Rav Arora - On Exclusive BOMBSHELL Story On Dishonest Government-funded Psychedelic Studies
Today, we have our special guest Rav Arora. Rav is an independent journalist who covers topics such as MDMA therapy, vaccines, and much more! We covered his new bombshell report on ‘How The Government Funded Misleading Scientific Studies To Demonize MDMA’. You can find the full article & his work HERE: https://www.illusionconsensus.com Visit https://www.freeassange.org for more information & to support Julian and his family. --💙Support this channel directly here: https://bit.ly/RussellBrand-SupportWATCH me LIVE weekdays on Rumble: https://bit.ly/russellbrand-rumbleVisit the new merch store: https://bit.ly/Stay-Free-StoreFollow on social media:X: @rustyrocketsINSTAGRAM: @russellbrandFACEBOOK: @russellbrand
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Rav is an independent journalist based in Vancouver writing on a wide range of topics including violent crime, MDMA therapy, which we're talking about today, identity politics and vaccine mandates.
You can find his work at Illusion of Consensus or go to illusionconsensus.com.
Those links are available.
Rav, thank you for joining us.
Thanks Russell, and great to see the millions of Awakening Wonders yet again.
Isn't it astonishing the way this movement grows?
It seems that as the establishment doubles down on its mission to destroy independent
thought and the possibility of independent opposition, people continue to tenaciously
grip onto deeper truths that are very empowering.
Now you're obviously interested in who isn't the nature of consciousness, and you've brought
us an exclusive story prior to publishing it, even on your own sub-stack, and you are
one of the best investigative young up-and-coming journalists out there, so we're very excited
We talk a lot about psychedelics and psychedelic therapy and indeed awakening is very significant In our community.
Can you tell us exactly what this story is?
What the therapies are that it pertains to and how it intersects with some of the issues we are already interested in like for example the kind of control that's exercised by the pharmaceutical industry and their kind of territorialism when it comes to IP.
Yeah, so I came into contact with Dr. Joseph Freeman, who authored this incredibly compelling and striking study on the mRNA vaccines being associated with a 1 in 800 serious adverse event rate.
I know you've talked about that study before on your show, Russell, you might recall.
Yeah, so on our podcast, The Illusion of Consensus on Substack, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was interviewing Freeman and Freeman just mentioned like early on, I was doing studies on MDMA specifically, known as the pathogen of psychedelics, the heart opener, a drug used for PTSD, individuals with severe trauma.
It's a great compound shown in the studies to go through and process severe traumas and difficult emotions.
He mentioned he had worked with this drug and then I reached out to him and I said, oh, that's interesting.
Psychedelic research is something that I'm interested in as someone who is intrigued by awakening consciousness and healing mental health issues, etc.
A person, I would say, who's struggled with mental health issues and knows a lot of individuals struggling with trauma, depression, PTSD, etc.
And when I spoke to him, he started telling me the story that he's never told before, and that became this exclusive piece which I'm very excited to tell you guys about, which is how in Dr. Freeman's early research in the early 2000s, the early aughts, He was part of three peer-reviewed studies focused on giving MDMA to rats in rat studies.
And essentially, the nutshell is that, I guess, unsurprisingly, given the war on drugs, the war on psychedelics, and the politicized mission to demonize this specific class of drugs, the studies were done in a way where there was a very clear political and scientific narrative to amplify the negative findings associated with MDMA in these studies and to obscure or downplay or sort of defocus any positive findings.
And remember, these studies were NIH-funded, specifically NIDA-funded, the National Institute of Drug Abuse.
And Freeman tells me a story about how in three of these studies, one study in which they found That actually adolescent mice were more resistant to MDMA neurotoxicity than adults.
And they found that this was a very striking finding because they would think that maybe in the younger mice, there would be more potential neurotoxicity, which is also this kind of big myth that has led to the criminalization and suppression of MDMA is this idea that it's neurotoxic, which is based on some other In some cases, fraudulent or misleading studies, not the ones that Freeman was part of, but some other ones as well.
