The Peter Attia Drive - #65 - Rick Doblin, Ph.D.: MDMA— the creation, scheduling, toxicity, therapeutic use, and changing public opinion of what is possibly the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

In this episode, Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of MAPS, discusses MDMA, a molecule that has (at a minimum) revolutionary therapeutic benefits for PTSD, but arguably could have, at the highest order, a lasting impact on humanity’s ability to peacefully coexist. Rick details the history of MDMA, what lead to its unfortunate criminalization, and his lifelong work trying to protect MDMA (and other psychedelics) from criminalization (and his subsequent attempt to decriminalize it). Through his founding of MAPS, Rick has made enormous progress in debunking many of the exaggerated risks being claimed against MDMA (neurotoxicity, memory loss, depression, Parkinson’s, etc.), and is very close to getting FDA approval for a psychotherapy technique using MDMA. Additionally, in this discussion, you will learn about the history of LSD, psilocybin, and other psychedelics and how the combination of the misunderstanding of them with the crackdown on drug use in the 1970s lead to their designation of schedule 1 substances. But it’s important to note that you will also realize from this discussion just how different MDMA is compared to the average psychedelic. We end this discussion with a message of hope: there are going to be many people who are going to wonder what can they do to receive this MDMA therapy. We talk about what those clinical trials look like, what the enrollment looks like, and perhaps more importantly, what a compassionate use license would look like, such that if there are patients who are in need of this therapy (prior to its approval) they can have an understanding of the legal paths to doing just that. We discuss: Discovering MDMA, how Rick learned about it and his first experiences with it [9:45]; The timeline of MDMA’s evolution, the reinvention in the 1970s, “ecstasy”, the criminalization of MDMA [21:10]; Explaining the different “schedules” of drugs [30:55]; Rick’s fight to protect it for therapeutic uses, losing to the DEA despite winning in the court, the scientific community, and the media [38:25]; The risks involved with taking MDMA [42:30]; An incredible MDMA-LSD case study: Rick’s story of healing a treatment-resistant PTSD patient in the 1980s [44:45]; How and why MDMA was declared illegal on an emergency basis going against the judge’s recommendation after hearing Rick’s compelling case (and multiple appeals) in court [57:15]; Rick’s decision to study politics to affect change from the inside out, and the recent progress being made with the DEA [1:07:00]; Debunking the exaggerated risks of MDMA (e.g., neurotoxicity) [1:16:30]; Rick’s unbelievable ability to play the long game [1:28:45]; Which patients would not be good candidates for MDMA from a safety perspective? [1:34:30]; How MDMA is different from all other psychedelics, the importance of the setting, and Peter’s experiences with MDMA [1:36:30]; MDMA studies which lead to the crucial designation as a “breakthrough therapy” [1:40:30]; How someone with PTSD can get treated now through “expanded access for compassionate use” [1:46:00]; Rick’s ultimate goal and long term vision for psychedelic clinics [1:50:30]; Trip of Compassion documentary, and how psychedelics could change the world [1:52:30]; Rick’s early life: Resisting the draft, his feeling of wanting to change the world, and his profound experiences with LSD and other psychedelics [1:55:30]; The history of LSD and psilocybin, and the CIA’s interest in psychedelics [2:10:45]; Timothy Leary and the Good Friday Experiment [2:22:00]; Rick’s follow up study to the Good Friday Experiment, and his criticism (and praise) of Tim Leary [2:33:50]; Peter’s experience taking psilocybin [2:44:30]; The Concord Prison Experiment, and Rick’s follow up study 34 years later [2:47:00]; and More. Learn more: https://peterattiamd.com/ Show notes page for this episode: https://peterattiamd.com/rickdoblin/ Subscribe to receive exclusive subscriber-only content: https://peterattiamd.com/subscribe/ Sign up to receive Peter's email newsletter: https://peterattiamd.com/newsletter/ Connect with Peter on Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.

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I guess this week is Dr. Rick Doblin. Rick is the founder and the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS. Now, if you listen to the podcast that I did with Tim Ferris, that name may sound familiar, we spoke quite a bit about Rick, well more so about maps and really the work that they've been doing to legalize specifically MDMA but other molecules as well for medical use. Rick is, he's a force of nature and there's just no other way I can describe this interview. How much I, I learned about a guy that I already sort of knew in terms of his background, his passion,

what motivated him. He's really a unique individual, and I at the very end of the interview, I even sort of comment to that effect that there's just not that many people that can really bend the arc of history the way I believe Rick is doing that. We spent about the first hour and 20 minutes or so

putting some background together. Both Rick's background where his drive for this came from and also the background of how these molecules, and we talked mostly about LSD as an example, but how these molecules were synthesized, basically made broadly available and utilized quite liberally, and then ultimately how they were scheduled with the drug act of the early 70s. At that point in the podcast, we then turn our attention specifically to MDMA because what I really wanted to focus on here was MDMA for several reasons. One, as I think I stayed in the podcast, whether right or wrong, my personal opinion as MDMA

is the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species. Also it's the closest one to being D-scheduled, meaning taken from being an illegal drug that is a schedule one to something that will have a medical application. And you'll see through this discussion how long it has taken to do that and what the implications of that are. And of course, more importantly, you'll probably appreciate why we would think that that's an important thing to do. So when it comes to MDMA, we talk about a lot. We talk about how it was created back in 1912, how it was rediscovered and recent-assized, where its use, where it found its use, and how the parallel use of ecstasy, as the party

version of this drug, in some ways, kind of, one that in some ways, I mean, in many ways, really hurt the clinical application of MDMA, which was really where it started, how it was, of course, scheduled and made illegal in 1985, which is relatively late compared to all of the other psychedelics. And you can see that through this discussion that MDMA is sort of not your typical psychedelic. And then how a year later, Rick created maps and did everything from going off to the Harvard Kennedy School to get a PhD to help him understand the regulatory morass. He was going to have to navigate his way through and right to where we are today, which is truly being on the cusp of legalizing this incredibly powerful

molecule that is going to help in my opinion literally millions of people. So I'll just give you one example of something that we dive into pretty deep that I think people are going to find very interesting, which is the toxicity of MDMA. So there are lots of rumors about the toxicity of this drug. And of course, every drug has toxicity. So the point here isn't that it doesn't have it. But the point is, what is the toxicity? And is it really what we were led to believe with everything from depression, Parkinsonian

syndromes, neuronal destruction versus what's actually happening. So a very nuanced discussion on that. And I think we end with a message of hope, which is one, there are going to be many people I think who listen to this, who are going to wonder what can they do to receive this therapy. And we're going to talk about what those clinical trials look like, what the enrollment looks like. And perhaps more importantly, what a compassionate use license would look like, such that enrollment looks like, and perhaps more importantly, what a compassionate use license would look like, such that if there are patients who are in need of this therapy, prior to its approval, what are the legal paths to do that? I have to state something very important that I feel strongly about, of course, the drug

enforcement agency considers MDMA to be a schedule one drug. That means it is illegal. That means according to the DEA, at least at the time of that scheduling in 1985, they do not believe there to be a medical use and that they believe that it has the high potential for abuse. Now, I think you'll see from this discussion, neither Rick nor I agree with that at all, but we do have to respect the letter of the law. So there's nothing in this podcast that I want to be construed as encouraging you and or endorsing the use of illicit MDMA. I think there are more than sufficient legal channels by which people could pursue compassionate

exemption for the appropriate treatment of PTSD, which is at this point in time where we believe MDMA is most valuable. So with that said, sit back and please enjoy my interview and discussion with Dr. Rick Dobler. Before we begin this podcast, I'm going to point out something that we did here a little different from what we've done in previous podcasts. Rick and I sat down for a very lengthy conversation, and in the beginning we spent a lot of time going really deep into his background. Now, while I think this conversation is really interesting, I also realize that the entire conversation is long and many of you may be tuning in for more of what we talk about at the end, specifically as it pertains to MDMA. So what we did is we took

roughly the first hour and 15 minutes of this interview and put it at the end. So what you're about to hear is where we pick up the conversation, again again roughly an hour 15 into it, where we start to talk about maps and Rix work on MDMA, which I think is what the majority of you are probably wanting to hear about. Then at the end of that podcast, we will roll directly into the initial conversation on Rix background, which the diehards like me will find just as interesting. As this is a different sort of format than we typically do, hopefully it makes sense and you'll enjoy the interview, but it's our belief that this will create slightly better

flow for what you're about to hear. Rick, thanks so much for opening your home today. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here. Everyone's in a while, I get ready to sort of interview somebody and I think to myself, this is highly applicable. This is incredibly broad. This topic we're discussing is so important.

And I don't know, as I was coming over here, I was talking to my wife and she said, I can't believe I'm not there to listen to you guys have this discussion, to which I said, you've never once listened to me record a single podcast. Well, I hear you're so interested in this and she's like, I don't know, I just, you've spoken about Rick so much and you've spoken about MDMA so much that I just don't want to miss it and I said, well, don't worry, it's going to be recorded.

You're going to hear it with everybody else. But this is a discussion I've wanted to have for such a long time. Now, in many ways, there's probably a few people, if any, that have done more to sort of write the wrongs of that era, and that we're now 33 years into an organization that you started. That organization you started in 1986 called Maps. Tell me what map stands for and what you set out to do. So Maps is multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies. I knew at the time that I wanted to have the word psychedelic in the title of the nonprofit. So just to go back a little bit further. So in 1972 when I was at New College and having difficulties with my psychedelic experiences,

I went to the guidance counselor at college and I asked for help. And I said, I'm having powerful important experiences, but I'm not able to fully integrate them. And I was just so fortunate that guidance counselor gave me a copy of a book, Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stan Graf, about his work with LSD. Before it was even published, manuscript copy.

And it was reading that book that really helped me see that here is science, here is spirituality, but viewed through a scientific lens. And it had the reality check of therapy. It's focused on how do you help these people suffering from different conditions grow. And so I felt that this was now everything together for me. Science, mysticism, spirituality, the sense of unity, and therapy, reality check. So in 72 is when I decided to become a psychedelic therapist.

And I wrote a letter to Stan Groff, and he ended up writing me back, and I took a workshop with him in the summer of 72. And I did everything that I could to try to elevate and expand my consciousness, including I have the delusion that the more I psychedelics, I took the faster I would evolve, which I underestimated the whole integration process. So I basically then took 10 years to integrate.

I dropped out of college. I didn't see Stan anymore. I spent 10 years trying to get prepared to make psychedelics the forefront. So I was in the construction business and build houses and build various things and got grounded in this 10-year period and every once in a while would take LSD and work on my fear. And so I went back to college in 1982 at New College, the same college I had dropped out of. I'd built houses for a couple of professors. I figured out how I could sort of frame what I was doing as studying transppersonal psychology and psychedelic psychotherapy. And so the very first

semester that I went back to school, Stan Graf was giving a workshop, a month-long workshop at Estlund called the Mystical Quest. Where's Estlund? Estlund is in Big Sur. It's about three and a half hours south of San Francisco. It's on, perched on the cliffs overlooking the ocean. There's hot springs that come up there. There's bass. It's sort of the cradle of the human potential movement. You were just there. It was just there for a week-long program on psychedelics where the entire property, which fits around 120 people. It's sort of a commune you could say where they grow their own food. Their job is to provide housing and workshops for people. They've been involved since the 60s started by a dick price and Michael Murphy

Fritz pearls from the salt therapy lived there. I'd a raw from raw thing stand-graf was there for about almost 15 years as scholar and residents All sorts of people have taught there and still going and so this particular workshop that I was just at had the largest waiting list in the entire history of Esteline since the 60s that over a thousand people try to get into this program for 120 people. But I went there in September of 82 as the beginning of my going back to school. My first semester was going to be about creating a curriculum to become a psychedelic therapist. And so during this month long, Ad Esselin was standing in Christina Grafist's wife. This woman named Debbie Harlow came by, she wasn't in the workshop, but she came by Ad Esselin and she started talking about this new drug called Adam, which was MDMA, and that it was used in therapy.

It had been used in underground therapy circles since the middle 70s. It was itself legal at the time, but it was kept quiet because this was again during the drug war period, and that if it were made public, chances are it would be criminalized. And when we learned about it in 82, when Debbie started talking about it, she also shared that it had escaped these therapeutic circles and was being sold as the drug ecstasy. So it was clear that it was doomed. It just wasn't clear when. And my initial impression of it was that I underestimated it.

