#1964 - Rick Doblin
2023-03-31 02:49:21
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Hello Rick. good to see you again my friend. How are you?
Yeah, I'm doing great. It was so nice to be with you a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, it was fun to have you at the club, you were there like one of the first days.
Yeah, I think I saw the first event in the small room.
Yes, did you see Dave Chappelle?
I did.
Yeah, that was the first one. We had Dave there, he wanted to do that room, We opened it specifically for him. That was the first time we did a show there. Very exciting.
Yeah, I really liked having the opportunity to talk to him a little bit afterwards and to listen to him. It was hilarious.
Yeah, he's a big fan of what you guys are doing, as is everybody. I think what you guys are doing at Maps is one of the most important things for society and culture, and just consciousness in general. That's happening today and I'm very, very happy that you're doing that.
Thank you, yeah, yeah, I'm pretty, extremely lucky. That 51 years ago, when I was 18, in 1972 and I decided to focus my life on psychedelics, that now I'm 69, all these years later, and it still makes sense.
Well, back then, it must have been a big risk. Because in the 1970s, when you focused your life on psychedelics, that was like, right after that whole sweeping schedule, 1 Psychedelics Act was passed, right?
Yeah, that was in 1970.
Yeah, things look grim.
Didn't look good.
Yeah, well, I was a draft resistor. I thought that I would serve my country by going to jail, which is kind of a funny way to say it. But I had felt that I'm not a conscientious objector. In order to do that, you have to be a pacifist, and so I'm not a pacifist.
I think there are some times you need to fight and defend yourselves.
So the only options for me, as I studied how to respond to Vietnam, was to. I didn't want to pretend I had bone spurs or run away to Canada or anything like that. And I studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance and decided that the thing that I would do would be to not register for the draft. And I was paying taxes, I had a Social security number, I had a driver's license.
I was in high school, I figured the government knows who I am and knows where I am and knows my age. And so I assumed that I would go to jail and that that would be a way to drain the system of energy and to register my protest that way, Martin Luther King actually said a great thing, he said. The person that thinks the law is unjust and violates it, and is willing to suffer the consequences as an example to others about the unjust nature of the law, actually has the highest respect for the law.
He was trying to reframe civil disobedience as patriotism, and it made sense to me. And so when I talked to my parents about it, they were like, Well, OK, you know, we don't think you should go to Vietnam either, We don't think it's in America's best interest. But you're never going to be a doctor or lawyer. My dad was a doctor because you'll be a felon.
And I'm like, that's a price I'll have to pay. What do I do with my life? I can't have a normal job in a way. So then when I stumbled on psychedelics, I was like, great, I could be an underground psychedelic therapist that doesn't need a license.
Whatever happened, did you wind up getting in trouble?
No, it's astonishing, I think. A lot of times we overestimate the efficiency of the government.
And so nothing happened at all. I mean, I turned 18, later, was the lottery, I did have a higher lottery number, but nothing ever happened.
And I just was shocked by that. And later what happened was that Jimmy Carter. On his first day in office, he pardoned all the draft resistors. And that made me sort of move from my identification as a counterculture drug using criminal to somebody who wasn't quite a criminal in that same way.
What year was that?
Well, as soon as he got inaugurated, 77, when he did that first day in office. And I later read, there was about 60,000 people that never registered for the draft. But enough people were going in that they were able to find enough bodies and people to send to Vietnam.
Yes, one of the rare military operations in history that's universally regarded as a terrible thing.
Yes.
I mean, nobody today defends the Vietnam war. There's still some people that think it was a good idea that we got Saddam Hussein out of power. Despite all the horrible collateral damage. And the million people that are innocent that wound up dying in Iraq because that invasion, but nobody thinks Vietnam was good.
Right, it was starting to be this imperial overreach.
Yeah.
And we've had a fair amount of that.
Based on a false flag.
Yeah, yeah.
Which is very scary. It's very scary that that was just, you know, 1960s. It just happened.
Yeah, well. One of the people also quite interested and supportive of psychedelic therapy is Daniel Ellsberg, who was the person that released the Pentagon papers. But the false flag began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and so we're told that our ships were being attacked. And he was. I've gotten to spend some time talking to him.
And he said that he had just started the National Security administration at that time, was looking at some of these cables and realized it didn't make sense. But he thought somebody above him knew more than he did, and he didn't feel like he should say anything about it. And then all these years later, when he released the Pentagon papers and people think of him as a hero. Because he was willing to go to jail for decades and decades, potentially the rest of his life, which is what the government was trying to do for him, went all the way up to the Supreme Court and he won the case.
The New York Times also won the case. But he thinks of himself not just as a hero, but that he should have had more courage early on. And if he would have done something early on, maybe more people would have realized that this wasn't the way the government was saying it was. But I do think that there is patriotism in civil disobedience.
Yeah, certainly, especially when you feel it's morally wrong to participate in whatever this thing that you're being obligated to do.
Yeah, and I think it's really remarkable for me now that because I was not a pacifist and I was not a conscientious objector. I always felt that the freedom that I had was defended by our military in World War II. If we had lost, and I'm Jewish, I probably would have been killed along with others. So I always felt that the military was essential and it was protecting my freedom. And so now, all these years later, to have so much work to be done with veterans, and in the veterans administrations, and with special operators and all sorts of people with PTSD. It feels right, in a way, that a draft resistor should form an alliance with suffering veterans.
Yeah, I think that's one of the best aspects, at least publicly, of what you guys are doing is that you are working with all these soldiers. And so you've got a lot of support from people that traditionally wouldn't be invested in psychedelics, which is really kind of opened up. It used to be that a lot of people on the right thought of psychedelics as a way to waste your life. And you're going to be a hippie and a loser. But because of the benefits that it's been showing to people with PTSD and people coming back from all these various foreign conflicts, then you're getting now.
You're getting support from veterans, you're getting support from the people on the right and people that know veterans. That have had incredible experiences with psychedelics, where it's completely changed their life and sort of reset their mind.
Yeah, just several days ago I was in Nashville with Sean Ryan doing his podcast, and he is a former Navy Seal and CIA contractor. And he was just talking about how much he had benefited from his experience with ibogaine in Mexico and how it's changed his views about things. And we've heard this a lot. But he still said that if he were to be attacked, if America was to be attacked, he would defend it. It doesn't turn people again into Pacifists, necessarily in that same way.
And there's something noble and honorable about willing to serve your country and be willing to give your life to protect others.
I think it's a problem in some cases when the political leadership makes terrible choices and you've enlisted to do that. But I think the other part. Last week, I was in Dallas and we had an event that Governor Rick Perry attended. And Marcus Capone and Jeff George, who's the chair of the board of directors of our Maps Public Benefit Corp. And then also Amy Emerson, who's the CEO of that. And we have Governor Perry's support because he's heard from so many veterans.
He's also talked about Marcus Luttrell, who lived with him at the Statehouse when he was very emotionally damaged from his time in the military. And then he saw Marcus get a lot better when he went down to Mexico and got Ibogaine. And so Governor Perry. There's people that I have never thought that I would find common ground with. And one of the ones that I thought was the most far that I couldn't imagine. Building a bridge, I mean, one of our themes is be the bridge. But it was with Ted Nugent.
And I thought, You know, how would I build a bridge with Ted Nugent? Well, Rocco Moon, his son, connected us, and Rocco is interested in being a psychedelic therapist, and he's been doing a lot of work educating his dad. And we had a really remarkable conversation. And Ted actually said that he could be extremely effective for helping us because he's known as being so anti-drug.
Yeah.
And yet he can see, even he can see that in a therapeutic setting for veterans, that's what he cares about the most. But others that these things can be helpful. So this idea of building bridges there was one point in time. One of the most important lessons I learned was actually from a Supreme Court justice, where I was sitting next to him at Passover Seder. And this is Stephen Breyer. And I had accepted a donation from Rebecca Mercer, now Rebecca Mercer, her father and she. They own Cambridge Analytica.
They own Breitbart, you know, she's very much a supporter of Republican causes, and she gave us a million dollars and said that it was restricted to use in veterans. And I thought, this is really a good thing to do to take this. But I've gotten more criticism from taking that donation from Rebecca Mercer than most anything I've done in the entire 37 years of Maps.
And so at this passover seder, my wife and I got there late. Our friends were somewhere else. There was this old couple sitting next to us and I didn't know who they were. And I thought, Oh, this will be boring, you know?
And so I talked to this guy and I said, Well, everybody else was pretty much scientists, and I said, Are you a scientist? He said, No, I'm a judge. And then his wife started talking about how she had written a book about grieving parents who have illnesses, that their kids have fatal illnesses and how to handle grief. And so we had this incredible conversation about MDMA therapy and about how it can be helpful for grief and all.
And then, after hours, Passover Seder stick, hours and hours, I finally realized that there was something more going on. And I thought, this guy is not just a judge, I think he's Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court judge, and I said, Are you Stephen Breyer? and he said, Yes.
And I said, Well, I have an ethical question to ask you, you know, I have taken this resources from Rebecca Mercer, and she's very much supporting Trump and supporting Bannon and others. And I said, What do you think about that choice? Ethically? Was that a wise idea? And he said that the essence of democracy is trying to find common ground with people with whom you may disagree on everything else.