It turns out MDMA is not neurotoxic in the doses given in any kind of therapeutic range, but this particular finding about adolescence and MDMA, about it being more safe than using adults, this finding was the most interesting finding, but Freeman was not able to focus on it.
because of the NIDA funding against what they're exactly looking for.
They were giving repeated doses of MDMA in adolescents and as well as another dose when the rats were in adulthood and they found that repeated doses of MDMA in adolescents actually prevented neurotoxicity from MDMA in adulthood and this was a very striking finding again that went against kind of the narrative But they, Freyman told me, they deliberately didn't emphasize this in the study because, remember, the studies were designed and conducted and pushed in a certain way to demonize psychedelics and to show particularly negative findings.
and not actually talk about any potential benefits.
And so here you have this kind of narrative seeping into or contaminating the science, which is exactly the opposite, Russell, of how we want science to be.
We want science to be about, let's do a study, let's find out what happens, right?
Let's see the harms and the benefits and weigh them.
But here, these government-funded studies were explicitly conducted in a manner to demonize a class of drugs that had these political and Ideological and kind of weird spiritual associations that the government wanted to make illegal and to discourage individuals from taking.
And so here you see ideology and politics trumping objectivity and the scientific method.
Another example, and thank you for sharing this with us exclusively and primarily, of how the claims of objectivity of science can be thwarted or at least compromised, as you say, by ideology.
Your claim is that the NIADH only even undertook These trials in order to discredit these substances.
That's the claim.
The claim is based on the amplification of negative findings and not correctly covering or conveying positive findings.
Is that right?
Yes, and this has since been confirmed actually by someone, Dr. Robert Malone.
He came across the piece and we were communicating over the weekend and his wife was part of some early research in the 80s and 90s and she actually confirmed this and this is going to be another follow-up piece that's going to be available on the illusion of consensus substack uh tomorrow or the day after and she's and she confirmed this exact same thing and said at that time um when she was not not part of MDMA research but in the drug research area she was told and community it was very clear to her um that if for she used the example of marijuana if they found some positive effect with marijuana which is a drug being studied funded to study by the NIDA the government agency
That would essentially be career suicide.
You couldn't do that.
If you were funded to study a particular class of drugs by the NIDA, which are heavily politically pressured to paint this narrative, you can't focus on any positive findings.
The goal is you're getting money, you're getting rich and wealthy.
based on you doing these studies to support the government agenda.
So that all has to work in a systematic, precise way.
And if you go against it, you could lose funding at your lab.
And this is what Dr. Joseph Freeman shared in his particular experiences.
There's one other thing as well that he shared, which in some ways is the most interesting one.
There was a third study he was a part of, where they were Kind of comparing SSRIs, particularly citalopram, which is an SSRI, an antidepressant in mice with MDMA.
And there was this hypothesis based on other studies that maybe if you gave mice citalopram before you gave MDMA, there could be some neuroprotective or some synergistic effect potentially.
And in the study, they were comparing and contrasting these different groups.
And they were expecting to find neurotoxicity from the MDMA, and potentially citalopram could help with that, or they were going to investigate what would happen.
And they ended up finding, unexpectedly, that when the mice were actually given the SSRI, that itself had produced serotonin damage in the mice, something they didn't expect to find.
They were looking for that in the MDMA, and they did find that later on.
Remember, they were giving the mice very high doses of MDMA, extremely high.
A person would have to take a ridiculously large amount of MDMA to get some sort of equivalency there.
The temperatures are really high.
They did all sorts of things for it to Find the worst possible outcome.
And they found the citaloprime actually caused serotonin damage, which they didn't expect to find.
And Freeman, he was stunned by this particular finding because this is a drug that's widely prescribed in America and the UK and Canada.
If you go to your doctor and say you have depression, it's very commonly and easily prescribed antidepressants like Halloween candy.
And they're finding this particular finding about this commonly used drug.
Yet, Freeman again was told by supervisors, basically, no, we can't touch this man.
Like, no, we can't badmouth or emphasize any negative findings with SSRIs because we don't want to interfere or damage any relationships with these pharmaceutical companies who gave us these agents and these medications for various studies.
We want to maintain a good relationship with Big Pharma because we want to keep getting funding and access to pharmaceuticals to maintain our studies.