You underestimated the drug or the backlash that would come against it. The drug. Yeah, so she said it helps you feel love. It helps you feel connected. It helps you be a better listener and helps you talk to people. Speak from your heart. And I felt I'm in love. I feel love. I feel like I can talk. I saw a group of people doing it. And they were just sitting around in a circle talking to each other. And I thought, how profound can that be? When you take 250 micrograms of LSD, you can't talk. You go into this non-burble place. That's what's really profound. You go

beyond your ego. You're... At that time, Rick was the language that we now use to describe that distinction known. Was it understood that, for example, Silasibon was an entheogen while MDMA was an empathogen? Did we even understand what that meant in 82? In 82, not quite then. So, entheogen, I don't actually use that word because that's the God within to generate a spiritual experience. I think that that word was created by John the Nod and others to try to create a counter to the word hallucinogen.

So hallucinogen is pejorative, negative, it's a delusion. It's negatively loaded. Entheogen is sort of positively loaded. It's going to be spiritual. Psychedelic is mind manif loaded. It's going to be spiritual. Psychedelic is mind manifesting. It's neutral. And it describes what it actually does. So I've chosen to try to reclaim the word psychedelic. The empathogen is a really good word for MDMA that produces empathy. Others Dave Nichols, that was Ralph Metzner's word, empathogen. Dave Nichols proposed in tactogen to mean

to touch within. And what was going on there, so that was really created, those in pathogen and tactogen, those words were created once we needed in our legal case to try to protect the use of MDMA. It was to try to say that it wasn't like a traditional psychedelic. So I think in 82, when I was first learning about MDMA, when I was foolish enough to underestimate it, but smart enough to buy some, that it was clear that MDMA was not like a classic psychedelic. There's no dissociation, there's no hallucination. You remember it as though you're completely awake. It is really in a

class of its own in that way, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, it's very good. And so that was the attempt to try to, the enthian, where it was just to try to balance out hallucinogen, but empathogen and taxogen was part of our legal case to try to say this was a different class of drugs and you couldn't criminalize it the way these others had criminalized it, that in the end failed. And psychedelic is a broader word, mind manifesting. So I think that MDMA is a psychedelic, but it's not a classic psychedelic. So once I learned about it and actually underestimated it,

but bought some and tried some and was then just profoundly impacted by how subtle it was and how incredible of a drug it was. Do you remember the first time you took it? Oh yeah, oh yeah, I remembered it really well. That was with the girlfriend and we took it together. And at one point we said this love we're expressing and experiencing is it's really us. It's not a drug delusion. It's liberating us to express what we

really feel. I felt like the profundity and the depth of connection was genuine and also something that we could learn from. I think one of the things that makes this so helpful therapeutically, this drug is that because you're not dissolving your ego, it's easier to integrate what happened. It's not that far away from normal consciousness. It's a subtle shift with a reduction in fear and the amygdala in different areas. It's just profound therapeutic. And so once I tried it, I thought that this was an incredible opportunity because there was going to be a backlash, but it was still legal.

And I had learned about LSD, really, the value of it in 71 and 72 after the backlash, which was 1970 and the Control Substances Act and criminalization of all the psychedelics and the effort to squash psychedelic research all over the world. So I felt I missed my moment. You knew you had a small window,

but you didn't know how big it was going to be. Yeah. So I started a different nonprofit in 1984 before maps. What had happened actually, and again, it's great that you're wearing the Dora's shirt because Laura Huxley was key to my whole life. So in 1983, after I had learned about MDMA, I read this book by Robert Mueller, who was the Assistant Secretary General of the UN. He was from France, a French Resistance Fighter. He was the mystic of the UN.

He'd been there for 40 years. The book was New Genesis, shaping a global spirituality. And so this book was about how the UN is for conflicts between nations, but actually a lot of these conflicts are religious conflicts and how he felt we needed a global spirituality that would in live in every particular religion. It's not like a one-world religion, like one-world language, but it was the sense that religions are like languages. They're all different ways of expressing something similar, a similar reality, and that if we move beyond my religion as the

one right religion, and if you don't follow it, you're an infidel or you're all these religious wars that we've had over the centuries, this idea that there was this sort of we're all from the same planet. We all have more in common than separate. That's what Robert Mueller wrote about this global spirituality and as the key to human survival. So I wrote him a letter as a college undergraduate and I said I agree with what you say, but you don't say anything about psychedelics. I told them about the Good Friday experiment. I mentioned MDMA as a tool that could be used and he wrote me back and introduced me to various people who were mystics to share MDMA with them and see what they had to say. So this letter, though, that I wrote to Robert Mueller was Debbie Harlow-Saud, who had introduced me to MDMA.

She showed it to a friend of hers who showed it to Laura Huxley. And so Laura thought, wow, I'm trying to do important political work, outreach work. So I got invited to meetings that were taking place at Esselin, organized by Dick Price and others to try to figure out how to protect MDMA and how to bring this, MDMA had sort of revitalized the psychedelic underground. Because now there was a new tool that was tremendously effective and it was legal. But there was a parallel sort of social drug

that was coming out as well. So when was ecstasy becoming the sort of parallel path for MDMA to become mainstream? Was that about the same time? Yeah, that was about the same time. So Michael Kleeg was one of the people that had gotten MDMA under the name Adam in these sort of therapeutic contexts in private homes, not all done by therapists and patients, but personal growth, private homes, out of public settings. Michael had been involved with being a cocaine dealer, other see new other cocaine

dealers, and he thought this was a tremendous drug, and more people should know about it. And so he created ecstasy. He created his ecstasy and started marketing and then public ways. And that was gonna attract the attention of the government, particularly at the Stark Club in Dallas, was where it became a real party drug.

You could buy it over the counter, 800 numbers. Michael added quite a large operation. Was it at the time ecstasy pure MDMA or was it typically included with other impurities or additional stimulants? It was pure MDMA. It was great quality. People had incredible experiences and started sharing it more and more and more and more people wanted to do it and so it was used a lot it was sort of the beginnings of the rave movement the dance movement it was used in these more public settings and so that was a concern to those of us that were interested in trying to protect the therapeutic use that this public use was going to do it and we actually contacted Michael

and others he approached us at different conferences. And so we got to know who the underground manufacturers were. And basically I said that they owed a debt at gratitude to the people that created MDMA. And they should help us protect it. And so they did make some donations for us to help in our legal efforts. And just to give listeners the background, right?

I mean, MDMA, again, like LSD, completely synthesized man made, originally synthesized in 1912, I believe. Yeah. Somewhat forgotten about, correct? Yeah, so MDMA was invented by Merck Pharmaceutical in 1912. They were actually looking to evade a competitor's patent on getting to a different drug. And so they had a whole different synthetic route. And they patented every step along the way, way MDMA being

one of them. But they weren't looking for MDMA. It was just a... An intermediary towards the other ultimate goal. Yeah. And then they did nothing with it. World War I came along. It's a German pharmaceutical company. And they actually didn't test it in animals until 1927. And at that point in time, they found nothing of interest and abandon it. It's funny to me by the way to imagine animals on MDMA. That's such an interesting concept. Like, would it do anything to an animal? Do they? Well, it does actually. And so some researchers at Johns Hopkins

have done studies with octopuses with MDMA. So as it turns out, octopuses... You can make them less ornery? Yes, you can. They're solitary creatures, unless it's mating season. And so they've got this experimental contraption, this is a digression, but it's worthwhile. They've got this experiment, so they put an octopus in the center chamber, and then they have two chambers off of each side. One has an inanimate object in it, in a kind of a bird cage, so that it doesn't move in a larger area, And the other has an octopus in this sort of bird cage

so it doesn't move either. So under normal circumstances the octopus will spend way more time with the inanimate object than with the other octopus. They don't really like being with other octopuses. We supplied the MDMA for this experiment, we meaning maps. So we ended up that they figured out how to dose the proper amount of MDMA in the water. So they soaked the octopus in a bath of MDMA-infused water for 10 minutes. And then they put the octopus back in this experimental contraption, and lo and behold, now they spend way more time with the other octopus. And humans and octopus diverged 250 million years ago. And so the big question that the experimenters had is,

first off, what octopus is reacting MDMA at all. And then secondly, even if they did, would it have any kind of similar effect as it does in humans? And it turns out that it does. Suggesting that whatever MDMA is doing is in a primitive enough part of our brain, meaning it was still there before the bifurcation of those. Yes, yeah, yeah. Suggesting it's not in the cortex.

Yes. And also that it's something that we're not only in the cortex. Exactly. We're not exclusively in the cortex. Yes, and also that it's something that we're not only in the cortex. Exactly. We're not exclusively in the cortex. Yeah. And also that the FDA has told us that if we manage to prove safety and efficacy in adults, they want us to do work in adolescents with PTSD. And if that works, they want us to go down to seven to 11-year-olds. So it suggests to me that work with the octopus that young children who've been traumatized may still benefit from MDMA, even if they don't have a lot of verbal facilities. And so MDMA has also been given the same group of Hopkins just published a paper in nature, which we can reference to.

Well, to all these things, yeah. Yeah, they just published a paper in nature that was in mice. And what they showed is that MDMA releases oxytocin, which causes neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons and new neural connections in pro-social areas of the brain, and they speculated that that's what's underlying the increase in the therapeutic alliance between patient and therapist that MDMA catalyzes.

This oxytocin release, hormones of love and bonding and nurturing, nursing mothers and when you're in love. But when Merck came back to it, there's like this period where it was sort of forgotten about until Sasha came along and started synthesizing. Sort of. So what happened then? So invented in 1912, 1927 Merck dust studies in animals and then gives it up.

The next time that we know about it was in 1953, when the US Army Chemical Warfare Service tested eight different drugs for toxicity and animals. This was classified. It didn't come out to the early 70s. So very few people knew about it. But MDMA was one of those drugs. And so what they did is they tested a series of eight drugs with masculine on one side and methamphetamine on the other and MDMA more in the middle.

So I think that's a good way to understand MDMA is that it has the energy properties of methamphetamine. That's why people can take it and stay up all night and dance. It makes you alert, but it doesn't make you jittery like methamphetamine. You can take it and be alert but be perfectly still. You can use it in meditation and many people have actually. Is it technically considered a stimulant? I mean, it isn't amphetamine. Well, it has stimulant properties for sure, but it's also similar to mescalin, but it doesn't have the ego-desolving sort of visual, classic psychedelic properties that mescalin has. So MDMA is kind of between mescalin and methamphetamine, but different from each end of the spectrum.

So that research was done in animals. There's no evidence that they did anything in humans. And that wasn't declassified till the early 70s. So then what happened though is that a drug called MDA, methylene dioxyamphetamine was developed independently. And it became quite popular during the 60s. And it was called the miracle drug of America. It's a little bit like an MDMA LSD combination. And a lot of people really used it during the 60s. It was a pretty incredible experience and also kind of a different contrast

to LSD, softer version of LSD. And so once all the drugs were criminalized in 1970 in this backlash and the controlled substances of that, then chemist like Sasha and others were looking to modify drugs that were illegal to develop new versions that would be legal and might have therapeutic properties. So it was because of the popularity of MDA that people started looking at that kind of molecule. And then MDMA was actually rediscovered without people knowing that it had been invented by

Merck or that the Army come warfare service had used it and then it became used. So Sasha Shulgan actually was told by a graduate student of his that he should check into that particular molecule and then he took it and the way Sasha worked was incredible that he and his wife and he would invent these new drugs. He was looking for drugs for consciousness change. He had been working for Dow and it invented a biodegradable insecticide and Dow had given him his own lab and said you could do whatever you wanted to do. But what he wanted to do was investigate psychedelics. And he had his first experience was with mescaline and he had a very spiritual experience with mescaline.

After a while it was clear that he wasn't going to be producing anything that that wanted to market. And so he left and started on his own and taught chemistry, but really became the premier American psychedelic chemist. And so he re-synthesized MDMA and his process was he would take things himself, he and Anne would take them. They had a group of 12 people that they would, and these were the same 12 people, that they would test all these new drugs. And he felt that individuals are so different from each other. If you have 12 people and you all take the same drug,

you'll get a range of experiences and that gives you a good sense of what this drug might be. And those drugs that this group of 12 thought might have therapeutic potential, then he worked with a fellow named Leo Zef, who was a clinical psychologist PhD who had, when the have therapeutic potential, then he worked with a fellow named Leo Zeff, who was a clinical psychologist PhD who had when the crackdown came, decided to continue using psychedelics.

And so Leo was, or the leader of the underground psychedelic psychotherapy movement. The first book that maps ever published was called The Secret Chief. And then a few years after that, we were able to publish the secret chief revealed once his family was comfortable with us talking about Leo Leo was going to retire, but once he did MDMA, he realized that this had incredible therapeutic potential. So he didn't retire and Leo is the one that trained lots and lots of therapists and psychiatrists and he really built up

the therapeutic use of MDMA. And so from the middle 70s to the middle 80s, half a million doses, much of it made at MIT secretly. Chemist at MIT were making MDMA for this underground therapy community. And it was out of that then that it leaked and Michael Klee turned it into ecstasy. Is it your belief, Rick, that had ecstasy never made it to the public party scene that MDMA could have potentially evaded censorship that came with its criminalization as a schedule one. Is it possible this could have just at that moment in history been integrated into medically accepted psychotherapy? I don't think so.