And he said, in our hyper-partisan, polarized world, there's not nearly enough of that. And so he supported that. And so I felt that that was like the judgment of the Supreme Court. It was okay what I did.
At least one.
At least one.
But I like that concept is that we need to find common ground. I mean, I thought that was one of the things that Dave Chappelle was saying. I thought it was very interesting.
Dave He very much is in tune with that and speaks about that all the time. It's very important to him. Because it's just too easy to just dig in your heels and embrace the conflict and push away any ideas that are connected to the other side. If you can get someone who's a Republican, who's a Trump supporter to engage in. Psychedelics, understand the benefits of psychedelics. For whether it's for soldiers, or whether it's for grieving parents or anyone. If that can make it into their life, and perhaps they can have an experience, I think a psychedelic experience is one of the greatest ways that someone can relax. Any ideological, dogmatic ideas that they might have that restrict them from taking in some of the opinions of the left.
Yeah, would you feel comfortable sharing some of your own experiences?
Well, I've never been a right wing person, I'm very left wing for the most part. Other than support for the Second Amendment and some other things, and just a general distrust of government.
I, you know, I was raised by hippies, you know, I lived in San Francisco during the Vietnam war when I was a little kid. I mean, we were, you know, my stepdad is long or had long hair when I was a kid, so I was, you know? But then I also grew up and I was a fighter, so I was always around these. Like hard nosed, like, very tough, you know, no nonsense, people.
And a lot of them were very right wing, and you know, I knew a lot of cops from martial arts. And you know, people have these ideas about what you know. What drugs are, and that blanket term, which I really don't like, the term drugs and drug users, what drug users are. And one of, you know, one of the things that I'm kind of proud of is that. If anybody wants to say that people who enjoy psychedelics, or people that enjoy marijuana are lazy and they don't contribute, or they don't. You know, like, what about me? like, what about me?
Like, I work hard and I work a lot, and I work out a lot. And I have a lot of friends that are very much like me. And they're very open minded people that are, they embrace all cultures and ideas and all kinds of different things. But they're also, you know, these hard nosed, determined, very disciplined people. That you would sort of automatically, maybe callously, lump in with. People who are cruel or unkind, or not embracing, you know, other ideas.
And I just think that these ideas that we have of people. It's so convenient to push people into one category or another. And it's also very convenient to embrace one category and adopt their sort of predetermined pattern of ideas.
Yeah, but would you be comfortable sharing some of your own psychedelic experiences?
Sure, sure, I mean, the DMT experiences are by far the most profound, and those are the ones that have really made me. Every time I've done it, it's just completely made me rethink how I interface with people, what what life is, and what that experience.
What is that, is that a well of souls you're entering into? Is that another dimension, is it some sort of parallel dimension of disembodied consciousness that you seem to be engaging with? Life forms, with things that know you, that can see your thoughts and see resistance and see bullshit in you. I mean, it's every time I've done it, it's sort of just like, in one way or another. Just removed one layer of the onion.
You know, one layer of bullshit that keeps you from just embracing the great mystery of this existence, whatever it is.
Yeah, I think we're built on these layers and layers of billions of dollars, billions of dollars, billions of years of evolution and sort of. From the single cellular organisms. It's all in a still. And that there are prefrontal cortex. Our brain has kind of helped us focus on what we need as humans in our transition from birth to death. But that when you say, well, we talk about the default mode network, which is sort of the part of the brain that's identified as the sense of self. And the classic psychedelics weaken that part. And then more information floods.
So I think we can get back through all of the intercellular knowledge that is stored in our bodies and connect with this deeper unit of sense. It's amazing.
Yeah, it's also they help so much to abandon preconceived notions. And just sort of we don't realize how much of the way we sort of see ourselves and see the world is. Is a kind of a convenient set of armor that we put on to try to protect us from uncomfortable thoughts and protect us from. You know, just just mystery, the mystery of. But there is a lot of mystery in life, it's mostly mystery, you know, and I think psychedelics are the greatest mystery and there's something about them. That's just the idea that it exists, that you can smoke a thing and then 15 seconds later be transported into an impossible realm. And that that exists. And no one's discussing it.
Every day on the news, they're talking about a million different things that seem so trivial once you've had a DMT experience.
Yeah, you're reminding me of my five MEO DMT experience that I had. And it felt like I went sort of back to the moment of creation. Yeah, and but that I realized that so much of our life is patterns.
Like, you're saying that, that we have these habits and we have these patterns, and we take them as fixed, but they're not actually fixed. We have put them into motion. And this five Meo. By bringing me back to this moment of creation, it helped me realize that the new can enter at any moment, that there's a way. And so I've actually felt that that experience has, which I had one time back in 1985, has been a big part of our success. To get to the place that we're at now with psychedelic research, with MDMA therapy. Because it helped me to realize that whenever I felt blocked or stuck, that I could try to find something new to enter into the picture.
That there's this perpetual ability to connect with creation, to connect with the new. And so much of our life is on cruise control, is on these patterns.
It's easier to do it that way.
It is, and there's advantages to that, so we don't have to rethink things all the time, but it also narrows our vision.
Yeah, it very much so does. It's just so easy to fall into patterns. You fall into patterns of the group that you hang out with, you fall into patterns of accents and dress. And the way people behave and think about things and the concepts that they adopt. And when you have a real breakthrough psychedelic experience, it just makes all that seem so trivial.
My DMT experience, my first five MEO experience, I've done both multiple times, but the first five MEO experience, I thought I fucked up. I thought it's over. Because there was a moment when you're entering into whatever that great white field of geometry is, you know where where you go. Oh my God, am I dying like it? It feels like there's no way I'm coming back from this, like, like I've gone so far.
And then that fear, that fear subsided once the experience just fully kicked in, like the fear was at the big like, the doorway to the experience. Like, Oh, no, what have I done? And then you go into that with. The weirdest thing about Five MEO, too, is the lack of visuals. It's just this great white pattern, this thing where you don't have any memory, you don't have any. You're, you're barely a conscious entity, and you're experiencing what seems to be like the source code of the universe. I mean, it's just a gap.
It's like I felt like I was shot through a rocket to the center of everything.
And yet there is an aspect of memory, and there is an aspect of us paying attention. There's still this observer in some ways.
Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty compromised, but there's something that you come back with. But it's also very difficult to hold on to, right?
It is, and that's this process of integration that's necessary. But also for the five MEO, it's so brief. So that's where the ibogaine experience can be 12 hours or more, or the MDMA experiences, we make them into eight hour sessions.
I haven't done ibogaine. I've heard really great things from people that have addiction problems, like people that are addicted to pills in particular. I've gone to Mexico and one of them was my friend Ed Clay, who went down to Mexico because of a pill problem he had. And then he wound up opening up an ibogaine center down there once he had been cured of it.
There is that phenomenon where people, once they get healed, they want to help others, and in particular in the military. You're trained to leave nobody behind. And many people have said that that once they've gotten help, now they want to bring all their brothers to have help as well. That there's something about this feeling that it can help not just them, but many other people. And I think the other part there's been about why Governor Perry is so interested. In a sense is that there's been now around 800 Navy seals and others that have gone down to Mexico for ibogaine. For both PTSD, depression, traumatic brain injury, addiction.
And he's heard just remarkable stories. But now that you mentioned that we're talking about ibogaine, I just would like to say a bit. We have a mutual friend, Aubrey Marcus, and I've been texting him this morning and it's a bit sad. His father died, and so he's sitting. Shiva, which is this Jewish tradition, where for a week after someone dies, people come over to the house and you just mourn for a week.
So I'll be there tomorrow morning. But his father, Michael Marcus, actually helped start ibogaine research, and so I'd like to explain that just a tiny bit. So Michael had studied a bit of holotropic breathwork with Stan Grof. Stanislav Grof is the world's leading LSD researcher.
He's almost 92 years old, but he worked at Johns Hopkins, he did LSD research in the Czech Republic. And when the Russians came in in 68 to crush their rebellion, he escaped and came to the U.S. But Michael got to know Stan and did work with him. Where, once psychedelics were criminalized, Stan realized that you can catalyze similar experiences through hyperventilation without a drug.
And that, I mean, it is like a drug, it changes the chemistry in your brain. And so I got to know Michael and at one point he was a stock trader and he felt like he was losing his edge. And this is probably, you know, 15 more years ago. And what he said was, he wondered, maybe a psychedelic experience could be helpful for him.
And I suggested Ibogaine and he went down to Mexico for an ibogaine experience and it helped him. And then he felt like he regained his confidence. And then he bet that there was going to be a massive stock crash, he shorted the market, and then there was a major crash.
And then he contacted me and he said this ibogaine really helped him and he would like to know how he might pay it back. And I said, Well, we've got this project we're trying to start for a long time. It's the first project where we're going to look at a clinic in Mexico and test. People do before and after. Just how are they doing? It'd be a long term follow up because ibogaine, for no good reason at all other than the drug war, is illegal in the United States.
And it's not a drug of abuse, it helps treat drug of abuse, but it is legal in Mexico and in Canada. And so just the day before, I'd gotten a matching grant offer of $10,000 for a $20,000 study. And I said, Michael, would you be willing to match this? and he said, Sure.
