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell.
But it's all about this...
Combination of us being both interconnected and also extremely individual.
I think this other part is that the more you realize how we're all essentially more similar...
I mean, look at our DNA as very similar to some animal DNA.
There's very slight differences.
And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more.
But once you can kind of understand that...
Hopefully, then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences.
So it's this paradoxical thing where the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person.
I think what you brought up about the suspension of the Illusinian mysteries, that's just so important.
That kind of tactic has always existed because the...
Psychotic people in power want to maintain their control over the population.
And it's very difficult to do.
It's very difficult to get people to fight each other when they're all tripping together.
And they're like, oh, there's something more to this.
Like, we're missing out on a giant piece of this puzzle.
And it's like, there's these tools that are available to humanity that can elevate us.
And yet these tools are, by tyrants, are being kept from people.
Not just kept from people, but...
As you're talking about with Nixon's advisor, openly discussed how they lied and used propaganda to pretend that the effects were far worse than they really were.
And I think that it's, again, really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used.
So the social context.
So, for example, religion is often cozy up to the people in power.
So there's an ayahuasca church, the União do Vegetal, and they came from Brazil.
They actually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and got approval for practicing ayahuasca in the United States.
But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church.
So they've become patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical, and some of the leaders of the União do Vegetal aligned with Bolsonaro, who was about destroying the Amazon.
So that it doesn't, the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person.
It's the context.
So it's the same way in therapy, that you can have these experiences, but it's the context in which you interpret them, and then it's the integration work that you do after that really makes the most sense.
So that you can have psychedelic experiences, but if it's not in this...
Sort of therapeutic context where you're really open to deal with the different issues and things, fears of death, things that come up.
So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just – it's a magic pill and it will produce better people.
Well, what he's basically saying is that it's a real good chance that early monkeys and stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat and that they would eat mushrooms and that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language.
But I think then, what does that mean for us today?
Is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing.
Einstein had this great quote.
He said, Everything, except our mode of thinking, and hence we are drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe.
What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking.
And what is that new mode of thinking?
It's sort of how we're interconnected.
It's what the astronauts have said.
So I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics.
The astronauts who've been up in space look back and see the Earth as a whole thing.
Just seeing Earth from the stars, not from the stars, but from space, looking down and seeing the nonsense of these imaginary lines that we put on the ground.
But then there's this thought process that the conflict and the evil is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good, and that this is all part of this evolutionary process that the human race is going through, and that almost...
In the face of this catastrophe is where real change comes.
And then we kind of have to understand that evil and terrible behavior is a real thing.
And have some mad search for the tools to mitigate these problems.
And so it encourages people like yourself.
It encourages people to try to figure these things out using...
And again, these tools which are right under our nose that have been here for thousands of years.
So, in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown.
You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see.
And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out.
And so these people become the enemies.
These people become the evil.
And we're the all good.
It reminds me, actually, I was with Terrence.
This was my first DMT experience.
So this is about 40 years ago.
This was at Esalen at Big Sur.
It was with Ralph Metzner, Terrence McKenna, and a bunch of us were trying to...
We gathered together to think how to protect MDMA.
And one evening, we all were trying DMT.
So not 5-MeO-DMT, but DMT.
And you smoke it in a pipe.
It's like 10 or 15 minutes.
And then you just go out, and then you come back and share what happened, and then you pass the pipe to the next person.
So it's like a three, four-hour process with this group.
And so for me, my first experience with DMT was...
So the first thing I saw was this horizontal line.
And then I saw a vertical line.
And then it turned red.
And then it turned into cubes.
And then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting where the space doesn't seem to make sense anymore.
And then I was blasted into this other universe.
But I was blasted out of myself into the universe.
And I felt like I was part of everything.
And everything was part of me.
And it was this glorious billions of years of evolution.
And I went through all of this.
But then after all of that, finally I had this idea.
That if I'm part of everything and everything is part of me, then Hitler is part of me too.
And it was shattering.
But it was true.
You can't claim to be part of everything and only take the good parts.
And it just was a shocker to me that this logic brought me to this.
And it was really, really shattering.
And it took me this whole...
Data, start working on that.
And then the very next day, and this gets back a little bit to legalization, the next day, and to MAPS's political strategy, the next day, we experimented with ketamine.
All right, so in my ketamine experience, somehow or other, I was above and behind Hitler because, you know, the Holocaust had been this animating idea for me my whole life.
So I'm above and behind Hitler.
Ketamine gives you a bit of remove, like you're not So I felt that I was safe, but I was watching him give a speech to these rallies where we have enormous numbers of Germans.
And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody, doesn't want to kill the Jews, doesn't want to have this roar?
How do I get into his head?
And I felt this panic rising.
And it was like bubbles, like I was underwater, and I felt the bubbles of my fear.
If they broke the surface, I wouldn't be able to...
I'd have to look away.
I couldn't deal with it.
And then I realized that one of the beauties of ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration.
You can breathe.
So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not.
So I started really breathing.
And then I was able to go back and watch.
And what I saw was this Heil Hitler salute.
And then I saw everybody doing it back to him.
And I got this sense because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger.
And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the Heil Hitler salute, and then everybody is pushing it back to him.
So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one.
And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up, like this kind of unity between him and the people.
And it just was terrifying.
And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head.