No. I think that there was the backlash against the classic psychedelics. So the summer of 84. So I started going to these meetings at Estlund in 83, 84, and 85. And we were planning how to protect MDMA. The summer of 84 is when I started Earth Metabolic Design Lab. So that was the nonprofit that actually had been started by Buckminster Fuller, and a friend of mine had a branch of it in Zeratota, Florida for alternative energy.

My friend hadn't used it, and so I was able to take over the nonprofit and interpret the alternative energy to include mental energy as well. And so that was the nonprofit that we used to try to organize to protect MDMA once the eventual backlash happened. So when the DEA first moved to criminalize MDMA in the summer of 84, Sasha had had connections with an attorney Rick Cotton with a big DC law firm.

Andy Wile had gone to Harvard as an undergraduate with Rick Cotton. And so Rick was monitoring the DEA. And so once the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA, he let Sasha know so that we had 30 days to go to Washington. And so I went to Washington on like day 28 and filed for a lawsuit to try to an DEA administrative law judge hearing. So if there hadn't been the crackdown at that point,

that was still an era when all psychedelic research was banned. That didn't change till 1992, when the FDA had a advisory committee meeting and decided that they would open the door to psychedelic research. That was where, in 1990, a new group of people at the FDA took over regulating schedule on drugs, and they decided to put science before politics. With pause for a moment, I'll explain what are the criteria for schedule drugs. So you have four schedules within the DEA I'll let you explain what schedule one is and we'll work our way, but so schedule one is for drugs that have a high potential for abuse

No accepted safety under medical supervision and no currently accepted medical use that basically says this is incredibly harmful addictive, etc. And there is no benefit to using it medically. And so heroin is a schedule one drug. Conversely, cocaine is not. The listener might say, wait, how could cocaine? Which of those two does cocaine not satisfy? Well, it clearly satisfies the first one.

It's highly addictive and harmful. But it turns out it does have one very important medically valid use, which is, it clearly satisfies the first one. It's highly addictive and harmful, but it turns out it does have one very important medically valid use, which is it's a remarkable local anesthetic in very vascular areas. And so cocaine is used quite carefully in nasal surgery. If you're having a nose procedure done by any anti-surgeon, there's a reasonable chance to use cocaine. So MDMA lands itself as a schedule one drug, meaning it's on the same level as heroin or methamphetamine. Well methamphetamine also has a medical use.

Oh, that's right. That's right. Yeah. So marijuana is a schedule one drug. So the way in which it's been interpreted, high potential for abuse, they emphasize the word potential. So it doesn't have to have a lot of people using it. It just has to have a high potential for abuse. And the way they define abuse is non-medical use. It's a very loose definition. Oh, it can encompass anything because it doesn't have to actually have harm. It just has the high potential for abuse. So a grape technically could be a schedule one agent? Well, what's the potential for abuse of a grape? I mean, well, if you ate enough, you could get diabetes. Yeah, that'd be a bit straight. I don't think grapes are likely to be scheduled,

but I see your point. Yeah, I mean, it's so ridiculous, is my point. Yeah, no accepted safety under medical supervision, just means that it's not a prescription drug. The definition becomes a bit of a totology. Yeah, and no currently accepted medical use. I think where people misinterpret what schedule one means is that it doesn't mean that the government has determined that there is no medical use. There's no currently accepted medical use and currently accepted has been interpreted as FDA approval. It's not that you have a whole bunch of doctors that say this looks like it's got incredible

potential. They've made it so to get out of schedule one, you have to have FDA approval. So schedule two is high potential for abuse, but it has currently accepted safety under medical supervision and it's got a currently accepted medical use. So opiates fit into this category, fentanyl, oxycodone, oxycontin, cocaine, as we discussed. Yes, nethemphetamine for attention deficit disorder. Schedule three is for drugs that have less than high potential

for abuse. Schedule two drugs, whenever there's a prescription, one copy goes to the DEA. So there's a lot of special controls for scheduled two drugs, even though they're medically available. You can't write a prescription that's automatically renewed for a scheduled two drug. Every new prescription has to be written explicitly by your doctor. You can't renew this every three months for the next couple of years.

And it goes down there from schedule three to schedule four to schedule five where you get over the counter drugs, but there's still controlled in certain ways, but minimally. So, what we're anticipating and what we're trying to do is move M-D-A-M-A and also psilocybin is schedule one drug, LSD is schedule one drug, masculine is schedule one drug, all these psychedelics are scheduled on drugs. Chetamine has been used as a dissociative anesthetic by anesthesiologists and it's a prescription medicine. It was just approved as chetamine, an isomer of chetamine, it was just approved for depression. It's considered among the most important, if not the most important, new development in the treatment of mental illness in the last several decades, because it's being used for

depression, and it's effective relatively immediately, rather than the current antidepressives that sometimes take weeks and weeks of daily dosing. So this schedule system, what eventually I think should happen, is that the psychedelics should be descheduled completely. I think that there's a fundamental human right that people have to explore their consciousness, particularly when you think about it as spiritual experiences experiences that we should have this fundamental human right. I believe we should have a system of licensed legalization. Is there a precedent for the DEA taking something that is on schedule one and moving it to schedule

two? Yeah. The oral THC pill, Marinal, which was used in 85, 86 for nausea control for cancer chemotherapy, was switched from schedule one to schedule two. G-A-G-B was in schedule one, but it's now actually in schedule three. Yeah, and last year there was like 1.4 billion in sales. So Xyram, it's for narcolepsy, it's to help people sleep at night so that they don't fall asleep during the day. Isn't Xyram actually a chemical cousin of GHP and not actual GHP? I'm not sure about that. I thought it was actual GHB.

It's close enough that I can understand why, but GHB, of course, being, what was its street name again? Well, that's what's called the date rape drug. The date rape drug yet? Did it have another name? I'm not sure. It's the date rape drug because you can put it in water and then it makes people sleepy,

particularly when mixed with alcohol. So it does have a bit of a taste, but you put it in alcohol or something. It's hard to taste it. So there is a precedent of moving drugs off of schedule one into other schedules. Usually it goes schedule two, and then it, depending on how it goes, it could go down further. So, all of this is to get back around to this idea that the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA in 84, this nonprofit that I'd started with Debbie Harlow

and Elisa Gar to protect it. We got a hearing and we eventually triumphed. So the DEA Administrative Law Judge said that it should be schedule three. But while the hearing was going on, that was in 1986. So while the hearing was still going on in 1985, we were winning in the court. The DEA Administrative Law Judge doesn't work for the DEA.

The Administrative Law Judge is our employed and paid separately, and then they're inserted into the different agencies to administer disputes between people and the agencies, and they make recommendations to the head of the agency about what they should do. So they don't make binding decisions. They are there as a quasi-neutral arbitrator of dispute. Yeah, exactly. If you don't like the decision that's been made by the head of the administrator of the agency, then you can sue them in the appeals court. So that's what we do. So in 85, though, we're winning in the court, which is dismaying

to the D. The D.A. didn't even anticipate that we would file because they didn't know about therapeutic use of MDMA. So they just thought they're criminalizing X to C. They're criminalizing a party drug. And in the final hour, you guys show up and say, wait, please, this has really important therapeutic benefit, which by the way, Rick, we should circle back and really talk through that. And now all of a sudden, quote unquote, their judge, although it's not really their judge, agrees with you guys and says, this should be a schedule three agent.

Yeah, but before the judge issued his ruling, it was clear that we showed up with doctors with psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School, from all over, with testimony, we did a secret study, actually, as a safety of MDMA. So we had data to present to them. We had all these things that we kept a secret because we didn't want it to be criminalized before the DEA moved. So also we were winning in the court of public opinion. So Robert Miller, who had mentioned was the assistant secretary of general, you and had referred me to various mystics to whom I had sent MDMA. So in the very first article, it was early 1985 in Newsweek, the first large media article

about MDMA, Brother David Stindelrast spoke on behalf of MDMA and said that a monk spends his whole life trying to cultivate the mental attitude that you can get from taking MDMA. There was a paper in the Washington Post that Rabbi Zalman Shockter, who had also experimented with MDMA that I'd send him. He compared MDMA to the Sabbath. So the idea of this as a party drug used by hedonistic kids just recklessly risking their brains, that narrative, which is what the DEA wanted to share, was contradicted by this narrative of rabbis and monks and therapists and psychiatrists talking about the value of MDMA.

So, we're winning in the court of opinion, winning in the court, and the DEA freaked out, and declared MDMA illegal on an emergency basis in the middle of 85 while the hearings were still going on. And that was actually heartbreaking because we had thought that the hearing might actually save it. So DEA criminalizes it on an emergency basis. Later it turned out that the DEA committed to crime in the sense that they didn't have the authority to emergency.

I was just going to ask you both, do they have the authority and secondly was there a precedent for that? Well, no, there was not a precedent for that. What had happened is that Congress had given the attorney general the power to emergency schedule drugs. The attorney general, not the DEA. Yeah, all the attorney general would have needed to do was to sub-delegate the power. They would have just had to file a piece of paper in the federal register saying that the attorney general sub-delegates down to the administrative of the DEA. But that had not been done. Had not been done. Who was the AG at the time?

I don't actually remember. Presumably, the AG at the time was very sympathetic to the DEA. Oh, completely. Because this was, as you pointed out, I mean, this was one of Reagan's signature policy pieces. Very much. The escalation of the drug war. So you could argue that the DEA, though technically in violation of the reg, probably could have

done it if they'd waited, gone through the proper channel, they probably could have received authority from the AG to do this. The bigger question is why? Why were they so afraid at that moment? Well, because here was a drug that was being used by a lot of people, but it wasn't causing problems. Let's dig into this for a little bit. So I think there are going to be many people listening to this who are up until this point in the podcast are thinking,

what the hell are these two guys talking about? You're sitting here glorifying drugs. And so let's talk very specifically about ecstasy. I think back to when I was in college, I had never touched this drug. And certainly a lot of kids were using it. And the conventional wisdom was this drug gives you hypothermia. So you run this risk of overheating, you run this risk of getting long-term, really depressed because you deplete serotonin levels. I mean, there was certainly a lot of seemingly legitimate fear around this. What was actually happening? Well, MDMA can cause hypothermia. There are cases of people that have taken MDMA, usually they're people that have danced

in hot environments and got overheated, didn't have enough fluid replacement, and so some people have died from hypothermia. And is it actually the MDMA that's precipitating the hypothermia, or is it just that anybody who could dance that long in that heat could get hypothermia and the MDMA just sort of blunted their other ability to self-regulate? Well, people generally don't die from hypothermia from dancing all night. So the MDMA contributes. It's a contributing factor. So the MDMA in therapeutic settings doesn't cause hypothermia.

So there's something about MDMA combining with lots of movement and dehydration that creates this trifecta. Yeah, what also was happening is that in a lot of these environments where people were doing MDAM, these bars, people weren't buying alcohol. Alcohol kind of blunts the MDAM experience, people weren't buying alcohol. And so what the bars would be doing

would be shutting off the water in the bathrooms and making people buy water. And so that's why sometimes people wouldn't drink. Now, also occasionally people drink too much water, they dilute their blood, they get hyponite and treat you. And so what we use in therapy is fruit juices or things with electrolytes. So for those people that are looking for harm reduction tips, it's better to drink stuff with electrolytes than water if you're doing MDMA.

So you drink as much as you want, you're not going to dilute your blood and get hyponatremia. It's very, very rare that people will have these side effects. MDMA doesn't cause the same kind of dissolution of ego that the classics psychedelics do. So generally, people don't have difficult experiences. However, there are people that have had traumas in the past, or issues that are emotional issues, even without traumas. Because MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, reduces your fear response to difficult emotions. A lot of times when people do take MDMA, difficult things come to their awareness. I have witnessed this in therapeutic settings where the tears of past events just come out in a way that you could

never imagine this happening otherwise. Yeah, I mean, profound in ways that therapy sometimes people are too scared to let it out, but MDMA helps them to do that. And so people can have difficult experiences. One of the stories I told during my TED talk, which we'll link to when it's out, was about a woman who I worked with in 1984 who had PTSD. And she had taken MDMA, not in a therapeutic setting, and this violent sexual assault that had happened to her years before came to the surface and intensified her suicidal feelings. And she actually checked herself into a mental institution to protect herself from committing suicide after having taken MDMA.