Yeah, let's focus on all the negative findings we can get with MDMA because, well, the government wants to criminalize and to demonize this particular class of drugs.
There's nothing less than systemic corruption where there are fait accompli prerequisite outcomes at the point at which they embark on the endeavour.
You could assume that if those clinical trials were undertaken by a private enterprise that That there would be a different outcome because it would mean perhaps that the FDA had approved the possibility of licenses being afforded to those drugs.
In a sense, if it's a government-funded clinical trial where there is no predetermined partnership
with a private pharmacological entity, it's likely that the clinical trials are being
undertaken to condemn, tarnish and curtail the use to, as you say, demonise, in this
case MDMA.
And if it was undertaken by, I don't know, Pfizer or another giant organisation, it's
likely that they might, using the same drugs with slightly different methods, reach a positive
outcome because at this point the drug is ready to be licensed.
So in a sense, would you say that in all likelihood we're at a phase where the profitability of
SSRIs is too significant to be countenanced, challenged and diminished by rival substances?
And beyond that, Rav, do you imagine that there are reasons that pertain to the general
Because a lot of time when you're globally covering the kind of subjects that you cover and that we cover over here, you get the sense that there's a requirement that people, the light of the human heart remains dimmed.
That people feel Repressed, subdued, hopeless and despairing.
And I know a lot of people in our chats will identify with that.
It's almost as if part of the function of the culture is ongoing disempowerment, the creation of division.
And when you hear, for example, of emergent substances that might be beneficial for mental health, they are controlled until there's a point where it might become profitable and then At that point, they could be in some diminished or distinct or evolved way, be utilized.
So I guess what I'm asking you is, do you think it's just because of the profitability of SSRIs?
That's one part of the question.
Second part of the question, do you reckon if these products were licensed, they'd just trial it again and go, actually it works quite well now.
And do you get the sense that there's a broader appetite to keep people subdued and despondent?
Yeah, those are all great questions.
Yeah, there's a great quote from Brett Weinstein recently.
He was on Tucker's show and he put it perfectly.
He said, pharma is healthy when people are sick.
And I think that's true in many respects.
You have big pharma corporations and government entities that are essentially monetizing and profiting off of disease states.
It's not exactly in the best interest to give Holistic mind-body healing to deal with the core of our mental health and physical problems.
In many cases, you're seeing across the United States and across the West, we're moving more and more towards just giving pills and handing off prescriptions to deal with very complicated Uh, issues like PTSD, like depression.
I mean we're talking about SSRIs and antidepressants.
The idea, Russell, I totally challenge this.
The idea that In any way, you could cure depression with a pill is ludicrous to me.
It doesn't even make sense just as a premise.
Because what is depression, right?
Depression, someone who's lonely, lacking social connection, lacking spiritual connection, have unhealthy relationships, isn't working out, isn't exercising potentially, has this gray cloud over their head.
Usually a lot of people with various traumas in their life from childhood to adulthood, etc, etc.
There's all these kind of issues, you know, maybe someone left a job and now they're despondent and in despair because they don't know what to do next.
And now they feel depressed or they just had a traumatic breakup with someone that they love and that they invested all their life in.
But yet this person doesn't love them anymore.
And you know, that's now they feel depressed.
That is a very complex human problem.
That's existed since the dawn of time.
The idea that you could fix that with a pill makes absolutely no sense, right?
These are very complicated problems you have to deal in a holistic manner and psychedelics like I want to be careful and make sure people understand like I am not some guy here just promoting drugs or like in any way some kind of influencer or who wants to Say you should take these things willy-nilly or in some recreational way.
I personally have grown up in a very conservative, traditional kind of Hindu upbringing with my parents who are immigrants from India.
I never smoked any marijuana or did any drugs when I was a kid.
It was strongly condemned.
And in fact, I have a very strong or did have a very strong bias against psychedelics and marijuana.
It was very kind of anathematized or condemned in a way.
Yeah, over the past few years, as I see the rise in mental health issues across the West, right, depression, PTSD, anxiety, ADHD, in researching what works and what doesn't work, you quickly begin to realize if you're looking with an open mind, that psychedelic therapies are Incredibly effective and probably the most effective therapeutic we have on the market for dealing with some of these complex problems and it makes sense, right?