Yeah, I said, Great, now we're going to have this first ibogaine study. And then he said, What else do you have? and I was like, Well, okay. If you want to know more, I'd say the most difficult thing for us to fund, the most idealistic thing we're doing.
This was at the time was. We're trying to start research in Jordan, we have research in Israel, we have research in Canada, we have research, but we've no research in the Arab countries. And I thought, if we could do something in Jordan. And I had incredible connections in Jordan with the mayor of Amman, whose son-in-law actually had found LSD helpful for cluster headaches.
And anyway, I went to Michael. I said, the most idealistic thing, the most far reaching is at this point, would be to do this study in Amman. And he said, Well, how much does that cost? and I said, Well, it's about $85,000, something like that, $90,000. And he said, All right, I'll do that too.
And so that started the first project with ibogaine, and then we eventually did another long-term follow-up in New Zealand. And now there are people now where. There's a project in Spain with a group called Iseers. And it's to take increasing amounts of ibogaine to help people withdraw from methadone. There's projects in Brazil with ibogaine, there's a company, ATai, that's one of the for-profit psychedelic companies that's working with Deborah Mass from Demorax.
They've merged and they're interested in ibogaine, so ibogaine is one of the classic examples of disastrous drug policy. It turns out that there were LSD dealers in the 60s who got busted and they happened to have ibogaine, and so the government made ibogaine illegal. But these LSD dealers. Howard Lotsoff was also experimenting with opiates.
And when they tried ibogaine, they felt no desire for opiates, and they went through the withdrawal without any pain. It's just remarkable what opiates do for you when you go through withdrawal. It's terrible, but if you have ibogaine, you can go through it in a couple of days. And you have a lot of psychological experiences about why you might want to run away from your problems into opiates.
Isn't there something that happens with ibogaine, where it literally rewires?
And sometimes they get encoded in harmful ways, like with trauma. With PTSD, the memories are so painful that they never really get fully processed, they never really get put into long-term storage. There's a lot of changes in your brain when you have PTSD, but that this idea that you can then rewire your brain once you experience them.
And so there's researchers at Gould, Dolan is at Johns Hopkins. She's done studies in mice with MDMA and showed that it releases oxytocin, which is the hormone that we have for love and connection. Nursing mothers. But it also promotes this new neural growth. So ibogaine does that, LSD does that.
Psilocybin does that, and what Gould found, which is really interesting, is that the longer you're in the psychedelic state, the longer afterwards. This period of neuroplasticity lasts, where you can do more integration work, where you have this enhanced ability to reroute patterns in your brain. And so Ibogaine opens up this period of neuroplasticity for several weeks after, because the experience can last for more than a day or two.
Is there any headway that's being made on bringing ibogaine to the United States?
Because when you think about the opiate crisis that we have here, that seems like one of the very best sort of remedies for that.
And this is where, if you were to look back over the last 50 years. I doubt that there's more than five cases that the government has about anybody abusing ibogaine, if at all, what's a 24-hour drug? I've never done it, but it knocks you down, I would highly recommend it.
Yeah.
I'd say one of the most important experiences of my whole life was Ibogaine. Yeah, yeah, what happened? Well, so there's a fellow named Leo Zeff, who is the we called him the secret Chief.
So he was the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement.
And he worked closely with Sasha Shulgin, and Sasha Shulgin was the chemist that invented hundreds of psychedelics. He worked for Dow in the 60s, and he invented a biodegradable insecticide. And they rewarded him with his own lab to do whatever he wanted, and so Sasha tried to do more psychedelics. And they're like, Well, maybe these are not going to lead to products.
So he realized he had to leave, and he set up a lab at home and he taught. But they would have this process of inventing new drugs, new psychedelic drugs, looking for new therapy drugs, and they would. Then Sasha would take it into himself, and then, if he thought it was okay, he would give it to his wife, Ann.
They're now both. And they would do these together, and then they had a group of 12 people that would meet like once a month and they would try these new drugs. Sasha, by the way, did go to the Bohemian Grove, where he was a musician there, and so he was able to go. But he would test new drugs with people at Bohemian Grove.
Oh my God. So like presidents and bankers.
Different kinds of people like that, yes, they would try these new things. They'd go for walks in the woods. Because you go to Bohemian Grove for a week or two, and so it's not like you're there for a day or so. But so this small group of 12 people decided that MDMA had incredible potential.
This is in the middle 70s and they gave this to Leo Zeff, and Leo said, Wow. He was about to retire. He was a clinical Psych P.h.D. and he was getting up there in years, and he was about to retire. He trained a lot of people with LSD and other things.
And so he did not retire in order to bring forth MDMA.
And so he really pioneered the use of therapeutic use of MDMA, and this is now MDMA being a therapy drug. Before it became ecstasy as a party drug. And that a lot happened in Dallas at the Star Club, which is, you know, a public place where, you know, incredible stories start. There's going to be a documentary by Michael Caine is working on a documentary about the Star Club.
But that attracted Lloyd Benson, the senator from Texas. He heard about this and then he complained to the DEA, and then the DEA moved to criminalize. We knew that this public use of MDMA was going to eventually result in DEA crackdown. This is Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and all of that. And so we had a jumpstart in a sense that the DEA didn't know we were there.
They only knew the party drug, they didn't know the therapy part, but we knew that the DEA was there and they were coming after us. So I started a nonprofit before Maps in 84, and that was to prepare and gather this community together in order to defend MDMA once the DEA moved.
And so Leo Zeff came to me and he said, You're starting to be an advocate and I'd like to offer you an IBN experience. Because we need to own our own shadow, own our own weaknesses, own our own things that we're not comfortable with. And also, you know, have spiritual connections and things like that. And he said, If I can help you, this might help in your political work, because then you'll see that we're mixtures of good and bad.
Everybody is. And that you won't demonize the DEA, and that you may be able to find a way to, you know, build a bridge. And so he offered me this IBN experience and I said, Great, I would love to do this.
And so we had this whole long day to set aside to do this. And Ibn, in plant form, takes a while to take an effect.
So Leo said, I'd like to give you a bunch of LSD at the same time. It was 350 micrograms of LSD, which is a pretty hefty dose. The first LSD experience that we know of Albert Hoffman, April 19, 1943. Was an amount that he thought would have no real effect because it would be so small 250 micrograms. Which is a major existential challenge.
So 350 micrograms is pretty good as well. And so I actually got administered IBN a bunch of it in plant form. And then also the LSD at the same time, and I could tell the differences between the drugs, I could tell. Coming up on the LSD. And moving towards this kind of ego dissolution and opening up, and different my emotions. And how am I going to do this political work?
And who am I? And, you know, am I qualified? And all of this? And I sort of had a lot of experience with LSD, I'd never done IBN before.
And I was able to open up pretty well for the LSD. But then this sort of low, guttural rumble started from the ibogaine. The LSD peaks around three hours or so, and I could feel this ibogaine. Building and building and building LSD is also very much in your head, very ethereal. More so than psilocybin mushrooms, which are more embodied.
And so this ibogaine started coming up, this experience and I started feeling like if I could just let go, if I could just fully have this experience. And if I didn't have these fears and anxieties, then I would be a better advocate. And I needed to, and so much was at stake. But then I felt I couldn't let go because I was too scared.
And then I would be hating myself, so I felt that there was this cycle of, oh, I'm not as good as I should be. I wish I could let go, I do have these emotions of fear, and then I would feel that and get nauseous.
And then I would vomit and then I would feel relief for like a minute or so, and then the swirl would begin. And each of them is like 15 or 20 minute cycles and stuff, and then I would get to this peak.
And then I would vomit again and over, and over, and over.
And for a Jewish person, the imagery that I had was that I was being crucified on the cross of self-perfectionism. That I didn't want to be human in a way, I wanted to be perfect, I wanted to be more than I was.
And that this idea that I was not perfect, that, you know, it just was this connection between self-criticism and self-hatred. And I could see that, and that just made me sick and I wished I could do more, but I couldn't get out of it.
And I had like a 12-hour cycle of that, over and over and over, I mean, you know, it was like dry heaving, I had nothing left to throw up anymore. And I just so saw this connection between wanting to be perfect, not wanting to be human being, super self-critical, leaning to self-hatred, and shutting myself down. And so at the end of that day, I was so exhausted.
I called it transcendence through exhaustion. You know, I just gave up. I just beat myself up so much. I just gave up and I had the most blissful night.
It was so beautiful, it was like no struggle, completely open everything. And I realized that what I needed to do was keep the self-criticism, because that is the drive for quality. You need access to the self-critical part of your mind, but if it's connected to self-hatred, you don't listen as much because then you're a bad person.
So I sort of severed the connection between self-criticism and self-hatred. I accepted myself as a flawed human being that had a lot of room to grow and that I made friends. In a way, I made an ally out of the self-critical part of my brain. And it, I think, has helped me to learn and grow, because we're doing things that have never done before.
We're doing things I've never done before, nobody's never done before, bringing this through the FD.A. psychedelic psychotherapy, and we're constantly making mistakes. I like to say that I'm just a fuck-up who just keeps on trying.