And when she got out with the same old drugs that had been given to her before, she was even more suicidal. And so a friend of hers, I didn't know her at the time, contacted me about her, and so I started talking to her and agreed to work with her. And under the influence of MDMA and then also in MDMA LSD combination she was able to overcome her PTSD so in 84 is when I learned about directly working with someone and seeing that MDMA can be helpful for PTSD was that to your knowledge Rick the first time I mean first of all were you guys referring to the term PTSD was that a term that was widely understood in 84? No, there was a lot of people that had... I mean, clearly we'd seen it. I mean, all these poor guys coming back from Vietnam

when you were in college beyond traumatized, but that term was not commonly used. I'm not sure the actual history of the term PTSD. I think it was used somewhat, but people weren't as aware of how much trauma impacts so many, many different people. So at that moment in 84, really what you knew was this is a woman who'd been traumatized for lack of a better word.

And you saw the potential in this agent to while on its own do something potentially dangerous in a controlled setting, you actually felt what, that she could relive this experience and do so safely and process it to talk me through what you were really doing in 84 to understand them. Okay, so this woman's name is Marcella. So other people before this, so I had been working with various people with MDMA before both taking it myself

and also sometimes with people that had different issues and sometimes people just looking at to communicate others. I had spoken to a soldier who had been shot in the back and he told me under the influence of MDMA that he was able to relax in certain ways so that the pain in his back went away to a large degree that sort of combination of the impact of the bullet but also the fear connected to all of that.

This was a key turning point of my life. So I had been back to Estlenn for a month-long workshop in the spring of 1984. And this was again with Stan and Christina Groff, and it was called the Spiritual Emergence Network. So there's a bunch of people that break down for different reasons, and different ways where people break down their path in life is not working for them. And often it gets pathologized, and people get tranquilized, or they get hospitalized, or different things. But what Stan Groff and others were saying is that this can be a spiritual emergence. It can be seen as a spiritual crisis that we're resisting.

So it comes in dramatic ways. But the process, what's trying to emerge as healthy, the process is not. So I had studied how to help people who were struggling to integrate different, either spiritual experiences or psychological experiences that were coming back as part of my effort to become a psychedelic therapist. And I was only home for about less than a week when I got a call from this friend of mine who I actually had sold the MDMA to when it was still legal. And he said that he and Marcel had done this together in a kind of a romantic situation and that her past trauma had emerged. He wasn't aware of that and that she was now suicidal

and that whatever had been tried by traditional psychiatry, including the psychiatrist, the mental institution, that not worked for her, she was suicidal even worse. So I felt like I'm not qualified. This is a terrifying situation. Somebody being suicidal, but I didn't think that she had any other options. She tried her best in

traditional psychiatry. And I felt this is what I'm trying to do, learn how to be a therapist, to work with this. And I felt somewhat responsible for having sold them the MDMA. And so I agreed to talk to her. Talk to her on MDA or just talk to her on the phone. So during the discussion, she explained what had happened. And I was saying that you'd taken this MDMA in a situation where you weren't really anticipating that this would emerge or that you would process this, and that it made you destabilized. And now you're suicidal.

However, if we were to do this in a therapeutic setting where you're not trying to be with someone where you're able to focus on this, the properties of MD may help you integrate it, may help you fully experience it, look at it, come to peace with it. And I said that if she were willing to promise not to commit suicide while we were working together, I would be willing to try to work with her. Even though I said I'm not a fully trained therapist, this is something that I have been

training to become. I just went through this month long training. And so I'd be willing to work with you and I would get a group of my friends, particularly female friends, to come and create a safe space around you and you could come to my house and work and we would work with you to try to help you integrate it. And so she agreed to do that. And so we created this context. The first MDMA experience that she had turned out to be like a tour of the traumatic experiences of her life. This violent rape and assault, where she was almost left for dead, was not the only trauma that she had. There was a series of those other traumas that she had kidnapped when she was young, different things, and she'd grown up in Colombia, was South America.

So we got a tour of all of the various traumas in her life. And it was progress. A lot of tears, a lot of processing. She didn't feel as hopeless, but it didn't feel like it had sort of solved her problem. So I thought, let's switch to LSD for the next experience. And she agreed to do that. Just to say that the first use of a psychedelic for treating PTSD was done by a Dutch psychiatrist, Dr. John Bastian's, and he had done this in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and he did LSD for what he called concentration camps syndrome. So it was for people that were in the concentration camps traumatized by that, and that he had found that LSD would bring a lot of the memories back to the surface, and then they could try to process them.

But LSD doesn't really reduce the fear. There's an Israeli Holocaust writer, Kutsetnik, which was his concentration camp number, and then his number who wrote a book called Shaviti, a vision, which is tremendous because he went to get LSD therapy with Dr. Bastian's and this is a book about his therapy. And it was very difficult and a bunch of my Israeli relatives knew him and said that it helped him, but he was still tormented a lot. So in any case, with Marcelo,

he does have tied it to switch to LSD. And so during the LSD experience, a lot of these memories again resurfaced. What amount of time was separated between them two weeks? So it's really important to integrate the experience before you're ready to do it again. So during the LSD experience, what happened was that she started having this vision of a double sun. She was on a foreign planet and there was a double sun and she was baking to death and it was

just terrifying to her. And she was stuck. She couldn't process it. It was just overwhelming fear. And so I suggested that she take half a dose of MDMA. Full dose is like 125 milligrams, so about 62 and a half. And I thought the MDMA would soften the LSD and might help her process it. And it turned out that's what happened. And so once she took the MDMA, it condensed from this symbolic foreign thing to actually her life where after she was raped and beaten and thrown out of the car and left under the sun, sort of way out to die. So it condensed, the MDMA helped it turn into this experience that had actually happened to her.

And then she was stirring to able to share that this person had been a date rape situation. And there was times where she was seeing me as the rapist. My feet were turning into his feet, then they turned back to my feet, different kind of things. And so you still had females there as well? Not at this one time, but around her and before and after. But at this point, it was just her and I. So I felt like I could take these projections onto me because that wasn't really me. And so she was able to sort of clarify that she was seeing the world through her own distrust through what had happened in the past. She wasn't sure what she could trust through her own filters.

And then when she could sort of feel more safe that it was me and not the rapist, at one point I asked her when I realized it was date rape, I said, what did you like about this guy? And she immediately vomited. And then she started sharing that he had liked animals. And so what she was able to do and one of the things that was making her suicidal was that she felt that she could never find love again,

because she could never trust herself. Yeah, I was just about to say, there's probably a piece of self hatred, which is at some level she made a decision to at least be with this guy in some capacity socially, right? Or maybe they had a meal together or something. And it's like her judgment failed her is probably part of this pain. Yeah, very much so.

Yeah. Man, she could never trust herself. So how could she find love? Because it could always turn into something like another date rate. But the fact that she could go back and say, he liked animals. Okay. So now I could know that somebody else who likes animals doesn't mean that I should automatically trust them. She was recovering her ability to be discerning.

You know, that's a really interesting story because it illustrates something I don't think I've ever thought of until you said it, which is that a woman who's been raped in that situation has maybe an additional level of trauma that the equally tragic woman who gets yanked into the alleyway by some stranger doesn't have which is this sense of this loss of self trust and maybe even this sort of self-loathing of how could I have possibly let myself get into this situation. Yeah, I think that's what made Marcellus so suicidal is that knowing that she led herself into this in a way or she had made some fundamental misjudgment, causing her to question everything that she would then do

in the future. And so I think when she was able to sort of say, yes, he liked animals, but that's not a reason to automatically trust people. She was starting to regain her discernment and regain her ability to feel hope that maybe she could go out and find out. Were you afraid during this situation?

I mean, I can't imagine what it would be like to be flying by the seat of my pants in a situation like that. You're dealing with an incredibly fragile woman who is broken and on the verge of something awful. And by your own admission, you're not qualified to be doing this yet, but at the same time, there's no alternative. It would seem which puts you in a tough situation.

I mean, how frightened were you? Once she agreed not to commit suicide, that reduced my fear a lot. And then I did see progress from the first MDMA experience. And she did too. So that made it less scary. And also, I've had my own terrifying blockages with LSD, where I reached places, where I wasn't able to really make any further progress, wasn't able to integrate it. So it was scary, but ones I could see that the MDMA was taking an effect once it moved

from something that she was just overwhelmed, and then that she was able to process it, then my fear went down. And then when I saw her throw up and... It's almost like she was purging. Yeah, very much. It was like this, I think what did you like about him? The fact that she immediately threw up, that was a clue that that was kind of part of the thing that was keeping her. So this happened in 84? This happened in 84. And that was the breakthrough. I mean, she didn't have any more sessions. We just did two sessions. And then she felt able to also this person had told her that if she ever talked about what happened, he'd kill her.

And so even though this was years before, the fact that she hadn't been able to talk about it was Prisoner in her own mind. And so being able to talk about it and see that even though he was a cotton in a way The fear was still implanted in her, but that she could overcome that she could start talking about it was also freeing for her. So a year later you watch this molecule that you believe has incredible potential. You watch it get scheduled as one and you realize it's only going to be more difficult for patients like this woman to experience what she experienced. And at that moment in time, because one of the things that so impressive about the work you've done at Maps

is the, well, one, it's just been relentless. It's hard to, as someone myself who has dabbled in the sort of non-profit slash policy world only to immediately realize like this is not for me, it's the fortitude with which you can do it. But also, it's sort of the clarity of purpose. Now, I wanna make sure we talk about certain concepts like the Breakthrough Therapy designation, which is such an important piece of this story. But before we get to that, I guess what I want to ask you is,

in 1985, 1986, how much of what would transpire over the next 30 years was clear to you. In other words, how much of this strategy of we find an indication for which it is crystal clear that this is valuable, the best indication would be one for which there is no other therapy hence this notion of breakthrough therapy. Did you think that that was going to be PTSD? I mean, what were you thinking about? You hadn't even started at grad school.

Yeah, but I was still a non-agragile. Yeah, because your PhD is basically geared towards getting you ready to fight this fight. Yeah, I think when I look back on my life, it was really at this period when I was 18 and 1972, when I felt like I might be going to jail for being a draft researcher, I just felt like the contribution I could make to the world, that this support from my family, this multi-generational process that permitted me to look at deeper threats, that I was terrified of the world and terrified of what happens and terrified of our own human potential for murder and genocide. And that I felt that I had this rare gift from my family,

this freedom to choose what I thought would be the most strategic thing I could imagine, which was helping people to realize that we have more in common than separate, and that we're all part of one big family, and that you shouldn't dehumanize and kill. That decision at age 18, now that I've recently, in November, turned 65, it's always made sense. So I feel incredibly lucky and fortunate that something that I stumbled on at age 18, still at this other period of my life, still makes sense. And it has made sense continually.

And I've also thought that if not but for an accident of birth, I could have been born earlier, I could have been in the concentration camps or I could have been sent off to Vietnam or incinerated in nuclear warfare, that I always felt that whatever the struggles were that I was having were nothing compared to what a lot of struggles that other people had to go through. And that this dream that I had of a Holocaust survivor telling me to be a psychedelic therapist, that that's where the motivation came from, that I had this rare opportunity to try to work on long-term threats that didn't have to directly lead to a job that didn't exist. So when I was 18, I thought I would be an underground psychedelic therapist.

The first day in the office of President Carter, he pardoned all the draft resistors. So that started me starting to think that I could have an above ground career. But it's a far away from being pardoned as a draft resistor to the legalization of psychedelics. Are you saying that that was just your first clue that the ice was melting a little bit? I identified myself as a counterculture drug using criminal. So at age 18,

that was my self-identity. Counterculture drug using criminal. A little bit of the criminal part was taken away, and then I thought I could sort of rejoin society in a certain way, but I was still criminal from using psychedelics. Going to college was now in 82, starting was now psychedelics were forefront, but they were always what I had been planning to in this 10-year period that I was building houses and preparing for doing this. And then the transition of being politically involved with a nonprofit in 84, and then starting maps in 86, that also changed my attitude. The fact that there was a non-profit that this friend had started John Lamby connected with Buckham Mr. Fuller, the Rhythmic Metabolic Design Lab. I started realizing that that was

part of the system, this non-profit, and that the system permits you to fight the system. So I was sort of outgrowing this idea of myself as counterculture and seeing that you could work within and that there are opportunities for reform from inside. And then the work with Marcella in 1984 and seeing her continually get better over time as the demonization of MDMA increased. And as all of this NIDA nationally shown drug abuse funded research, started talking about MDMA neurotoxicity and all the concerns about hypothermia and hyponitramia

and just the demonization of MDMA, the blocking of all MDMA research, the whole part of that. The big transition for me, once MDMA was criminalized by the DEAN emergency basis, the judge in 86 said it should be schedule three. The DEA rejected those recommendations, and then we sued in the appeal score. And we won twice in the appeal score. Both of the time, the appeal score, it tends to tell agencies what you did is wrong. They don't normally say you should do this. They just say what you did is wrong. Go back and rethink it. Do they have authority to do anything other than just make a formal position on what was done? Yeah. So for example in school integration, sometimes courts will take over school systems.