It makes sense.
It's not like an antidepressant that numbs you or makes the highs less high and the lows less low.
It's kind of what some people experience on SSRIs.
For MDMA, going back to the specific topic, MDMA, for example, there are now incredible studies done by Rick Doblin at MAPS, who I recently interviewed, and a recent phase 2 study that showed 71% of individuals who had undergone this MDMA therapy protocol, which involves three sessions of MDMA over the span of six months with Psychotherapy before, in between, and after these sessions, 71% of these individuals with PTSD, people who are replaying and constantly being plagued by these past traumas and past experiences, are now in these sessions where basically it's 7-8 hours per session and you're working through and re-experiencing and reprocessing difficult emotions and traumas that you've experienced.
This isn't a podcast, we're going deep into psychedelics, but that's kind of the gist of it and something that's very powerful for folks.
This therapeutic, 71%, Russell, for those that don't know, is incredibly astounding.
And that's similar and basically the same figures for psilocybin for depression, great studies at Johns Hopkins.
Other studies with LSD and DMT being done as well, but psilocybin, ayahuasca, MDMA, astounding efficacy, unlike SSRIs, which basically seem like a placebo at this point.
And the dominant theory for prescribing SSRIs was that there's a serotonin imbalance in the brain, therefore we can chemically correct that with handing off this pill, when in reality that story has now been widely debunked and If you ask psychiatrists, they don't have a lot of solutions in the toolbox, and a big reason why psychedelic therapies, which are showing to be more and more effective with these incredible studies at Johns Hopkins and Rick Doblin at MAPS,
These drugs have been demonized from the early 70s and 80s and 90s when they were coming onto the scene.
And there were a lot of complications with it.
Some of the people that were advocating for these things, you know, tune in, uh, drop out the whole Timothy Leary thing, who he had conducted some misleading research and it would kind of became this politicized mission.
And some of the psychedelic advocates were quite irresponsible in what they were advocating for in society.
And so that really, uh, frustrated or scared the powers that be.
And there became these federal regulations were being passed.
There was this idea that if you allow people to take psychedelics, then people are going to tune in, you know, tune out and drop out of society and not participate in in a responsible, obedient, civil way.
But what ended up happening is instead of having an honest conversation about risks and benefits and putting in the proper guardrails with this with this stuff, there was just a complete elimination of the conversation and Pushing to criminalize these drugs, Republicans and Democrats were in favor of this and there was this perception that we can't let the kids take the LSD otherwise they'll go crazy.
And a lot of those studies, like I said, Dr. Joseph Raymond's testimony, which is incredibly powerful.
And by the way, we were we were talking about this and it's like.
We were worried, like, Joseph, if he wants to continue doing research, you know, how is that going to happen if he's now revealing these political narratives?
And he's basically, at this point now, with his research on COVID vaccines and other things, not wanting to rely anymore on NIH or NIDA.
I mean, it's more important for someone like him to reveal these bombshell revelations about how this research was conducted than being in good favor with NIH and NIDA, who, as we're finding out more and more, Russell, the way in which we perceive and understand pharmaceuticals, drugs, and vaccines is not exactly how they're conducted or how they're designed.
We look at the conventional wisdom on drugs, medicines, and vaccines as being absolute gospel, right?
Whatever our doctor says, whatever Fauci says, whatever the FDA and the CDC say must be true, right?
And that's something that I would have thought before as well.
But as it turns out, as I do more and more research and follow these threads in my career, the way these things are Processed and kind of propagandized the public.
The way these things are studied.
It's not just it's not just whatever drug is most effective and what is the most safe.
We saw this with the coven backs as well.
There are a lot of financial and political and ideological interests at play that we don't get to see as the public.
We just get to see.
Oh, vaccines are safe and effective.
Oh.
Psychedelics are dangerous, and we don't want to go near them, and oh, antidepressants are actually the solution to your problem, and oh, ADHD medications, which more and more youth, more and more kids my age or younger, in Gen Z, are being prescribed ADHD medications because they can't focus.