And so this and then. But I told myself this story. This was the most beautiful night all night. I was just super alert, didn't sleep at all and just saw the stars. But I told myself a story. And so much is governed by stories, as you know.
But the story was that I was telling myself is that I had not earned this, I hadn't had a breakthrough. I just exhausted myself. So I said, when the sun comes up, I'll be back stuck in this nauseous space. I don't know why I told myself that story, but I did.
And the sun comes up. And then I was like, stuck and nauseous again, and I couldn't move for a day. I actually had to sit there or lie there, really in a field position. A friend was supposed to come pick me up, I said, I can't move.
Do you think you brought that on yourself?
In a way, I do.
I think the stories we tell ourselves, I mean, that's sort of PTSD or depression, the story, and that's what we're saying about. You get in these grooves. And that's where the psychedelics can shake things up. And the neuroplasticity is what really permits you to see it in a different way. So I spent the whole next day just curled in a puddle, basically.
Occasionally, they'd bring me a banana to eat or something like that. And then, by the third day, finally, I was able to stand up without being nauseous. And a friend came and picked me up and ended up driving me away. And as we were driving, I'd only been there once. This was at a house I'd never been to before.
And we were going back to familiar ground in the same way. And I had this sense in my mind that I knew what was around the corner. And I would say, Oh, I think we're going to see this, and a couple times we did.
And so what I think happened is that I was taking it in peripherally.
But I wasn't paying attention to it when I was going there, it wasn't like I was telepathic in a way or anything like that. It was just that all these experiences had sort of been there, but hadn't registered. And I think I cleared out a lot of space in my mind from this constant self-criticism, so I had more openness in space and I could remember things.
It was the fourth day that I could finally drive. But I felt that ever since then, I've had this increasing ability to be self-critical without it being so connected to self-hatred and so painful. And I really feel that that I began to experience, although I've not done it since.
Because it was pretty heavy and exhausting and painful.
And I've had other experiences since, but that, I think, was one of the pivotal ones in my mind. And so here we have an opioid epidemic. Over 100,000 people died last year with overdoses, connected sometimes with fentanyl and others. And a tool that can be tremendously helpful is something that is not being studied at all in the United States. And we're forcing people to go to other countries.
So Maps is developing what's called an investigator brochure. And what that means is that any time a pharmaceutical company wants to develop a drug through the FDA. You have to summarize the world's literature in the peer-reviewed journals, and you look at it from a safety and efficacy perspective. And so we prepare this brochure for the F.DA, and it will bring us to what is the latest science. It will include the study that ICERS is doing in Spain with ibogaine for helping people withdraw from methadone, or studies in Mexico also for opiate addiction. And then we will propose a new study.
Ibogaine is in some ways, one of the most dangerous of the psychedelics. In that there are a small group of people that can have problems with the heart, and so some people have died from taking ibogaine. But if you do it under medical supervision, particularly for people who are in weaker physical states because of drug addiction, that nobody needs to die. And you can reverse it if something does happen. So we're probably going to propose. And we're working with Joe Barsuglia and Martin Polanco, who have developed a company to try to make ibogaine into a medicine. They ran a lot of the clinics also in Mexico.
So a medicine like a pharmaceutical medicine that will be available for prescription.
Yes, well, there's two tracks again, and that's one track, but the other track is from a policy point of view. So Maps, our nonprofit, we have a policy and advocacy team. So if ever there was a drug that we could make a strong case, that should be removed from Schedule 1..
Schedule 1 is a drug high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use. It's the worst drugs. According to our scheduling system, if we make MDMA into a medicine, what's going to happen is that we'll have what's called bifurcated scheduling. And that means is that our particular product in this particular capsule. For PTSD would move out of Schedule 1, potentially schedule 3 or Schedule 4, but MDMA itself would still stay in schedule 1. So getting MDMA out of Schedule 1 so that it's, hopefully, you know, more accessible, not just for medicine, is part of our goal as well. Drug policy reform, post-prohibition world.
But Ibogaine, there's no reason for it to be in Schedule 1 or Schedule 2.
Schedule 2 is drugs that have a high potential for abuse but also have a medical use. So I think we need to have a two-pronged strategy with ibogaine. One is to try to work through the F.DA to make it into a medicine, but other is to try to make the case that it never should have been criminalized in the first place. And it's not a drug of abuse.
And at a time where we have so many people dying from opiate overdoses and so many other people suffering, even if they're not dying from this. That this is something that a logical, rational country would make this available, and we should have clinics right here in Austin and all over the country because we have a massive problem. And yet it's this remnant of the drug war, which, and again, I would say, Nixon, well, John Ehrlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor, came out in the late 70s. And he said that the Nixon White House had two main enemies, those were the Blacks for civil rights and the Hippies, the anti-war. And what Ehrlichman said is, we realized that if we could criminalize the drugs that they did, we could bust them up, we could arrest their leaders, we could bust up their meetings.
And then Ehrlichman said, Did we know we were exaggerating the risks of those drugs? Of course, we did so. I think we could make a good, scientific and rational case now that ibogaine never should have been criminalized. And it should be legally available. But by trained therapists in proper circumstances, so that the safety is fine. But I think what has happened and what we've seen with medical marijuana leading to marijuana legalization, changing people's attitudes. We see that. A lot of the psychedelic research with MDMA and Psilocybin has led to Oregon decriminalizing drugs and making the Oregon Psilocybin initiative. With a sort of state legal program that they're trying to implement with local guides, Colorado.
In November, the last election legalized natural plant medicines.
So I think with ibogaine we will see a similar kind of a thing. That there will be a lot of hopefully research over the next couple of years. And that will change people's attitudes. And then maybe we can remove ibogaine from schedule 1.
And then the bigger question is, you're saying, like, you know, nobody really looks back and thinks Vietnam was a good idea.
I'm going to pause you right here because I have to pee so bad. I'm really sorry. Hold on one second.
Vietnam.
Yeah, so nobody looks back and thinks Vietnam was a good idea. I think it's going to be the same way for the drug war. Yeah, for sure. And so I think we will think of it as a massive, tragic experiment that has been exported all over the world, caused enormous violence. And I think the idea of ibogaine removing, getting it removed from Schedule 1 could be really important.
But I have a little pee joke if I could tell you, okay, people will know that you just went out to pee and come back. But that's what brought this to mind. And so I actually was. I'm very lucky I had prostate cancer and I had it was caught early.
And so, but I had prostate surgery and now I'm fine. But it affects your ability to control your bladder for a while, right? So I had to wear and still do these sort of basic depends and pads. But there was a time shortly after the operation. This is very short. I was at Burning Man.
And we had, you know, we have a village at Burning Man, we do psychedelic harm reduction there. So a group of us were in this sort of cuddle puddle in this, you know, I was not doing MDMA at the time, but other people were. And it was like three in the morning and we'd been there for hours and we're just like 14 of us or something, just talking. And this one woman goes out to pee and comes back, and you know, other people do that. And then she turned to me and said, I don't understand, you just had this operation, you're supposed to, you know, pee more often.
And you know what's up with you? It's like, you're just sitting here the whole time. I said, I've been peeing the entire time.
So, you know, diapers at Burning Man is like a new fashion trend. Jesus Christ.
Have other people adopted this?
People were telling me about it.
Oh my god, you started a trend that seems like it would be uncomfortable. It would be better to just go pee somewhere.
It would be, but then you interrupt the conversation for all that stuff.
Like, I just did, maybe I should do a podcast with a diaper on.
Well, it wicks it away, it's not even that uncomfortable. I mean, anyway, I just had to do the pee joke.
No worries. So back to this idea that in the future, we're going to look at the drug war as being an overall negative thing and a mistake. For sure. I think the biggest thing is going to be this blanket definition of drugs. You know that there's especially things when you have things like psilocybin in schedule one where it can help people in so many ways.
And we're denying that help. And I think one of the keys, just like Rocco, was the key to get the Ted.
Yeah.
I think that someone's son having a bad experience with opiates. Someone in a great position of power, someone who's a politician or a governor, or someone like that. Who sees a big turnaround from someone using ibogaine or using psilocybin, like, that's going to aid us.
It's when people see members of their family or somebody that they care about, that's suffering, that gets better.
That's when change really happens. And I think it's sad that it takes that. That you can't sort of look at the world and think, you know, those might not be me or my friends, but something new should change.
Well, it's just not having an understanding of what it actually is, and it's because of that. Term drugs, the term drugs is almost always associated with someone being foolish, wasting their life, doing something dumb.
And the word hallucinogen, too.
Yeah, I mean, it's a delusion, it's fake, it's not real. It's like pink elephants when you're on alcohol or something.
It's not real.
And so I think it's very pejorative, the language that we use about it. We try to talk about these things as medicines instead of drugs, and I think that the way in which we have drugs have become scapegoats. So, you know, they become the shadow, they become the source of all the problems.
And the fundamental mistake, I would say of the drug war has been to say that certain things themselves are good or bad. These are bad drugs and they have to be illegal. These are okay drugs, or these are good drugs. Of course, good drugs have included tobacco and alcohol, but we make the thing itself good or bad.