Like you're saying, the psychopaths that are often politicians, that they're getting so much out of it.
But it's the people giving away their power that I thought, that's where the solution has to be.
So MAPS is about mass mental health, about a spiritualized humanity.
And so that led to this understanding for me that safety for humanity is not just...
Giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up.
You know, it's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power.
So that led to this idea we need to medicalize, we need to go, you know, to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks, but at the same time there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people.
In a way, preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis.
So that it's this two parallel paths.
One is science and medicine.
The other is drug policy reform.
And then we talked about earlier about educating young people.
We need honest drug education.
People have died from taking ecstasy contaminated with fentanyl.
You know, we need pure drugs.
We need peer support, treatment on demand.
But I think the drug war is so counterproductive that if we could just turn a switch, it would be worth it.
But we need to really anchor and build kind of a healthier culture and healthier people.
But it has to be sort of masses rather than just individuals.
Yeah, they were all methed out of their fucking minds, which is like the wrong drugs can ruin everything You know and that whole experience of being a part of something and everyone's on amphetamines.
Yeah I mean, what the fuck?
They were giving them out to the soldiers.
That's how they got them to go through Poland in three days.
It's a phenomenal book.
But just like crazy when you think about how history was changed and a large part of the way it was accepted was because everybody was messed up.
On the wrong I mean imagine if Hitler was dosing out everybody with mushrooms They would have been like hold on like what are why are we in Poland?
The fuck are we doing?
I'm not killing anybody.
What is this?
This is crazy.
I gotta get out of this country like people just abandoned ship it's just The worst drugs are the ones that are always pushed by the tyrants and I think blitzed is a perfect example that the the Nazi administration that what the the Nazi Government was doing giving their soldiers giving their the people in the tanks got the most meth Because they had to be at the front lines.
It's a crazy book, man It just makes you think like what does that look like if no meth is there?
Does this all get worked out way in advance?
Is this never happened?
Does the Holocaust never take place?
Like what was what would have been like with no meth?
Yeah, I think that was a part of the Nazi lore—oh, excuse me, the Viking lore as well.
The Viking lore had—did Vikings find that out?
Would they just take—because Amanita's a weird one, right?
I remember McKenna saying something about that he believes that it differed not just seasonally, but he thinks the effects differed genetically and geographically, and they were different in different places.
Sort of like, you know, like— A bad example, but all I have, like, if you grow certain tobaccos in Cuba, they make the best cigars because the soil is, like, so rich.
And you get a cigar from, you know, it's grown somewhere in America, it's not going to taste like a cigar that's grown in Cuba because there's something going on with the difference.
And I would imagine it's probably something about the nutrients in certain soil that would lead to the Amanita developing these properties in some places and not in others.
Yeah, Amanita muscaria.
No definitive evidence of a specific mushroom is Vikings regularly consumed.
Some scholars propose they may have used mushrooms for hallucinogenic purposes.
Most cited examples fly agaric mushroom Amanita muscaria.
Some believe...
May have been the Vedic soma, a sacred drink described in ancient texts.
There's also speculation about other hallucinogenic compounds like psilocybin cubensis, so psilocybin mushrooms being used.
So they might have as well.
The Amanita mascara is the weird one though, right?
There's an article about it, actually from Netflix, about the show Vikings, talks about how the Amanita might have not actually made them berserkers and it was something else doing it.
It says, if anything, fly agaric would have made them particularly worthless warriors since the side effects included drowsiness, vomiting, muscle spasms, and numbness in arms and legs.
Rather, it's more like if berserkers were getting high off henbane.
So the Amanita Muscaria one, though, I always go back to the sacred mushroom in the cross because that was what John Marco Allegro believed was the early days of Christianity.
They were consuming that.
But isn't it a strange one that you don't hear about people having like these Breakthrough experiences on Amanita.
This gets back to one of the earlier points you made about it, do I get frustrated?
Which is to realize that this is actually thousands of years plus of the suppression of psychedelics.
Also, you said something earlier, how quick 100 years goes by.
So, what if something takes a couple generations?
That's okay.
I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small.
We need to have, like, multi-generational goals.
I grew up outside of Chicago, and there's this Baha 'i temple.
So the Baha 'i religion emerged out of Islam, but it's more of a universal religion.
and they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries.
But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago, this beautiful temple, but it took three I think this process of elevating consciousness...
in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take.
So if things take longer than I thought That's a great attitude.
So there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference.
And it's also lots of opportunities for networking.
Because, again, For me, even though MAPS has been focused on MDMA, what it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance.
So I don't see the psilocybin or the ibogaine or anything as competition.
We want the psychedelic therapists of the future to be cross-trained in all the different drugs and then to be able to customize the treatment for each person.
So I think that Lycos is going to succeed, whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever.
We will eventually, FDA will eventually approve MDMA cystic therapy for PTSD, then they'll approve psilocybin and other things.
And so I'm sort of going around the world in sort of high-trauma, low-resource areas to try to globalize access.
And I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now, and we could use more people dealing with their fears, dealing with their anxiety, withdrawing the projection of the shadows.
You know, immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways.
I mean, I think the real fear that people have is cartel members and people coming across the border and terrorists coming across, and not having a secure border, which I think we should have a secure border, but I also think we should have path to citizenship, too.