And there's this great Adderall and Ritalin crisis now, this shortage of these drugs, Russell, where doctors are prescribing this more and more, and more and more kids are heavily medicated with these stimulant drugs because they have ADHD, which means they can't focus, which is like Everyone these days and now we're moving further and further towards medication rather than focusing on the holistic solutions and I think Big Pharma, the government and the media is largely to blame.
We're seeing nothing less than the curation of reality, initially at the point of clinical trial, the type of trials that are undertaken with a particular objective in mind, but the good news is we are able now to provide competing narratives to the dominant narratives that as you say, suggest an empirical and unimpeachable reality
as offered to us by the kind of interests that you are currently investigating. Now, I'm very excited
by your revelation and again, very grateful to you for the exclusivity. What I would like
to say is that it was only a brief period of time where the pharmaceutical industry was
granted a kind of, I would say, equivalency with the other aspects of the medical industry, i.e. the
that we saw Big Pharma as participants in a philanthropic endeavor to save society during an immersive and terrifying pandemic.
Prior to that, you know, in the United States in particular, the opioid crisis meant that the pharmaceutical industry was regarded with a great deal of cynicism.
And now, with various inquiries being undertaken across the world, the pharmaceutical industry's position as a respected institution is once again being challenged.
What's interesting to me, Rav, and also as an area that you have covered in your work, is the point where The state have been providing additional funding to propagandize medical and pharmaceutical solutions, in particular to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We know of course that 55% of TV, certainly cable news advertising, comes from a pharmaceutical company and indeed a significant amount from Pfizer itself.
But in addition to that, You revealed in some of your reporting that the state were funding what amounts to now COVID-19 propaganda, or at least vaccine propaganda.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that story?
Yes.
I appreciate you guys covering the story I saw on YouTube.
I was like, watching on YouTube your video just because I watch your stuff, and I was like, oh, this is a topic I covered about how the US government paid media outlets to promote the COVID vaccine.
And I go on, I'm like, oh, this is my article.
I was like, that's cool.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, so this came to a surprise initially, but it made sense given the experience I had before.
I don't know if I want to go into it all now, but last year in the summertime I published a couple of essays about how I was writing for a number of major mainstream outlets, some left-leaning, some right-leaning, and I've decided not to name these outlets because I don't want to pick a fight with a big multi-million dollar media corporation.
I don't want to badmouth any People I was working with in particular but basically I was writing for a number of outlets very consistently having published many times before and I started investigating vaccine side effects particularly myocarditis and hearing about cases of vaccine myocarditis and I wanted to report on this and write about it in some of these places and time and time again the response I was getting Russell this is quite shocking and the antithesis to what I think journalism should be
We're a pro-vaccine publication.
We can't publish content like this because we don't want to promote vaccine hesitancy.
Time and time again, this was the response I was getting from editors, like, no, our publication is going to promote the COVID vaccine, so we're not going to platform this vaccine skepticism or your coverage of side effects.
And I was like, whoa!
I was like, hold on here.
I thought journalism was about Honestly, investigating these hot-button topics, free of an agenda, free of, is this going to promote hesitancy or is this going to, you know, align with a certain political ideology or not, I was just looking for the truth, similar with my recent reporting on psychedelic research.
And I was quite frustrated at the time and that drove eventually my migration to Substack and creating the Illusion Census and making a name for myself instead of relying on these major media outlets.
So recently I came across this story and investigated it further and found out that many of those publications that I was in contact with, and just many publications in US media, publications that we all read and know about, were getting direct funding From the US government to promote the COVID vaccine.
And I went and looked into their advertisements.
I know you did as well.
And they contained advertisements about these vaccines are safe and effective.
Your kids should be getting it.
Myocarditis.
It's a small temporary issue.
COVID is a bigger threat.
If you get the updated COVID vaccine, it'll prevent long COVID.
And to me, it was like, wait, again, this is the opposite of what I thought journalism was supposed to be doing.
I thought we were supposed to be questioning those people and those people in white lab coats who are Putting out these decrees and propagandizing to the public about the safety and efficacy of these experimental vaccines, when in reality what's happening is you're getting funding from them.
How explicit this problem actually is, I'm not sure.