And what we miss is that it's about the relationship that we have with the thing and that it's not the substance, it's the relationship. And so by focusing on the thing, then we say, oh, we got to reduce the supply, we got to, you know, do all this kind of work to make it so difficult or expensive for people to get to? And then we have to threaten them that there's a man named Carl Hart who is on our board.
I know Dr. Carl Hart.
Yeah, he's fantastic, he's on our board of directors and he's a neuroscientist.
And he is, you know, in New York City, and he's a drug policy reformer, and one time we were talking about drugs.
And I said, You know, I think that the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal.
And he said he'd like to say that and that he believed that also. And what I mean by that is that. The dangerous drugs are ones which when people get into problems with them, we need to offer them help as soon as possible. And then we stigmatize them and drive them away. The more dangerous drugs also get mixed with other things, so like fentanyl mixed with opiates.
And that's where you have the overdoses. So people don't get pure drugs, they don't get support, they don't get help, they're not treated as humans.
They don't get really access to treatments. We just punish, punish, punish. So our goal is to make drug users, particularly these people, feel worse off. So that they're an example, so nobody will want to do it, but that's not a really good example.
People won't do that.
So I think this idea of the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal, I think makes a lot of sense. And we need to really offer treatment on demand and peer support. And when we think about drug policy too, you know, people don't understand as much. Lost opportunities.
You can see things that have gone wrong, but lost opportunities are like invisible. But when I think about MDMA having been criminalized in 1985 by the DEA on an emergency basis for bogus reasons, about neurotoxicity. But they used that as a rationale. Then the hearings that we had going on with the DEA Administrative Law judge, they said that it should stay as a medicine, and the DEA overruled them. And we sued them twice in the appeals courts and won, and on the third time, DEA lawyers figured out how to satisfy the courts to keep it illegal. And that's why, again, in 1986, I started maps to go through the FDA.
But that when I think of the number of suicides that have happened in both veteran communities and everywhere since 1985,.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands, I think of lives.
We should talk about this while we're being brought up. Because there's a common misconception about MDMA that has been proven to be false, and it is that it makes holes in your brain.
Well, yes, yeah, yeah, Oprah is a big person responsible for that, actually.
So there was it started on MTV and went to Oprah. This is around 2001. So what had happened was that there was a young woman who her mother worked at a drug abuse treatment center, and she had problems with cocaine. She had problems with marijuana.
She had problems with ecstasy, other things. And so they arranged. And this was for this MTV show. That this woman would go and do a brain scan, a spec scan, which is blood flow in the brain.
And then they would reveal the results to her live on TV.
And this was at this drug abuse treatment center that her mother worked at. And they revealed the results, and the results showed these holes in the brain.
And it was a graphically manipulated image.
So spec scans show blood flow through the brain, and there are certain areas that light up when you have more blood flow than others. And so they took an arbitrary cut off any place that had lower than a certain amount of blood flow they showed as a whole.
And it was just complete propaganda, it was to scare this young woman to supposedly do it, she'd done all these other drugs and ecstasy anyway. So short time after that, Oprah decides that she's going to do a show. And she contacts me and us. Because we are now advocates, and she knew about what we're doing and we're trying to start MDMA research. Her team says that they want to do two shows on ecstasy.
It's such a big thing they want to do, one on the risks and one on the benefits.
I'm like, great, sounds great.
And they said, Well, we're going to do the one on the risks first. And they brought this woman who had all these holes in the brain supposedly to be on the show.
If you had all the holes in the brain that they showed, you wouldn't be walking and talking.
You would be just big holes in her brain, so nobody seemed to put it together here. This woman, she seems fine, but this is her damaged brain.
And we told Oprah's team, Don't show this.
This is fake, this is not real. And they did it anyway, and they had one woman who was a 24-year-old woman that was a raver. But she had positive experiences about MDMA, so they said, OK, she would be the one that would sort of say something positive about MDMA.
And then Oprah said to her, Do you know what you might be doing to your brain? With all these holes in the brain? We'd like to offer you a brain scan, and if your brain scan looked like hers.
Would you? —I think it was Lynn Smith was her name that had the holes in the brain? —would you stop using if your brain looked like that?
And she said, Well, I'd be willing to do a brain scan.
But the very next day, she contacted Maps, she contacted us and said that should she do this brain scan? And I said, you definitely should do it, but do it with different people, don't do it with the people that they're—but definitely do this brain scan.
And then you'll be on the show again and you can show what the results are.
So she did the brain scan.
And then she wrote me back and she said, Well, no holes.
And they've canceled the next show, there's no show on the benefits, and they're not bringing me back and I'm like, God.
They tricked you.
They did.
And then years—.
Normal Hollywood producer.
It was just,—and yeah, no show on the benefits. But then, years later, over a decade later, when Oprah was just a short time from closing her show. But she had O magazine. So she decided she would do a story on—she would assign a senior editor to do a story on MDMA and the therapeutic use. And it was like Oprah doing atonement.
I said, Would you be willing, though, to do another show on your TV show? And bring this woman back who had all these holes in the brain? And let's see what she's doing now?
And she actually did show some signs of brain damage in that she was working for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
And she was as the exhibit of, Oh, MDMA is terrible.
So do you think they scared her with the holes in the brain? To the point where she thought that drugs were ruining her life? And she wanted to save other people?
I think there was that, yeah, and I think that she wanted to get back in the good graces with her mother. And then she gets supported and then she gets a job and this whole thing. And so Oprah said, No, no, she's not willing to do another show. But this article would go forward in O magazine, and the article was great. And the woman who was the reporter ended up going for an underground MDMA experience, which I helped arrange, and it was very successful. And that's how the article ends.
But it's great because it didn't make a big deal of, oh, this is illegal underground. It was just like, here's what happened to her, to MDMA. But it was in some ways, propaganda in the positive way. It was like, can a single pill save your life? Before? It's like, this is going to cause holes in your brain.
Now one pill is all you need, a magic pill, and then you're going to be better for everything. Ignores the whole point that it's about the therapy and the context and the relationship.
It seems like, unfortunately, because of those kind of television shows and because of up until podcasts and the internet. You had a limited sort of ability to fully express the pros and the cons and explain the nuance of what these experiences are about. And you're instead dealing with this sensationalist perspective, where they're just trying to highlight whatever the most wildest aspects of the experience, pro or con would be. So they can get a lot of people to pay attention to it. It becomes prostituted.
Yeah, yeah. And I think the long-form podcasts where you can have the whole story, you can get the whole story out unedited by people that are wanting to do it. But I will say, in terms of educating people about psychedelics, what we're doing is a lot of maps is about public education.
And so we're hosting the world's largest conference on psychedelics ever, and it's going to take place June 19th to the 23rd.
How many DEA agents do you think will be in the audience?
Well, I think some. We also have some police officers who are we have one. Sarko Gagarin is a full-time police officer in Winthrop, near Boston, but he's also a psychotherapist.
And he's been through our training program in order to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.
We just had an incredible, the first psychedelic conference in Iceland.
And Sarko came, and also did his police chief came.
And we met with the Minister of Justice in Iceland, the conference was phenomenal, the psychedelic conference in Iceland. And now the Minister of Justice is interested in having Iceland fund a study to give MDMA to prisoners to work with them to see about dealing with their traumas to reduce recidivism.
Also with victims of crime to help them deal with their PTs, and also with prison guards and police. So we have this opportunity in Iceland to potentially make it an example of a countrywide approach.
Our new big vision? And I'll get back to the Psychedelic Science Conference in just a second.
But our new big vision is a world of net trauma by 2070.
So this idea of every year we're adding to the burden of trauma that people are experiencing. And then at last, there are some people that get better, but there's many people that get stuck in PTSD and then there's multigenerational PTSD. There's what's called epigenetics, which is biological evolution, takes place over long periods of time, but what turns the genes on and off is epigenetics above the genes.
That can change from your own experience. And there's a woman, Rachel Yehuda, at the Bronx, Va. That has done studies with Holocaust survivors and their children. And has identified an epigenetic mechanism by which this is passed on from parent to child.
And it could be either from the father or the mother line, it's in either of our genetics.
So this idea that we are increasing the burden of trauma by. There's some estimates that by 2050, that if climate change continues as it does, that there will be about a billion climate refugees. From droughts and poor crops and lack of water and all of this.
So that it feels like the humanity is going to be burdened more by trauma.
We have incredible problems with mental health because of both the Covid and other things.
So that what we want to do is reduce the burden of trauma every year and get to net zero trauma.
And that's, and it will take multi-generations, and the end goal is mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity, and that's the hope for the future. And we will be talking about this at the Psychedelic Science Conference, so it's going to be at the Denver Convention Center.
We have the entire Denver Convention center, we already have. Yes, part of the breakthrough.
From 19 to 23.
Yeah, and it's we've got over 5,000 people coming, we hope there will be about 10,000. And we'd also like to say that we have a special discount code for people who are listening, so it's psychedelicscience.org.
And if you just put in Rogan20, it's a 20 discount, all right. And so we think, if people really want to get involved in this field in any way, to be a therapist, or to run clinics, or to manufacture drugs, or start new companies.
Or just how do you blend this with meditation? Anything?