Courts can actually compel the appeal squirts can compel. But this is unbelievable. I mean, you have the DEA judge says make it schedule three. And then you have two subsequent appeals saying that basically, what the judge said they agreed with or what the DEA did was incorrect. Yes, that's what they said. So the rationale for the DEA to reject the recommendation, the first rationale was that the DEA said they didn't have the authority to reschedule, only the FDA did. The Control Substances Act of 1970 clearly says

either the Attorney General or the HHS Secretary either could reschedule to make the drug into a medicine. And the FDA sits under which branch? HHS. HHS, which is where, yeah, okay. And the DEA sits under what? The Attorney General. The AG.

And you're saying the Control Substance Act made it clear either had the power to reschedule. So the DEA basically said, it's sort of ironic. They had the power to schedule, but not reschedule. That's what they're basically claiming. Yeah. So the DEA lawyers, as I've learned over the decades, they don't really care if their arguments are flawed because they delay. So delay is the same as victory to them. So if they put out a ruling that's wrong, it can take you years to go through the appeals court. And so justice delayed is justice denied. So they don't care about their arguments, they just want to delay. So the first argument they made was that they didn't have the authority. So the

appeals court said, yes, you do. Then they came up with an eight-part standard that they said, you have to meet these standards in order for us to reschedule. To whom? The DEA lawyers would then put a new ruling in the federal register, justifying why they rejected the administrative law judges' recommendation. And so their new rationale was, okay, here's our eight-part standard. So then we appealed on that because that was essentially the same as FDA. And if the Congress had wanted the FDA to be the only agency to reschedule, that would have been one thing. But the fact that they gave the

DEA the authority to do it, the DEA couldn't say it's exactly the same thing as the FDA. Why didn't you at this point go to the FDA, which is the problem with the DEA at this point is the cognitive dissonance is overwhelming. You're asking someone who's done something to openly acknowledge what they've done was incorrect, so why not go to a new body? Well, we were also going to the FDA, but the FDA was rejecting all the protocols. So this was a period of time when the backlash against psychedelic research was so strong that the FDA was rejecting every single protocol. And so we were trying to go to the FDA, but they weren't responsive either. And so then the courts rejected this eight-part standard as being too equivalent to the FDA.

And then the DEA came up with a five-part standard, which the court accepted, which is still essentially the FDA. You still need Phase 3 studies. And so basically the DEA gave away their authority to reschedule to the FDA, because they didn't want to reschedule. They wanted to schedule, but not reschedule. Is that pretty much how it stands today? Yeah, the DEA is, but what's happened a few years ago is that Congress passed a law. It was always the case that if FDA says a drug is a medicine, the DEA must reschedule, but they didn't have a time limit.

So now they have 90 days that they have to reschedule. So we had MDMA criminalized in 85, kept that way in 86, I start maps, and then I thought that I would go and get a clinical psych PhD. So I graduated college in 87 with my good Friday follow-up as my senior thesis. And because new college didn't have any grades, I knew that to get into graduate school, I had to really study well on the GREs. So I did grade on the GREs. I had incredible recommendations from this professor that had been head of the PhD program in psychology and social change at Harvard who had retired in Sarasota and who was my special teacher every semester. I had one class with him on psychedelic. So in case, I tried to get into clinical psych PhD programs and nobody would let me

in because I told him I want to do empty may research and I was saying we can't do it now, but I don't want to spend five years getting a PhD and then I'm about to do my dissertation and then you tell me you won't let me do it. So I want to tell you what I want to do now and if we get there and the system won't let me do it, I'll do something else. It's very hard to get into clinical psych PhD programs, but I came very close a couple times in programs that had psychotherapy outcome research as their specialties. And so I wasn't in the end able to get in. And so I was confused because since 1972 till now it was 1988 that I had been on this

track for clinical psych PhD, learn how to do psychotherapy, outcome research, with psychedelics. So I went home after the last rejection. I said, I'm gonna figure out what I need to do with my life. And so I decided to smoke marijuana and think about it. And marijuana gives me a way to think about things from a different perspective. I'll be trapped in a box.

And so I had this realization that I want too much too soon, that I want to do the science, but the politics is in the way. And so I'm leaping over, the culture isn't ready, I want too much too soon. And so I thought, okay, if I want to do the science, but the politics is in the way, maybe I have to study the politics. And I remembered reading an interview in Harper's Magazine with several people talking about drug policy,

and one of them was a professor at Harvard at the Kennedy School Government, Mark Climan, and they talked about our lawsuit against the DEA. I wasn't even aware of public policy schools or the Kennedy School Government, but I remember that he had mentioned our lawsuit, so I called him up, and I said, I want to study the politics, I can't do the research, I want to do, I can't do the education I want. So would you be in my mentor?" And he said, if you can get into the Kennedy School, I would be glad to be your mentor. And so I applied and I managed to get in. I started the token left wing hippie of the year. You can't be school. And so that also started changing who I thought I was. And now I'm even more becoming part of the system, rather than

becoming part of the counter culture. Now I'm at the Kennedy School of Government was. And now I'm even more becoming part of the system rather than becoming part of the counterculture. Now I'm at the Kennedy School of Government Harvard and people are planning careers in the federal government. And so what they had was there was a program called the Presidential Management Internships. Now the Presidential Management Fellowship. And so it's for people who want careers in the federal government. It's a competitive situation. Federal employees watch you as you do group exercises. There's all sorts of essays and things. And so I managed to, it was at the same time

that the Native American church was having a Supreme Court case about whether the pay-o-d would be protected by religious freedom. So that was my essay. I was able to write an essay about a Supreme Court case but it happened to be about psychedelics. And so I managed to get a presidential management internship. And then I tried to get a job at the FDA. I figured I want to work at the FDA.

And coincidentally, in 1990, is when I got my masters and when I was applying for this job at the FDA, the group that regulated psychedelics switched in 1990 to a new group. So the group that had blocked research basically for two decades was now out of the picture and a new group took over. And my application ended up with this new group.

It was called the pilot drug evaluation staff. They were there in response to the AIDS epidemic where the FDA had been criticized for being too slow to approve drugs. This was a group that was gonna review new ways to approve drugs in faster. And so they were looking around to the FDA to other parts of the FDA,

which groups had drugs that they didn't care about that they could take over. So they'd have real life examples and the schedule one drugs had been blocked by Paul Lieber was this guy who in charge of the division that took care of schedule one drugs and So that he gave them up to this pilot drug evaluation staff. My application ended up with them and we went through about a six month process of review Whether I would be able to get this FDA job, including interviews with the number two guy, Karl Pek, who was in charge of all drug research at FDA. And the FDA decided that they would hire me. It was great, I was really excited. I was willing to give up doing drugs.

I was willing to wear a suit and die and do all this stuff to go work into the FDA for a couple of years, learn how they work and then come back and run maps and try to make MD main to medicine. But at the last minute, right before I got hired, the DEA told the FDA that they would refuse to work with me because I'd sued them before. And this is the branch of the FDA that works with scheduled drugs that deal with the DEA.

So the FDA said that I couldn't be hired, but they would work with me informally. It's hard to be listening to this story and have a lot of empathy for the DEA. I'm trying to sort of put my DEA hat on and sort of say, like, these are good people. They're doing their job. They believe that they're doing the right thing, but they really come across as a petty bunch of, I don't know what the right word is, but just sort of intellectually, not particularly curious, not especially thoughtful. I mean, to say we're not going to work with this guy, just strikes me as a bit

petty. Oh, extremely. Yeah. And then shunning responsibility deciding, well, we're going to schedule something, but we don't want to do schedule it. But my guess is if anybody's able to muster up some empathy for the DEA at the same time, it's also you. Nothing about you resonates this disdain for them. It's more of a, gosh, I wish I could help them see what I see and what I've seen and the potential benefit of this. Yeah, and what has really changed is I have started having some sympathy for the police and how difficult their job is. And so actually we have a senior retired DEA official who is now acting as a consultant

for us. The reason is because his son went into the military and has PTSD and uses cannabis for his PTSD. So that changed the father's mind and actually October of last year, 2018, this fellow Tony Colson, former from the DEA arranged for us to give a talk at the International Association of Chiefs of Police. So it's a convention that was all over the world. It was 10,000 police chiefs and police officers.

So we actually had a veteran, one of our therapist, me, and our DEA consultant speak. And what's so exciting for me, what happened there, is that it was such a politically ripe environment for President Trump that two days before we were supposed to speak, he decided he would speak there. And they scheduled his talk at the same time as ours. And almost everybody went to his talk. But 30 people came to our talk, including a psychologist who works for the police, a police officer who helps other police with psychological issues. And he said that at the end of our talk, he wanted to go through our training. And he has. And so next week, I'm meeting with he's actually from the Boston area. So I'm meeting with his police

chiefs about having police with trauma volunteer for our study. That was a big step for me is trying to have sympathy for the police. And what's also ironic is that my sister, an oldest of four of two brothers and a sister, both brothers have done MDMA, but my sister will never do a drug. She's very conservative in that way. Her son, her oldest son, Nathaniel, my nephew,

is now a police officer in Washington, DC. So I have a police officer in the family. So all these us and them kind of barriers are dissolving. And in December of 2017, we had a meeting with the police, with the DEA headquarters. And it was to talk about what's called expanded access, which is compassionate use of MDMA. And all sorts of people are gonna wanna do that.

And they're also gonna need these DEA schedule and licenses. So we had a meeting with the DEA to talk about that with our consultant again to prepare them for all these licenses. And they said that they would do that. One thing happened that was so personally meaningful is that you can't go to DEA without an escort when they take you into the building. They don't want you to see somebody's desk or whatever. So we had an escort.

So we're in this elevator with the escort. And we're going up to the fourth floor to where our meeting is. And for whatever reason, it's only our team and this SQR. And the door opens on the second floor. The elevator door, nobody got in, nobody got out, we didn't press number two. But for whatever reason, the door opens on the second floor closes, and then we go up to our meeting. And DEA consultant whispers to me that the second floor is where the courtroom is. So it was previously in that building in 2005,

suing the DEA, not on MDMA, but on another lawsuit for Emeir Wana, trying to get a license to grow Emeir Wana. So it felt like the door opened on the past conflict that we had with the DEA and then closed, we noticed it, but nobody else noticed it and then we went up to have a cooperative meeting about how we could work together with the DEA and then closed, we noticed it, but nobody else noticed it, and then we went up to have a cooperative meeting about how we could work together with the DEA. And the one part of the meeting that went flat, everything was really good. They're willing to give all these licenses. I just said to them,

if any of you have DEA officials or officers that you know that have trauma that are in cities where we have studies, they can volunteer for our project. And nobody smiled, nobody offered, but I just wanted them to know that this is for them too. That I did have that level of compassion for them. And I knew it would be awkward for me to say it, but I felt like I had to say that. That this is for them too. And now I understand more and more about how police are traumatized. So this notion of how to explain it, there's a really nice video you guys made. It's a maps video. It's like maybe 10 minutes long. It can't be that old because Sasha died how many years ago? Oh, quite a few.

Like 2014 maybe? Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what you're. It was that year because at the end of the video it notes that he died about four months after the filming. Like I said, it's maybe 10 minutes long but there were many survivors in it talking about their experiences with MDMA. And it's very moving. Do you know the video I'm talking about? We'll find this one and we'll link to it. But it's

worth someone who either doesn't have experience with PTSD, trauma, MDMA who maybe paused for a moment and watched that and get a sense of what it is that you saw in 1984 that kind of created an eternal flame inside of you that said, look until every person who has experienced trauma or is suffering from PTSD, at least has the opportunity to experience this type of therapy. I'm not really going to stop. That's sort of what I sense in how you talk about this. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I mean, even if I'd never discovered MDMA, I would have tried to legitimize LSD in the classics like Adelix, but seeing that there was a softer, gentler way of working with MDMA, I feel that

it's very rare that people who work on social justice movements live to see the change that they're working for, because a lot of these things are multi-generational. If you think about civil rights or under slavery, yes, of course. Yeah, I think that through an accident of history, I was born just at the right time, so that there was this backlash that I was able to see for its psychedelics, classic psychedelics, then this backlash against MDMA, but now I might actually live to see the medicalization of psychedelics. And that would be an arc of a life contained, it would be incredible. When did you guys receive the breakthrough therapy designation?