Like, how exactly these stories are turned out in mainstream media, what happens behind the scenes.
I'm not in those newsrooms, so I don't know.
But we saw what happened in mainstream media with the reputational decapitation of Joe Rogan for talking about myocarditis and talking about early treatments for COVID.
We saw the constant, you know, defenestration of anyone who was asking questions about vaccine side effects, and yet at the same time these publications were getting funding to promote these vaccines.
I think this is why independent media has risen so much, Russell, is because there has been now, I think, this is a very important point, I think there's been a great unveiling in the public, Russell.
Like the Gutenberg printing press, now we're in this age of media where establishment narratives are being challenged, questioned, and eviscerated in real time, right?
We're no longer just relying on the medical establishment and the CDC and the FDA We're in the age of podcasts and sub-stack newsletters and the internet.
I know some people, like individuals like Sam Harris, talk about the problems associated with that.
And it's true, there are problems associated with this, right?
If all you have is sub-stack and podcasts and people like yourself who aren't scientists and people like myself who aren't experts in vaccines talking about this issue, Yeah, there are going to be some people, some grifters and some anti-vaxxers and some people with extreme rhetoric or people who are not reliable because they don't have the relevant background.
But the problem is that people in authority, people with power, have been wrong repeatedly again and again and again when it comes to vaccines, when it comes to pharmaceuticals like SSRIs and ADHD meds, right?
When it comes to psychedelic therapies and the suppression of these therapies that can help so many people and uplift them out of their suffering, whether depression, PTSD, anxiety, etc.
These establishment narratives are being questioned more and more.
Like I said, we're moving more and more towards medication as an establishment and more and more towards vaccinating and medicating and following our mainstream primary physician's advice on these complex mind-body problems.
But I think for those of us that are more politically conscious and tuning into this, Great awakening in podcastistan.
We're seeing the days of SSRIs, ADHD meds, and trusting people in white lab coats being gone in the age of morning sunlight, sauna, cold plunge, ashwagandha, taking supplementation, psilocybin, MDMA, therapy, working through your traumas as now being invoked increasingly So we're moving away from centralized authority and kind of mainstream medical propaganda to individuals taking their health in their own hands and exploring their own traumas and their own issues without just medicating themselves with a pill or trusting advice that's proving to be more and more dangerous and misinformed.
And Rav Arora, I think you have precisely described the nature of the problem but also the nature of the solution.
Our individual awakening is a threat to ongoing centralised power and your work is so far extraordinarily effective and Unfolding, exploring, and explaining exactly how that pans out.
Rav, I'm so grateful to you for coming on the show.
You can follow Rav on illusionofconsensus.com.
You can find more of Rav's reporting and his work with Jay Bhattacharya, another guest of the show, a fantastic And reliable medic by going to Substack and looking at Illusion of Consensus if you want to support Rav's great reporting as we do.
Rav, thank you very much for that story.
Thank you for the other work you've done.
And I'd love to have another conversation where we get more into this stuff, the kind of things that you've been touching upon towards the end of our conversation.
I'd like to do a deeper exploration into some of that stuff in the coming weeks.
Would you be available for that?
Absolutely.
Yes, thanks for the mention.
Substack, if people can support us, that's where we have, if you can subscribe for free if you want, but if you want to support us, people, individuals can become paid subscribers.
That really helps us out.
That's the way independent journalism is done.
So you can check that out, Illusion of Consensus.
And Russell, thank you again for the platform.
I really appreciate what you've been doing the last couple of years.
A big, big fan of yours.
And yes, I would absolutely love to go deeper into some of these topics.
We have not yet talked about any of the mental health crises that I've gotten myself out of over the last couple of years.
And some of your early videos about heartbreak, about depression and anxiety actually were quite helpful a couple of years ago.
And now most people actually don't know, but I'm in university.
I'm basically majoring in Eastern mysticism and Buddhism, Hinduism, psychedelics.
The other world that I occupy and that we haven't actually talked about.
So, I look forward to another conversation where we get into matters more contemplative and mystical, because I think you and I align on a lot of those things.
I'm sure we do.
Thank you, Rav, so much.
You can find the links to Rav's work in the description right now.