There's going to be over 300 speakers. We have incredible opportunities for people to learn and grow and get involved.
We have this, the Denver Convention Center.
We have an enormous number of exhibits from probably 150 175 different exhibits, and Deepak Chopra will be there. I mentioned Aubrey Marcus, he's coming with Aaron Rodgers, the football player who's used ayahuasca, which is DMT and T-form. Michael Pollan is going to be there.
Paul Stamets is going to be there. Pretty much the research community from around the world doing psychedelics research and also drug policy reformers.
And Denver was the first city that made mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority.
So we're going to have experiential opportunities for people that will be federally legal.
I think Denver was also the first city that decriminalized marijuana.
Yeah, they have done –.
Because it was a long time ago when marijuana was not state legal.
Yeah, I think Ann Arbor might have been one of the, oh, really initially. Yeah, well, just because of the college there.
Oh.
Interesting, yeah, but Denver and Colorado is very progressive. The mayor is going to help us open the conference, we've got the support of the governor.
We're actually doing a project with the Denver Police because mushrooms are the lowest enforcement priority, and we want to educate police on what happens. When you encounter somebody with a difficult trip, you could make it worse for them, or you could sort of treat them in a certain way so that you calm them down. And they don't need to be tased or however. So we're trying to educate police on how to de-escalate people with difficult psychedelic experiences, so the conference is going to be the theme.
This is our fourth psychedelic science conference, that we call it, where we bring everybody together. The first was in is 2010 and we had about 400 people, something like that, but that was enormous for us, and that was in San Jose.
The second one was in 2013 and we had at this point about 1,000 people and that was in Oakland.
And then, in 2017, we had another one.
And that was over 2,000 people, and that now is still the world's largest conference. We had like 2,500 and now this one, we think is going to be way more. And the theme of it, why we've waited so many years between 2017 and now, is that we are now at the doorway to a new world.
And what I mean by that is that we are at an incredible moment in time. Where there have been probably two and a half or more billion dollars have gone into for-profit psychedelic companies.
They haven't done so great in the stock market, a bunch of them have gone broke.
What is the idea behind these companies? what are they trying to accomplish?
Well, some of them were trying to develop new drugs, a lot of them were trying to set up networks of clinics. We also have ketamine, which has now been esketamine. an isomer of ketamine has been approved for treatment of depression.
We ended up in November 29, 2016. We had what's called an end of phase two meeting with the FDA about our research with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So it took us 30 years, from the start of Maps 1986 to 2016, where we presented our data to the FDA.
And they said, Yes, you can go into phase three.
Phase three is the final stage of research, where you need to do safety and efficacy. And if you prove that the satisfaction of the F.DA, you get permission to market. So, some of the new for-profit companies, Compass Pathways is one. And Usona is a nonprofit. Are trying to develop psilocybin into a method of treatment with therapy Compass for treatment resistant depression, Usona for major depressive disorder. And so a bunch of these companies are trying to develop new drugs.
And I think some of them are thinking well, the classic psychedelics, like LSD, MDMA.
Psilocybin.
LSD, DMT, all these are in the public domain and so there's no patents on them. So people have tried to say, well, we'll patent the manufacturing process or we'll do something, but there's also use patents. But the use of psychedelics for therapy in different conditions is also in the public domain.
So a lot of these companies are going to try to develop new molecules that they can patent, so that's sort of a classic pharma strategy.
Sounds horrible.
Well, I think that.
The good thing is that it'll be legal, the bad thing is it'll be owned by pharmaceutical companies.
Well, I think it's true it will eventually, these new drugs, but....
No one should own them, that doesn't make any sense, anybody should get a patent. Now I understand that we're trying to undo 53 years of decriminalization, but I just think that that's a bad strategy. And you're getting in bed with some demons.
Well, there is that tendency, and then you see what pharma does to try to protect the patents.
It's just not.
We don't. It deserves to be legal.
Well, the classic ones that are off patent do I mean I am supportive of people patenting original ideas.
And so if somebody develops some new molecule?
Sure, and for us, it's going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to make MDMA into a medicine.
And so we've done that.
So we've done that in an incredible set of ways, and I think this is why. What I explained to you just a couple weeks ago and why you were so gracious to invite me back now is because I talked about this crossroads that we're at. And so Maps has raised about $145 million in grants and most of the donations in our history.
And we have gotten enormous value in people's donated time, expertise of all sorts, and it's hard to even put a dollar number on that, but it's been tremendous. And so we have used that to do this MDMA research. A couple years ago, with the rise of all these for-profit psychedelic companies, it became more difficult for us to raise donations. Because people are like, why should I donate now?
You know, I can just invest over here and you've got a story now. Your story is that it looks like you're moving into phase three.
Maybe you can get investors.
And so we didn't want to sell equity at the time. And so we do have, as I said, about $145 million in grants and donations and a lot of free donated time. But we also have $43 million in what's called a royalty share, so it is money from investors.
They're mission-aligned investors.
Ryan Zur organized it as the lead one called Vine Ventures, and they have about 3.8 of North American revenues from MDMA. Once we make it into a medicine for about 8 to 10 years afterwards. And if we don't give them a certain amount of money back, then it continues, but they don't have ownership.
And they don't control what we do, and we can end up, you know, prioritizing public benefit over profits. So we also have around $20 million in a loan that's potentially convertible into equity if we don't repay the loan. And we've got a couple years there, but we have reached this spot where we have. The nonprofit Maps, which has about 35 people, is the 100 owner of the Maps Public Benefit Corp. which is about 135 people. Something like that.
And so we have this situation.
We also tried to do something new with pharma and something new with capitalism, so that capitalism. When you have for-profit companies, you're supposed to maximize profits. And if minority shareholders don't like the fact that the management isn't maximizing profits, they can try to throw them out. And so that produces a prioritization of profits over people, profits over social benefit, and so capitalism has been modified in a way with the public benefit corporation.
So that's a new corporate structure, maybe 20 years old, but relatively new. And there's thousands, you know, not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, I don't think, but there's thousands of these public benefit corporations. And what you do is you can maximize public benefit over profit so that you cannot be sued by minority shareholders. To try to force out the executives. Because you're not maximizing profits, because your goal is public benefit over profit. So we want to create a new model for how pharma drugs can be distributed, so we have this remarkable moment where we have. The nonprofit is 100 owner of a for-profit but public benefit pharmaceutical company.
But we need to raise additional capital.
We are now at a place where we recently announced that our second phase three study was successful and was confirmatory. Our first phase three study was incredibly successful. And to give you a sense of how successful, and we published this in Nature Medicine. The F.D.A. looks at statistical significance, so there's efficacy and safety, so efficacy is determined by basically statistical significance.
And you have to have.
05, which means one in 20 chance that it's random, that it's not from what you think it was, that, your intervention, your experiment said. Yes, it's statistically significant.
That means it's one in 20 or lower chance that your finding is random.
And you have to have two of those.
And so if you have one in 20 and then you multiply them another one in 20, it's one in 400. Chance that these two independent studies have produced results that are random. And then the F.D.A. will approve it.
Our first study was one in 10,000 chance that it was random.
It was just incredible.
Now, how do you do that?
How do you get such great statistical significance? You get it because you have a big difference between the two groups, and you also have not that much variability. So what it means is the people that got MDMA, pretty much of them got major benefits, and the people that got the therapy without MDMA. So I should say the people that got therapy with MDMA did great. Not very much variability.
It doesn't work for everybody.
But we had 88 responders.
We had 67, no longer had a diagnosis of PTSD.
These are severe PTSD patients that had PTSD an average of 14 years, one-third over 20 years.
And then we had just another 21 had what's called clinically significant response.
And they still have PTSD, but over time they might get better. If they could have had a forced session, they might get better. And we had a great safety record. We had actually nobody in the MDMA therapy group tried to kill themselves, tried to hurt themselves. We enrolled people that have previously attempted suicide.
We did have one woman try to kill herself twice during the study, but she was in the placebo group, she got therapy without MDMA.
We had another woman.
It was so difficult for her to confront her trauma that she checked herself into a hospital to not self-harm. She also was in the placebo group.
So the results were phenomenal.
And Science The Journal Science, one of the most important journals in the world in science.
At the end of every year, they publish a list of what they think are the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year. And they chose our study in nature medicine as one of the world's top 10 breakthroughs of the year. It was phenomenal.
And we had special appreciation for what science was willing to do because you talked about beforehand, about holes in the brain. So, 20 years before, Science had published this article that they never should have published. And this was by researchers at Johns Hopkins, that had been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
And what they claimed is that MDMA could hurt dopamine.
This was a study in primates, and they said, Oh my god, MDMA can hurt dopamine and it could cause Parkinson's, and that this could be a real danger now. This was around 2002 2003..
And they had since 1985. It had all been about MDMA, supposedly hurting serotonin and causing holes in the brains from serotonin. And we had done studies in primates before with these same researchers, where none of the primates died from overdoses, there didn't seem to be any problems with dopamine.
But the narrative of the anti-drug people, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about serotonin neurotoxicity, was sort of diminishing. People weren't showing problems, and so what they were saying was, well. You're reducing your cognitive reserves and so you don't show problems now, but when you get older, you're going to show problems.