Start a maps in 86. So from 86 to 92, we had five different protocols all rejected by the FDA. And again, just for the listener to understand what we're talking about, you are proposing to the FDA clinical trials that would necessitate the FDA to create an exemption for the use of a schedule one drug is a big deal.

Yes, and DEA would also have to approve it as well, and institutional review boards are ethics committees. And then in California, that's the only state that actually has an additional review body for scheduled drugs. So it is a lot of regulatory affairs, and I did learn a lot about it in the Kennedy School how to work through it. So in 92, the group at the FDA that regulated psychedelics and switched, and that group decided to put psychedelics on a track for a rescience.

So from 92, we got permission for the Phase I Safety Study, the first dose response, Phase I Safety Study. That took us till about 96. Wow, I just want to pause for a second. That's 10 years of your life. And you spent six of them just getting rejected. Being told you're not even allowed to play the game, get off the field. Then you spend four years demonstrating what you pretty much know is already true, which is at a given range of doses, there's no toxicity to this drug. But of course, that is a hoop you must jump through understandably.

Yeah, we had to do that. And then the doctor that I was working with, Charlie Grove. Sorry, one other technical question. At any point in here, did you have to file an IND? All the protocols that were rejected were INDs. Yeah. Maybe explain to folks what that is and why that matters. IND stands for Investigational New Drug.

It's the formal application to do research with a drug to try to make it into a medicine. Before that, actually in 1985, even before maps, I funded through this first non-profit animal studies, 28-day animal toxicity studies in the dog and the rat. So that was a requirement to do phase one or phase two research. You have to have certain animal toxicity studies. So I did that already. We had our MDMA manufactured by Dave Nichols at Purdue University in 1985. We're still using some of that today, 34 years later, incredible stable molecule. We've had new MDMA made for phase three and for commercial uses, if we succeed.

But it took till around 96 to get the safety study done and then Charlie Grove, the psychiatrist that we were working with, we were proposing a study on cancer patients with anxiety. I knew about PTSD, but there was such a concern about neurotoxicity, which was vastly exaggerated. Yeah, the other thing that people talked about a lot was Parkinsonian-like symptoms. My recollection is a lot of that research, quote unquote, research has been quite debunked. Is that the case? A hundred percent debunk, because it turns out that the only claims that Parkinson were again

from Georgia Cardi and Unimican, these researchers that were at Johns Hopkins funded by NIDA, and they claimed, well, from the middle 80s to near the end of the 90s, they were focused on MDMA supposedly hurting the serotonin system and causing functional consequences of a serious nature so that nobody should even ever get MDMA even once. It was so serious. One dose, functional brain damage, stay away from it completely, shouldn't even be researched.

I was taught that in medical school. In 97, taking pharmacology, it was, this is a drug that can permanently alter your serotonin receptors. Yeah, totally not true. But we started challenging that. So actually, Georgia Cardi was my first alliance was. So I recognized that in the 60s, there was an exaggeration of the risks by the prohibitionists

and denial of research and denial of the benefits. But the advocates, like Leary, were exaggerating the benefits and both sides were doing the same thing. So I felt that maps had to be the expert on the benefits and on the risks that we had to be reliable. People had to rely on our risk estimates. And so once I started working with maps in 86 my first alliance for six years basically was with George Ricardi the expert funded by knighted to look at the risks of MDMA and so I funded his first monkeys to

move from rats to monkeys. So this is a real team of rivals. Oh yeah. You are funding the person who is being sponsored by your opponent and basically suggesting things that you believe are untrue. Now, presumably, you don't believe that there's any fraud in this. It comes to that. So with Georgia Cardi, so first off was, I thought, okay, we're scientists. We want to find out what's really going on. I am very interested in what's really going on. What are the risks? I'm taking the drugs. I should know myself. Everybody should know. And we got as far as we could with the animals and in the primates we found out what was called the no-effect level for neurotoxicity. No as an NO. Yeah, so it's NOEL, no L, so no effect level. So it turns out that 5 milligrams per kilogram in a primate given every two weeks for four months.

So eight exposures every two weeks. And at 5 milligrams per kilogram, there was some nerve terminal degeneration in the primate. At 2.5 milligrams per kilogram, there was no nerve terminal degeneration. So again, I should say that there may be changes, but changes are not necessarily bad. I mean, their brains are constantly changing. And in fact, when you have therapy with MDMA, you have a reduction overall before and after in the activity in the amygdala. So certain things are definitely changing, which can be good. What were the changes that occurred phenotypically at the 5 milligram per kilogram?

Well, there's never a cell death. It's just nerve terminals degenerate. Did that manifest itself in any cognitive deficit or behavioral deficit? No. The claim was that the only functional consulants that could be identified in ecstasy users were neurocognitive consequences, supposedly memory. However, we've since done studies a member of MAPS contacted me to say that methodologically, all these studies that were done in ecstasy users were methodologically confounded because these users had done all sorts of other drugs.

So how do you say what's from MDMA? And also, there's no pre and post. It's only retrospective compared to supposedly control groups. So this guy said, I have the solution that there's a group of people that have done only MDMA, and you need to study them. And so we're right here right now just about a mile from a clean hospital, which is more psychiatric research, part of Harvard Medical School,

more psychiatric research done there than any other private institution in America. And there's some people there that are experts in neurocognitive studies. And so I told them maps will give you a grant. There's this group of people. So we gave them a $15,000 grant. It turns out that they're fallen Mormons. The study took place in Salt Lake City. A bunch of Mormons

who had never done coffee, never done tobacco, never done marijuana, never done alcohol, but had done ecstasy because it wasn't formally prohibited. And so this population did exist. So they went and did a pilot study, then they prepared the data and they submitted it to night up and they got a $1.8 million grant to a major study of people who had only used ecstasy and they found virtually nothing. There really is no strong evidence, no weak evidence, even really about neurocognitive consequences in heavy ecstasy users. And we've done neurocognitive studies in our people in our therapy studies who only get

them to do a few times. There's no evidence whatsoever. So with Georgia Cardi, though, after we found that he didn't publish the 2.5 milligram, he published the 5 milligram per kilogram where there was some evidence of neurofterminal G generation, but he didn't publish the 2.5 milligram per kilogram. So I started thinking this is not so much about science anymore. There is a political agenda, but then I went to them and I said, I don't feel hurt. How can you go even further?" And he said, well, the only thing we can do now is spinal taps. So I said, all right, I will volunteer for a spinal tap. And so it didn't

hurt that much. It was terrible. At that point in time, how often had you been at or above the five MIG per KIG dose? I had never really been above it, but most people had not been above it. So I basically said, I'll be your guinea pig, so I got a spinal tap, and I thought about it as if women could give birth, I could give birth to my spinal fluid for my purpose. And once it wasn't so bad, then I got over 30 people to volunteer for spinal taps, which were done initially at Stanford and then at Hopkins. So all of this is to say that it didn't seem like there was any harm to dopamine, was still all focused on serotonin,

it didn't seem like there was much evidence that dopamine, was still all focused on serotonin. It didn't seem like there was much evidence that there was any problems with our serotonin. Either you only get serotonin metabolites in the spinal fluid. But what then happened was that the escalating fears of the rave movement, and so the serotonin hypothesis of MDMA causing serious problems, it started being challenged more and more by other scientists, by people at the CDC Center for Disease Control. So they're neuroscientists. It started challenging this exaggerated risk estimates of serotonin. And so then what happened with George Recurdy in Unimican is they realized this is in the

end of the 90s that the serotonin damaged theories that they were using to try to block research was getting increasingly dubious and challenged. Plus, more and more people had been doing MDMA for decades and still seem fine. They published an article in science that claimed that MDMA hurt dopamine and would potentially cause Parkinson's. And that was outrageous because the spinal tap studies didn't show any evidence of harm and dopamine. Other studies had not shown any harm and dopamine.

They were just searching and they killed a bunch of the animals died during their experiments but this was published in science. Yeah it was just about to say how did science publish that they must have been something they saw. Alan Leshner who was the head of NIDA. Later left night he built it up he panned her to Congress he scared them about MDMA and other drugs he increased the budget of NIDA up to over a billion dollars a year and then he left to increased the budget of night up to over a billion dollars a year And then he left to become the president of the AAA as the American Association for the Advancement of Science which publishes science Yeah, so that former head of nighta who was the main patron of Georgia Cardi, which is a real shame I mean people listening this might not appreciate the significance of what you just said

But science and nature are the two most high impact journals in the entire field of science. So, in other words, most scientists will go their entire career and not even have the ability to submit an article to one of those journals. Let alone have an article be accepted in one of those journals. I don't believe there is an equivalent outside of science in terms of what the prestige it would mean to have your work published in that journal. So it is certainly troubling to hear that not surprising, of course, but it's not the first time I've heard these stories, but I think for the listener to understand what the implication is. This isn't the national inquiry. Right, and then there was an editorial in science that talked about

MDMA as being Russian roulette for your brain by Alan Leshner. And this study, though, that was published in science, actually just why a couple weeks ago, this paper in nature about MDMA, positively causing neurogenesis and acytocin release. And well, that's why that's so significant. Yeah, exactly. Now you have nature and science

being on book ends of this interesting story, this arc. Michael Mitofer and I and others of our lead psychiatrist, and I, we wrote a letter to science, and we said that the letter to the other, this doesn't make sense, this paper to us. You've killed a bunch of animals. Other animals have not died in experiments. You didn't give the animals the MDMA orally in the way that people normally take it. There's all this evidence that MDMA doesn't hurt, don't mean. Nobody we know has Parkinson's and so we challenged them and so what we didn't know then is that they spent a

year trying to replicate their results. So our letter did get published in science, or critical letter. But this whole year, they kept defending their studies in the media. But we later found out that they were having increasing problems in replicating their results. And they later, out of frustration, after they couldn't replicate their results, took some of the animals that had died, did an tissue analysis, and had discovered that they had given the animals methamphetamine instead of MDMA.

It's a slight mistake. It's just a slight, subtle, subtle difference. Yeah. And so they should never have published that paper because they should have known that- Did they print a retraction? They did. They had to retract it. That was 2004, end of 2003, 2004.

So that was sort of the high watermark of the fear and paranoia about MDMA neurotoxicity. Okay, so that relates to that's when we got the first approval for our first PTSD study. So Charlie Grove, after we finished the safety study, he started getting worried about MDMA being so identified with ecstasy and the wave movement and neurotoxicity. So from a procedural standpoint, you have your IND filed.

You've now documented through phase one that this is not toxic. More importantly, you're not just winning that battle there. More broadly, the scientific community is now realizing actually this is not a toxic compound whatsoever. But in some ways, that's just the end of chapter one. Chapter two is, great, you have a safe compound. Now, what is the indication? What will be the medically valid use for this compound? Yeah. We had thought initially MDMA for cancer patients with anxiety because cancer patients would die and they wouldn't live long enough to supposedly

show the effects of neurotoxicity. But Charlie, who I was going to work with on this, he decided that MDMA was too controversial and he wanted to switch to psilocybin. So that started the whole work with psilocybin with cancer patients. I knew from 84 working with Marcella, and just by the way, Marcella is now one of our lead therapists, training other therapists. She later became a therapist, so it's a tremendous success in her life. So I returned to PTSD. And Michael Mitthofer, who's our lead psychiatrist, came to me in 2000 at a conference, the first conference ever on ayahuasca in America, organized by Ralph Metzner in San Francisco. And he was a member of MAPS, but I didn't know him. And he'd also been trained in the whole

tropic breath work by Stan Groff, which I'm also trained in. So it's hyperventilation to bring out experiences that are sort of like LSD or psilocybin. So Michael came to me in 2000 and he said, I want to work with you on creating an offshore clinic somewhere in the world. Was there any developed country in the world or any country for that matter for which MDMA wasn't scheduled?

Because usually what happens is once the US schedules other countries follow suit. Yeah, so very briefly, an 85 when we were assuming the DEA, we became aware the DEA was trying to criminalize MDMA internationally through the World Health Organization, the International Treaties. That's where I went back to Robert Mueller and said, can you help set up meetings? And just for the listener, because I know you've brought Robert Mueller up again. This has no bearing. It's a different name, Mueller, yeah, this is spelled M U L L E R Yeah, and he was the assistant secretary general, you know, and so he helped me set up meetings at the World Health Organization in Geneva

So I went to Geneva in 85 and brought information there to slow down the DEA criminalizing internationally and in some Incredible coincidence the head of that committee the expert outside committee committee was Paul Graf, Stan Graf's brother, and the committee endorsed the criminalization of MDMA except for one person, Paul. And he got a little footnote in there saying that this was an important compound. He was worried that the criminalization internationally would reduce research and the encourage the nations of the world, the facility research, which led to the Swiss government from ADA to 91 permitting people to do compassionate use of MDMA and LSD. But when Michael came to me and said, so there's no place in the world because it did get criminalized internationally.