So, the time bomb theory?
Did they have evidence of this?
No.
And not only did they not have evidence, but a lot of older people took MDMA and they were fine.
So if they had had this decline of aging, age-related decline, they were all right.
It does drop your dopamine levels, right? or serotonin levels.
In the short term, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, it does, but it doesn't do this kind of damage to the brain in that way.
They recover within a day or so.
And there's mitigation techniques, like with 5-HTP.
We don't use those, but people do use those. why don't you use those? Because we don't think it's necessary. So what we first proposed in 1992 is when we got permission for the first study with MDMA, and people had been using 5-HTP after MDMA.
But there is a benefit to using 5-HTP it boosts your serotonin levels quicker, correct?
Yes, yes.
It can be helpful.
But what we do in a therapy context, so the F.DA, we said, should we try administering with 5-HTP or something like that? They said, don't do that. Let's do everything under observation and see what the problems are, and if you see problems, then we should figure out how to mitigate the problems. So the key thing that we do is to say to people that when you take MDMA, it's a two-day experience.
It's not a one-day experience, and the second day is for rest and for reflection. And they have no obligations, no appointments, nothing that you need to do, just take the second day and rest.
And that's where people would take 5-HTP if they wanted to. But we don't see this dip in mood any more in the MDMA group than in the group that gets therapy without it. So people talk about suicide Tuesdays or this depression after you've used up serotonin, but I think the rest part is part of the therapeutic process. So we have never felt the need to recommend that people do 5-HTP.
I don't think it's a bad idea to do, I mean, if people wanted to do it. It can be helpful, but we just feel that the rest is just as helpful and it's more therapeutic.
But they're not mutually exclusive.
No, we could do both. Yeah, for sure, for sure, but we don't. In the research, we haven't found the need. So this idea of serotonergic neurotoxicity and holes in your brain and time bomb theories just wasn't working anymore.
It wasn't persuading people, it wasn't persuading the FDA. So Nida funded this study, Una McCann and George Riccardi, and it was in primates.
And as it turned out, a bunch of the primates died of overdoses. And they published a paper in science that said that MDMA could cause Parkinson's.
It could hurt dopamine.
And the Editor of Science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The president of that was Alan Leshner. He used to be the head of Nida and he fanned the fears of MDMA. And he did that in Congress. And it was great because then he got more money for Nida. Got over a billion dollars a year.
So he published a press release about this article and it said that taking MDMA was like playing Russian roulette with your brain. So it didn't seem right this article. We knew that we'd given MDMA to primates for research, and nobody died of overdoses. None of them did so. We wrote a letter to the editor and we questioned it.
They didn't give it the way people take it, which is orally as well. How did they give it? They gave it subcutaneously, so they injected it subcutaneously.
And so we ended up forcing them in their minds to try to replicate their results.
Can I pause you for a second? How did these primates die of overdoses?
They would just have heart attacks or something like that.
Is that common with humans?
No, no, so here's how this continues also.
You get more neurotoxicity in crowds, for some reason, when animals or people are together than when they're alone.
And when the temperature is higher, there's more neurotoxicity. So they tried giving more MDMA to primates with higher temperatures, more crowded in the cages, and they couldn't replicate their results. But they kept defending it in public.
And finally, a year later, they said that, and this was super embarrassing. They had to retract the study because they were puzzled why they couldn't replicate the results.
And so they took some of the tissue from one of the animals that had overdosed and died. And they discovered that they had mistakenly given methamphetamine instead of MDMA, and that the bottles they said that were labeled MDMA actually had methamphetamine in them.
And so they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. They provide all the Schedule I drugs for all the NiDA-funded researchers. So the Hopkins people blamed the people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the bottles, the people from Research Triangle Institute said. They never do that, they always test it.
They have quality control, they think that it got switched something or other at the site at Johns Hopkins. The National Institute of Drug Abuse didn't want to find out what was going on, or if they did want to find out, they never made it public. So it's never clear how did this happen? But they had to retract this data and retract their papers.
And it was the high watermark of neurotoxicity fears. And at the same time, Peter Jennings was doing a documentary called Ecstasy Rising, and this was the first documentary that really had a bunch of people talking about the benefits. And he also talked about this problem with the methamphetamine. The other thing about methamphetamine versus MDMA is that, you know, for people that know about Adderall and other things, 10 15 milligrams is a hefty dose.
But MDMA it's 125 milligrams is a full dose.
And so they were giving the wrong drug in MDMA quantities.
And that's why they knocked off a bunch of these primates, and that's why they claim that they saw this dopaminergic problems. And so ever since then, and that's been 20 years ago now....
Do you think, do you have speculation that was sabotage?
Somebody sabotaged it somewhere, I don't think it was from Research Triangle.
Do you think it's accidental sabotage or do you think it?
I don't, I think that the researchers wouldn't have done that intentionally, but maybe somebody in the lab did it or something.
But I do think that the researchers were fundamentally irresponsible to put the paper out because they should have known that there was prior primate studies where dopamine hadn't been damaged. The other thing is, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, we were trying to talk about MDMA serotonergic neurotoxicity. And so I went to George Riccardi, the same researcher that did the primate study with the methamphetamine instead.
And I said, I want to buy you some monkeys.
You've just done studies in rats. can you study this in monkeys, in primates?
And he said he did. And again, there was no evidence of overdoses or dopamine. Also, this was before brain scans came in.
And so the most sophisticated way that was available at the time to look at what's going on in the brain was to do spinal taps and to take spinal fluid and look for metabolites of neurotransmitters in the brain. And I felt like I could not recommend try to get other people to volunteer for it unless I did it myself. So I was the first one to get a spinal tap and it was really hard, but the imagery that I did, and again, this is kind of this idea about storytelling.
So the story I was telling myself as this big needle going into my spine to try to draw out the spinal fluid. Was that if a woman could give birth to a child, I could at least give birth to my spinal fluid. It was like, way less painful, much shorter, but I could do it, and so the imagery was, I'm giving my birth to my spinal fluid. To these researchers so that we can understand what's really going on with MDMA and hopefully make it into a medicine. And it didn't hurt terribly, and there was spinal headaches that you get afterwards.
So a couple of days afterwards, I had headaches, but I felt like I could enroll other people, I can encourage other people to do it. So I was going to New College in Sarasota, Florida, which, by the way, DESantis is now trying to kill and has fired the president. It's the most, it's the Honors College of the State of Florida.
And it is.
Why is he trying to kill it?
It's just what he's doing to public education. I mean, this was the symbol of the most, what he called the most woke school in a bunch of transgender people, a bunch of open minded people. It started as a private school in the 60s, merged with the state when they ran out of money. So he fired the president, he stacked the board of trustees, and he wants to turn it into a conservative school.
He's doing it for political purposes, to try to show that he's anti-woke and that he is wanting to.
What's going on in public education in Florida is really frightening.
George Soros is actually interested in trying to help out at new college, because George Soros actually, even though he's the boogeyman for a lot of the right wing. He funded the Central European University in Hungary as after communism, and it was killed also by Orban in Hungary. So you go after public education as a way to try to control intellectual narratives. But anyway, I was at New College's school and we were experimenting with MDMA. And so I got about 35 people or so to get spinal taps. Not just from New College, but from all over.
And the spinal taps showed that there was no problems with dopamine. There was a little bit less serotonin metabolites, but also lower serotonin, has been linked to risk taking behavior.
And so taking drugs is risk taking behavior, particularly when they're heavily criminalized. So it was not evidence that it was serotonin neurotoxicity from MDMA, but it cleared dopamine.
So these researchers should never have ignored their prior data. They were just so willing to demonize MDMA to get more grant money, so they were addicted to grant money.
Yeah, that seems to be the case with a lot of scientific studies, doesn't it?
Yeah.
It's a real problem when you're not just trying to find out what the truth is, you're trying to find data that would reinforce whatever idea that you went into it. Looking to find in the first place, throw out information that is contrary to that.
Yeah, I'll say the best example of that for me was that I've done long term follow up studies to the work that Timothy Leary did at Harvard. So the Good Friday experiment was in 1962..
The Good Friday Experiment.
Yeah, the Good Friday experiment is incredible. So this was Aldous. Huxley had written The Doors of Perception and was talking about Mescaline and spiritual experiences. And a lot of people who are doing work with LSD, with alcoholics and others in the 50s would have these spiritual experiences.
And Bill W.
Who started Alcoholics? Anonymous actually had an LSD experience in the 50s. Actually, his first place getting sober was Belladonna, so Bill W, the founder of AA, had a psychedelic experience that got him sober in the first place. Yeah, and then later, about a decade or more later, he experimented with LSD.
And he felt that this LSD could be tremendous for.
What was his initial psychedelic experience that led him to get sober?
Well, it was Belladonna.
What is belladonna?
It's kind of.
When you think about what drugs did the Witches use in the middle ages, it's a disorienting psychedelic. What's that? I think it's scopolamine, oh.
It's.
That stuff is crazy, that's that devil's dust shit.
Yes, exactly exactly.
That's the stuff that's supposed to turn people essentially into zombies that are very easy to suggest.
Yeah, Wade Davis has done studies about the voodoo cults in Haiti, yeah, and what drugs they use. And they kind of can tranquilize people, they bury them alive, they think that they're....
Yeah, they blow dust in their nose. Yeah, scopolamine is also the stuff they use to stop people from getting motion sickness on boats. Yeah, which is really crazy, like Dramamine patches.
Well, that illustrates the exact point, though, that it's not the thing itself, it's how it's used, right? It's the relationship you have with it. It's the dose, it's the route of administration, it's how you do it. So....
So, yeah, scopolamine helped him get off of alcohol.
Yeah, you have this terrifying experience, things come to the surface, but.
Yeah.
And it did help him.
And then when he did LSD in the 50s and I met one of the women that gave him the LSD, Sydney Cohn. Who was the man and what he felt was that...?
We talk about in AA about hitting bottom.
Mm-hmm, you know that people's lives when they hit bottom, then they're finally ready to make a change. But that means that they've destroyed their families, they've destroyed their jobs, their health. And so what Bill W felt is that you could give LSD to people and they could psychologically hit bottom....
While they still had some intact relationships, that would then help support them as they tried to move to sopriety. And he felt that this could have a major role to play in AA, but....
Why didn't he ever incorporate it?
It became too controversial. Mm-hmm, and so he ended up....
Working with cruder tools.
Working with cruder tools.
But there was a lot of work with LSD in the 60s for alcohol use disorder, and it proved to be quite effective when supported. So that these substances can be extremely helpful, again used in a careful way.
So the Good Friday experiment was an attempt to understand.
Can psychedelics produce a mystical experience? And Walter Pankey was a doctor and a minister, and he was getting a P.h.D. at Harvard, and he was interested in looking at the spiritual potential of MDMA. I mean, of psilocybin.
And he worked with Timothy Leary, and they did this experiment, and they did it with a reverend, Howard Thurman.
So, Howard Thurman was an African American minister at Boston University's Marsh Chapel.
And Howard Thurman is someone who deserves a lot more attention because he studied with Gandhi.
He studied nonviolence with Gandhi.
And then he became Martin Luther King's mentor.
And Martin Luther King got a P.h.D. at Boston University, and Howard Thurman was his mentor.
So Howard Thurman really helped the American civil rights movement adopt the strategy of nonviolence that he got from Gandhi.
And that's what we see in all of the stories about people being beaten by police, trying to protest different things, and they try to react. So, nonviolent resistance was a key to the American civil rights movement.
And Howard Thurman was very interested in this connection between the mystical experience and political action.
So the mystical experience you move beyond your sense of I'm this biographical person, I'm my tribe, I'm my country, I'm my religion. There's something deeper that we're part of humanity.
I mean, if you look at the quantum level, we're all energy, we're all connected in these different ways. So when you feel that. And Rita Marley has this incredible album about Marley's wife, and it's called Who Feels it Knows it.
Who feels it knows it.
So you can say this and I can say this and people could hear it. But if you have an experience that you feel it, then you know it. And so Howard Thurman was very interested in this idea of what are the political implications of this mystical experience.
And so Walter Pankey was willing to work with him, and Howard Thurman said I will let you come to my church, Marsh Chapel on Good Friday. And you can do an experiment with 20 Divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary. And you can give them all a pill, and half will be psilocybin, half will be placebo, which was nicotinic acid, which gives you a flush.
And so this was done.
And it was considered to be the most eloquently designed experiment ever done on whether psychedelics could produce a mystical experience. And it showed that nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, eight out of the nine had the psilocybin. And then they did some long-term, like six-month follow-ups, and they said it impacted their lives in certain ways. And then Walter Pankey died in a terrible scuba diving accident in 1971..
And so a lot was ended with him, and then the 1970 and the backlash against psychedelics. So now it's in the 80s and I'm an undergraduate. I dropped out of college for 10 years, from 1972 to 1982. And you have to do a thesis, a senior thesis at new college.
And I wanted to do psychedelic research, but psychedelic research was wiped out at the time. Nothing to do. You couldn't get permission to give psychedelics.
But I thought, if I go back to the Good Friday experiment, that I could do a long-term follow-up. That is just asking people what happened to them when they took the psilocybin and how do they think about it now? And I wouldn't have to get permission from the FDA or the DEA.
I would just have to get permission from what's called an institutional review board, which our college had just about the safety of the subject. But I'm just asking them questions. So that was the only way that I could do psychedelic research, and it was incredible. Because in the mystical literature, the real test of the validity of a mystical spiritual experience is called the fruits test.
It means what are the consequences in your life, what are the fruits of the experience?
Does it make you more peaceful, more loving? does it reduce your fear of death? does it give you a more spiritual sense of how we're connected?
So that's the fruits test.
Because people can describe all sorts of things, but what impact does it have in your life?
So I figured I can do a long-term follow-up, and that's the fruits test.
And Walter Pankey would have done it if he hadn't died, but nobody else was doing it. So I ended up trying to figure out how to do it. I went to Andover Newton School and nobody knew who the subjects were in the study. So I went to the school, which is outside of Boston, and I said, I'd like to put a note in the alumni newsletter. Would you be willing to do that?
And they said, no, they refused.
I said, This is the most important experiment ever in the history of mystical experiences and psychedelics with your students.
And I just want to ask them questions, Would you let me put something in the alumni newsletter? And they said, No.
This is now 1986.
And so I was like, Oh God, I was blocked. Tim Leary Nobody had the list.
So I went to their library and I thought, maybe I'll see some books or something on this experiment. Nothing.
The thesis that was done at Harvard, nothing, they had zero about this experiment.
It's like cultural amnesia. But I'm wandering through the library and I notice that they've got some books of the alumni. And one of them had the list of all the students that were in school in 1962 and their names and their addresses. I was like, Wow, this is bonanza.
So I photocopied it all and then there was like 350 of them, and I wrote a postcard to every single one of them.
And that led me to three of them wrote back, saying that they were in the study. And over years and years, it took me. But I identified 19 out of the 20 and I was able to go see them in person and interview them.
And this really validated my theory of change, so my theory of change also, which you've shared a bit, is that. If you have these spiritual connections, these spiritual experiences, that will make you think about the world in a different way, think about others in a different way. And so what people said is that their mystical experiences really did reduce their fear of death. Made them feel more connected to other people who were from different faiths, made them more ecumenical in a way, deepen their faith in their own religion.
It didn't turn them away, but they saw it in a more symbolic rather than literal way.
But what I discovered, so it validated the results, but what I discovered is a big mistake that one of the persons in the study had heard that. Howard Thurman By the way, the audio of that service is up on our website. If you go Good Friday Experiment, you can listen to Howard Thurman's Good Friday Experiment speech, his sermons and stuff from 1962. One of them was, You have to tell people there's a man on the cross. You must tell people there's a man on the cross.
And one of the students, under the influence of psilocybin, said Yeah, I got to tell people there's a man on the cross. I'm going to do it right now and I'm going to run out of this room and I'm going to run down the road. And I should tell the president, but the president is in D..C. so I'll tell the president of the university.
And he goes running down the street, and Walter Pankey and Houston Smith go, you know, running after him. It's a busy street on Commonwealth Ave, in front of the Mars Chapel. And they finally catch him, and he doesn't want to go inside, he's outside, he's tripping.
He's like, got this mission and they give him a shot of thorazine to tranquilize him, to bring him back inside.
And they never mentioned that at all.
Wow, completely not mentioned it. So I had this decision when I'm going to write this follow up study, you know, I said, I can't hide that.
So I did report that.
And what was going on, I think, was in the culture was this exaggeration of the risks and suppression and minimization of the benefits. And I think what Timothy Leary did in response was the opposite.
He's like, OK, I can exaggerate the benefits. One dose. You're enlightened, you know, more than everybody else.
And then he would minimize the risks.
Yeah, that's not good.
It's terrible.
You can't do that, you know, I think I had. I don't know if you ever saw the podcast. I had Alex Berenson on, who wrote a book called Tell your Children and it's all about the dangers of marijuana. And I had him on with Dr.
Mike Hart, who is a cannabis doctor in Canada. And you know, one of the things that he was talking about was people, for whatever reason, when they have a high dose of marijuana. There's something that happens to some of them where they have, like a schizophrenic break, and I have heard of it. I know people who have had this, and the pro marijuana people do not want to acknowledge this danger.
They want to paint marijuana as a completely innocuous substance that no one should worry about. And I think it's way too powerful for that. And I think too many people are psychologically or physiologically vulnerable. We're not all the same, and if someone is particularly vulnerable, whether it's towards schizophrenia or whatever mental illness it might be. There's something about these experiences that seem to send them over the edge.
And that's something that we should be concerned with, we should talk about it.
We have to, because if we become what we the opposite of what we are worried about, or actually we don't become the opposite, we become like them. We just do the same. So I think.
It's the same thing, it's like we become the polar opposite. We just justify things that we find morally reprehensible, we find ethically terrible, and we justify it because we're doing it for the right side.
You can't, you can't do that.
It's completely wrong. So what we have to do?
With anything right.
People talk to me a lot about where might the backlash come from. But for now, we're very close, we think now, with two successful phase three studies.
The second one was confirmatory.
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