But Michael had been in St. Kits where there was a clinic that was set up for IBEGain. IBEGain is something that I very much want to research. It's for opiate addiction. We're in the massive crisis for opiate addiction. IBEGain helps people through the withdrawals and it can give them spiritual experiences and brings up what they've repressed So it can be very very helpful in both going through withdrawal and also in reducing relapse and it's illegal in the United States But legal in Canada, Mexico Multiple places. So Michael had a patient of his Guanda St. Kits and he went with. And so he came to me and said,

let's set up a clinic. Maybe we can find some place where there's MD mayor LSD, we could set up a clinic. And I said, I'm totally 100% not interested in doing that because it sort of undercuts what you're doing at maps. It's sort of like saying, again, there's so many moments in your story, Rick, where I'm sort of struck by the maturity of the hippie. You're way smarter than anybody else. I wouldn't have had the foresight to have, you just played the long game at every moment. I want to applaud you for that as someone who I just know personally, I just wouldn't have had the discipline or the foresight to have played that long game over and over and over again, which was, this is about the highest integrity at the policy level.

This is about the highest integrity at the policy level. This is about the highest integrity at the scientific level. And it's a hard decision because along the way fewer people had access to something that you felt very strongly could help them. But it was one of those examples of if it means that a few hundred people or a few thousand people are denied this opportunity today as much as that's heartbreaking. This could mean millions of people can one day have access to this and we won't sort of taint or undermine

the rigor with which we get them there. Yeah, and I've always had people in the back of my mind from the Holocaust saying, if we don't bring this forward and mainstream at, we could have another situation. We have the rise of authoritarianism, the rise of hatred for the immigrants. We have a lot of that going on right now, we can see. And so that just is further motivation for me to try to mainstream it.

Even that's where the compassion for the police comes in, that's for them as well. And so I said, Michael, I'm totally not interested in setting up offshore clinic, but I think first off there's no place. But secondly, it's about going to the heart of the system and making change happen from the inside out. A year flight is here. Your flight is in DC. Yeah, exactly. And then the US is one of our most successful exports has been the drug war. And so other countries look around at us. If the US is changing, then the drug war will erode all over the. So I said, Michael, think that now is the time we can work with the FDA. Would you work with me?

And he was an expert in PTSD. And I'm like, fantastic, because PTSD is the next thing. And now that we don't have to worry about people saying, oh, neurotoxicity, PTSD became the number one thing, the top priority. And Michael said, yes. Yeah, before we leave the toxicity and start talking about the efficacy, I just want to ask, based on everything you know today, which patients would not be good candidates for MDMA from a safety perspective?

Are there some patients that we would still say today? Because, you know, look, any drug we can say, ibuprofen shouldn't be taken by certain patients, Tylenol shouldn't be taken by certain patients. Either over the counter. Who in your mind is not a good candidate for MDMA therapy? The most important thing is people with compromised hearts, so that MDMA increases blood pressure. Not overwhelmingly, not substantially, but significantly. I could show you, but we work with people that have controlled hypertension.

People that have had uncontrolled hypertension and only recently got it controlled will say you need to do a stress test. But of all the tens of millions of doses of MDMA that are being used every year in the world, there's almost nobody ever has a heart attack, almost nobody, really. I mean, there's hardly any cases like that. So, but still, that's the concern. When people are on a lot of other psychiatric medications, we ask them all to taper off of them.

The SSRI's blunt, the effects of MDMA. There's a remote chance that MDMA could trigger a seizure. Also that seems to almost never happen, but so we will not at least initially work with people who are epileptic. I notice in the documentaries, the patients in the study have blood pressure cuffs on. Yeah, we have to monitor blood pressure and temperature.

We exclude people that are psychotic. We exclude people with schizophrenia, although I think MDMA could be very helpful with schizophrenia, but it needs a different container because we basically do outpatient. I mean, they come in for the MDMA session, which is done under supervision. They spend the night after the MDMA session, and then they get more integrative psychotherapy the next day, but then they go home. So if somebody with schizophrenia, we would want more of a...

You've got to need a longer containment window. Yeah. Bipolar, I don't think MDMA need a longer containment window. Yeah, bipolar. I don't think MDMA is likely to be helpful for people with bipolar. My brother is bipolar and he's tried MDMA and it's he had a good day, but it made him slightly manic and it didn't change things on a long term basis. Let's talk about that, actually, which is I've experienced MDMA in both settings. I've experienced MDMA in the setting of you're to music, your having fun, your out and about around other people.

I've also experienced it in a very therapeutic setting, and they're very different. It's so interesting that the same molecule could have such a different effect based on the term that gets used so often, the set and the setting, the intention and the way it's done. And I'm trying to think of the best way to explain to people the difference,

because I suspect there are people listening to this who have experienced MDMA, these have be ecstasy, Molly, a party or something like that. And can certainly speak to how you feel wonderful on it, but what we've been talking about is very different. What we've been talking about is very emotional. Anytime I've used it in this sort of therapeutic setting, it's, I mean, it's endless rivers of tears.

And it requires a lot of processing afterwards. It requires further discussion, journaling, these sorts of things. What is it about creating that setting with that intention, ideally with a therapist, and with this sort of follow-through, that transforms something that is arguably one of the most feel good drugs at a party into a drug that is healing the deepest emotional wounds that people have. I think it's the intent, and it's whether your focus is external or internal. So the best way to understand these things, they're just tools, and they're not inherently therapeutic or inherently recreational or inherently

dangerous or inherently safe. These are tools and how they're used makes all the difference. So when you take it at a party and you're externally focused and you're dancing and you're talking to other people, people still process a lot of important stuff and people have insights and can make therapeutic process. Even in recreational settings, they feel connected to this whole group, they feel less isolated.

A lot of good can come from recreational settings, but in general, people who use it in a recreational setting say they wanna have the good slice of experiences. And if something is difficult or painful, that's not what they're looking for. The thing about MDMA that's different from the classic psychedelics is you can negotiate with the content a little bit.

By the way, I feel that is completely true, Rick. I mean, psilocybin and ayahuasca are beautiful and powerful tools, but I have never for a second in using them felt like I had even a modicum of direction. I mean, I've never done bullfighting, but when you watch on TV where these guys are on the bull and they got the little taser on the bull's nuts and that's what it feels like to be on those agents at high enough doses, which is there's probably something important to be cleaned here,

but I have no idea where it's going. I have no idea what's going to come up, and I have at least personally had no ability to steer it, even if it starts going in a bad direction. Yeah, the essence of doing the classic psychedelics is the art of surrender. It's the ego dissolution, and that's exactly the difference that gives them their power, but also to me there's just a finer therapeutic line. Yeah, very much so, and that's where, like, we talked about with Marcelo, she got stuck with Elstice. She couldn't control it. She couldn't turn elsewhere, it just was so powerful, emergence, and she couldn't handle it. So there's a way in which what differentiates sort of a good reprimal badra is this resistance. So what we like to say is difficult is not the same

as bad. If you have difficult material, but you're not resisting it, you can learn from it, you can grow from it, but it's the resistance that freezes it in place and causes friction and is painful. But it's very difficult, if not impossible, to negotiate with the classics like Adelix. But with MDMA, you can so that people can say to some extent, this is material that I don't want to deal with now, and then you're out or focused, and you're not processing that. And I think unless there's a real safe setting, people are going to say that, that they don't want to deal with it, because it is frightening. So that they're put a context where you're focused inward and you're open to whatever emerges, even difficult

things, that's where the MDMA can be very, very uniquely and remarkably helpful, coming to a different relationship with these painful experiences that have happened in the past. So I think if many of the people that are in our study, not, I'd say most of them have never done MDMA before, but some of them have. And those that have say that it was so different in a recreational setting as in a therapeutic setting. And so this idea of welcoming the conflict instead of trying to just have the slice, the happy slice is what makes it a difference.

And so from 1999 to 2000 to 2016 is when we did what's called the phase two pilot studies. How many such studies were done? We did six different studies in Israel, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. And the purpose of pilot studies is to prepare for phase three. The whole purpose of phase two is to prepare for phase three, which is to show efficacy. Phase three is to show efficacy phase three is to show large scale Studies to show safety and efficacy phase two is to figure out who is your patient population? What are your doses? What is your what's your indication? Yeah? What are the people that you exclude and include and so that's where we did a whole series of studies with different patient population. So basically from 1986 when I started maps to November 29, 2016, it was 30 years of getting ready, we had what's called an end-of-phase two meeting. And that's where the FDA said yes, we could go to phase three.

And is that when the designation of breakthrough therapy was given or was that later? No, so what happens is once you end up getting permission to go to phase three, most pharmaceutical companies go to phase three, but there's a program called special protocol assessment where you can voluntary engage with FDA where you negotiate every aspect of the phase three design, plus all the other information that they want to see. And if you come to agreement, you get an agreement letter that means that the FDA is legally bound to approve the drug if you get statistically significant evidence of efficacy using this design and if no new safety problems come up. Since MDMA is unlike any other drug that the FDA has ever studied because tens of

millions of people have taken it for multiple decades, we have all this information about the safety risk. We're pretty comfortable there's going to be no new safety thing. So we went through this whole process of Special Protocol Assessment and then we applied for Breakthrough Therapy. So we got special protocol assessment and then a couple weeks later we got Breakthrough Therapy. And tell people what that means in a sentence or two? Breakthrough Therapy designation is for the most promising drugs and if you get this Breakthrough Therapy designation, the FDA partners with you to try to make it into a medicine. So you have shorter review timelines, more meetings with FDA.

And this is pegged to an indication. In this case, because the indication of PTSD has no other option that is appearing to have any medical efficacy. Well, there are two drugs that are approved by the FDA for PTSD, Zolloft and Paxil. And both of those are SSRIs that diminish symptoms, don't solve the problem and don't work in many, many people. So it's the absence of other treatments, a large group of treatment resistant people and breakthrough therapy we were able to get. So it's the most important program that the FDA has. And that was the sign that now we had reached this place of legitimacy 30 years after we had started maps.

Is the FDA ever encountered another situation that you're bringing, which is you're not presumably just trying to seek legalization for a molecule that's going to be dispensed at a pharmacy, but it's tied to a therapy. So how does the FDA think about what you're actually doing, which is administering a therapeutic protocol, not just a medication? It's new for the FDA. Yeah, they've never approved a drug therapy combination. And that is what they're being asked to do now?

Yeah. However, there have been some drugs that have special risks that they approve certain kind of educational programs that are required. So the best example there is the litamide. So the only person from the FDA that ever won the presidential medal of honor was Francis Kelsey. And she was the one in the early 60s that blocked Francis Kelsey, and she was the one in the early 60s that blocked the litamide from becoming a medicine in the U.S. It was used for mourning sickness because of all these birth defects.

Years later, decades later, the litamide became a medicine. It's useful for leprosy and some other kinds of cancers. And so the FDA developed a whole set of policy tools that they require a patient registry. Everybody who gets thalidomide is on a registry to see if there's any birth defects. There's requirements of education for the pharmacists, for the patient, for the prescriber. And so this is evolved into what's called the REMS, the risk evaluation and mitigation strategies that the FDA can now regulate different drugs according to their unique risks.

So there's never been a drug therapy combination approved by FDA, but there have been drugs where they've had different kinds of REMs to control the risks and have required certain kind of policies. So the FDA is actually learning from and with us about how to regulate psychotherapy, which they don't actually have the authority to regulate psychotherapy. But we've came to them and said, the only people that we think should be directly treating patients, if this drug is approved, is people that have learned the therapy as well as the drug. And so that's what the FDA has agreed, so that everybody who will be prescribing it and will be treating patients has to go through our training program.

So there's one phase three study that has multi-sites I'm assuming. There'll be two. There'll be two phase three studies each 100 persons depending on the effect size. We think that probably hopefully it'll be each only 100 persons each and we've enrolled 19 of the first 100. I've read that you think that this could be approved as soon as 2021. Yeah, the end of 2021 we think, but what people should also know is that because there's so many people with PTSD in America, and because we're only going to enroll, hopefully, 200 people, the FDA has a program called Expanded Access, which is Compassionate Use. Yeah, tell me about how that works. If you have a disease that nothing is health for you, and there's a drug being studied for that disease, and if the pharmaceutical company agrees, they will set up this compassionate use program where you can have access to

the drug before it's approved while phase three is still going on. So your therapist gets a special designation from the FDA and the DEA to possess and use this not yet approved agent with you? Sort of. Because it's a controlled substance, only physicians will be able to get schedule unlicenses to work. So they'll be therapists working with physicians or the physicians will be. But there's an overarching protocol that we negotiate with FDA. It's different than phase three, because for some people have to accept the risk and they

have to pay for it themselves, because the FDA doesn't use the data to approve it. So the pharmaceutical company isn't going to pay to have all these people treated. So the protocol can also be riskier patients. So we can let people in who, let's say we're talking now about certain kind of diabetes. For excessive caution, we exclude people with diabetes, even the loads of people with diabetes have done M&M, but we can let people with diabetes in expanded access. What's the concern with patients with diabetes? Some sort of vascular problems and maybe they...

Oh, but it does an ultra-blood sugar? No, it's not directly about that. It's more about a stroke or something like that. We are training now people for expanded access already, and that was the meetings we had with DEA and FDA. How long is that, for example, I wanted to... I mean, I'm not a psychiatrist nor am I a therapist in any way, shape or form. Is it even possible for just a regular job low to become certified?

Yes, it is. We have training programs where the only one's not with the training programs, but our model is a male, female, co-therapy team. And one of them needs to be licensed as a therapist or psychiatrist. But the other one doesn't. Can be a student, getting a license, can be a nurse, can be a social worker, can be somebody without a license. So what we're saying is that the two-person team works better than one person.

It's not twice as good, but most people that are traumatized don't develop PTSD. Those that do tend to have a history of trauma before them often going to childhood and attachment disorders. And so having a well-functioning male-female team as people go through their traumas can recreate sort of a loving kind of a situation that they didn't have when they were young. But we don't want to make it so that it's twice as expensive. So the idea will eventually be one person licensed therapist, the other is a student working for free to get their hours or working for lower cost or something like that. And so we are now opening up the training to people that will set up expanded access

sites. And the ideal cities where we don't have phase three sites or cities where we do have phase three sites, but where there's a lot of people that have PTSD. So to get into expanded access, you have to have treatment resistant PTSD. That means nothing else worked for you, but people can have less severe PTSD. So psychedelic clinics are going to be opening up throughout America at the end of this year. Some of us know the two who has PTSD does not have to wait until 2021 necessarily. Their best option is one, identify a place where there's an ongoing phase three trial.

You may be a candidate for it. And I assume there's no placebo. Does that mean that everybody in it will be treated? Well, in phase three, there has to be a placebo. And it's a controlled study. So when you randomize, there's a chance you'll get the therapy without the... Yeah, you either get therapy without MDMA or therapy with active NVMe. However, everybody that gets randomized to the control group, once

the study is over, they can cross over. For free. So everybody is offered in the expanded access because you're paying for it, there is no control group. Yeah, because I get asked this question all the time, Rick, even by patients and by people who know of my interest in this, which is how long do I have to wait? And it sounds like the answer is not as long as you thought, really. In theory, this year, you can find compassionate use exemption. Yeah, I think so. I think the other part, though, to say is that in our phase two

pilot studies, 23% of the people that got the therapy without active MDMA, no longer had PTSD two months after the last experimental session. So that's actually pretty good in people that are severe treatment, resistant, chronic. So I'd like to encourage people if they are thinking about it to volunteer for phase three. You will get therapy, which can be very effective.

And then in the end, you'll get MDMA, but there is a bit of sacrifice in a sense that you- You have to wait potentially. You have to wait, but we need that. So if phase three starts slowing down, FDA is gonna shut down expanded access. I just wanted to add that the psychedelic clinics that we're going to open for expanded access,

people are also being cross-trained for ketamine, and eventually these clinics will work with psilocybin. So the long-term vision is that these psychedelic clinics that we're opening initially become places where people can go for therapy for MDMA or ketamine or psilocybin, but eventually we hope that they become sites of initiation where people who don't have a clinical diagnosis

can go for psychedelic therapy for personal growth or for couples therapy or for a mystical experience. And then if it goes well in your first experience with LSD or MDMA or psionic, and then you get a license to go buy it and do it on your own. So the future is a system of licensed legalization where people have access outside of religion and outside of medicine,

but that there's also these opportunities for medical use that insurance would pay for if you have certain diagnoses. Silosibon is sort of on the heels of MDMA. Yeah. Where do you see LSD in this? How far down the line? It all depends on resources.

I mean, LSD, so we're anticipating that it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million to make a psychedelic drug and do a medicine. That's about what you will have spent to go from your phase one to three on MDMA. In the history of maps, we spent another $10 million on the phase two studies. We've spent loads of money on a lot of the political work trying to get permission, so that isn't going to be necessary anymore. So if some of these billionaires out there that have the resources, if they wanted to make LSD into a medicine. What you've done is created a playbook. I mean in many ways MDMA is far in a way the biggest lift

because you had to do everything from soup to nuts including the advocacy. Assuming MDMA is approved in 2021, there is now a playbook for how to do this with other agents and psilocybin, of course, is right on the heels. The last thing I would say as I would encourage anybody who's listening to this, whose curiosity has been peaked to watch a documentary called A Trip of Compassion,

which is, I hadn't heard of it actually until Tim Ferris told me about it. I think he had just come back from Israel, but I can't remember if he had seen it before. He's not in Israel. He's not in Israel. It's hard to watch. There's just no doubt about it.

It's very moving, but I think it's important. I think if you're listening to this and you're still a bit unclear about what Peter and Rick have been talking about, you invest an hour and a half in watching this documentary, just search Trip of Compassion and you'll find it and you can stream it for five bucks or something. I can't think of many better uses of an hour and a half of your time. And I still maintain to this day that this I acknowledge is a slightly hyperbolic statement. I'm not convinced that there is a man-made molecule that is more important than MDMA.

Again, it's hard to imagine a world with conflict if everybody had the opportunity to experience this drug. In the supportive setting. Through the lens of, we didn't talk that much about it, but I think it becomes clear when people will watch this stuff. This ability to feel another person's pain is also very powerful, and I think that's a big part of what helps the trauma victim is that someone else can feel that pain with them. They know that the person with them feels

what they're going through. And that in and of itself begins the process of alleviation. That sounds hoity, toyty. And if you haven't experienced it, I apologize. You will not know what I'm talking about. And that's okay. Yeah, the trip of compassion is about three of our

Israeli PTSD patients, and I was really study. So much of it is in Hebrew, some of it is in English, but it has English subtitles, and it's three different kinds of stories too. So you really get to see about how empty me works. Sexual abuse, it's an explosion, like sort of terrorist violence. And what was the third? The third was kidnapping. That's right, the kidnapping. Yes, yes. It's very powerful. And some of the two is where people are explaining what happened to them in a peaceful way, but others you can see how trauma is trapped in the body, too. So a lot of it is people shaking and just letting out the fears that they

sort of suppressed in their body. So there's a book by Bessel Vanderkoke who's a psychiatrist PTSD expert called the body keeps the score. Yes. And so Bessel is actually the principal investigator of our Boston site. And so we're working with the leading PTSD researchers and all over the world. And I think that MDMA will make a major, major contribution towards healing PTSD. And also why I think it's so important and why I think you may mention that as well is that it also heals multi-generational trauma. That we have conflicts that are passed on through epigenetics from generation to generation, and they can keep conflicts going for thousands of years. We can break those cycles within one generation, within one session sometimes.

I think that's the real hope is how can we move from this weight of trauma that has been plaguing humanity for thousands of years in our murderous nature, and how do we evolve from that to appreciate the other rather than being scared by the other and to not have to define ourselves by who we're not, but how we're all more connected and celebrate differences rather than be scared of them. Hey, just as a reminder, this was technically the end of my interview with Rick. However, as I mentioned in the intro, we moved the first 75 minutes or so, and we bumped it to what you are about to hear now.

This section dives really deep into Rick's background, his motivation for doing what he's doing and basically what shaped Rick into becoming the complete and utter force of nature that he is. Hope you enjoy. You dropped out of college and there was a bit of a hiatus there. What year was that? Well, I started college in 71 and dropped out in 72. And when I dropped out, I had this really important exchange with my parents, where I said basically that I wanted to drop out of college, I wanted to study LSD and become an LSD therapist and bring back psychedelic

research and I wanted them to pay for it. They were initially shocked, I would say, I'm the oldest of four kids. So I was the first one out of the nest and then here I am at college and within a few months I'm taking LSD and deciding to drop out. But what I ended up explaining to them was that they were very open-minded in different ways. And I felt that what I learned from LSD, that I was unbalanced intellectually and emotionally. I was overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually.

And the world I felt was the same. Albert Einstein said that our technology has exceeded our humanity. And so I felt that this was at a time of the height of the Cold War, and not that long after the Cuban missile crisis and this whole concern that we had this nuclear technology that we might not be able to handle. As humans, mutual assured destruction and that the world felt at risk. And so I felt that this imbalance that was in me that was

also in the world and this ability of LSD to help me emotionally and spiritually. To explain a little bit more, I was a draft resistor to Vietnam. This was during a period of time when I anticipated going to jail. I did a lot of study of non-violent resistance. I read Tolstoy and Thoreau and Emerson and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and a lot about that. And so I felt that I was not a pacifist. And so to be a conscientious objector to Vietnam, you had to be a pacifist.

I was planning to go to college and there's college to firmance, but I felt like that wasn't really the proper kind of way to protest. And I felt like running to Canada was the wrong idea. I felt that it was important to directly confront the draft and to suffer the consequences. So what I felt was the best strategic approach was to not register for the draft at all, to drain the system of the most energy,

to make them come after me. What I didn't realize is that the system itself wasn't as omnipotent as I thought it was. And roughly, I learned later, 60,000 people are so never registered for the draft. And so absolutely nothing happened to me that later became a moral dilemma. Like, do I need to tell the draft board that I didn't register so they would come and put me in jail? But at this point, I had discovered LSD and was seeing

that this move beyond ego, this sense of spiritual connection, the sense of oneness, the sense of unity, struck me as having incredible political implications. And that's a lot of what I think was going on during the 60s is that the common narrative looking back is that psychedelics gone wrong is what caused the backlash. People took it unprepared. They had psychotic episodes. They committed suicide. They jumped out of windows.

They did all these things. And therefore, the drug war was to help prevent drug abuse. When actually what I think happened more was that psychedelics went right. People had these experiences of going beyond their ego, going beyond their different ways that they identified themselves by their country, their religion, their gender, their race, their socioeconomic status, all these other ways that we define ourselves and divide ourselves. And that by having that fundamental connection to the Earth, to the planet, to everybody,

that that would be an antidote towards genocide, towards tribalism, fundamentalism, towards fear of the other. And so I thought that at a time where the world could go up in nuclear explosions, and earlier I had been traumatized by learning about the Holocaust. So I was born in 53, and I have loads of Israeli relatives who fought in the 48 war who have been there for a long time. I had distant relatives killed in the Holocaust. My grandfather came from Poland in 1920 and so his family was left behind. My other relatives came a generation before and I grew up in a town called Skokie, Illinois, and I thought everybody was Jewish. Everybody in my family knew was Jewish, but I was six years old and it's kind of a family

story about when I learned that the whole world wasn't Jewish. And then it was just a tiny, tiny fraction. And I was like, what if they're right? What if we're going to hell? And Jesus is the only way. But it made me feel like this tiny, tiny minority. And then the more that I learned about the Holocaust, I just had to wrestle with that level of magnitude of human cruelty.

But I was protected by this incredible loving family. And at the same time, I realized I had almost all of the possible ways to feel safe. So I was born in America at the peak of American power. And I sort of bought into this American exceptionalism. I was also a male. I was also the first born male child. And I was also, my family, my dad was a doctor.

My mother was a teacher, but my mother's father was an industrialist and had made a big success in business. And so we were economically secure. And I was Jewish, part of the chosen people. So I had every kind of thing to think about that I was safe and protected. Plus, when we were 12, we moved to a town called Winnetka, which was a further north, wealthier town, and people were leading different businesses and government, Donald Rumsfeld lived across

the street. And so I was, I guess, just thinking that I had the ability to make an influence on the world. And that safety gave me, I think, the sense of capacity in a way to look at bigger threats without being terrified. I also knew, as I was growing up, that my grandfather had created this trust for all of his grandchildren. By today's standards, it wasn't that much, but it was enough that I would be able to pay for food and shelter And so that meant that I didn't need to compromise with what I would do with my life I didn't have to find a job for survival. I could find a job for

Whatever I thought was most important and so There was also a period of time where I was just wrestling with this the cruelty of the Holocaust and where I was just wrestling with this, the cruelty of the Holocaust. And then as a young boy, being in school during the Cuban Missile Crisis and being told that you can hide under your desk and you might survive. And so it was the Germans were the ones doing it to the Jews. Now it's the Russians doing it to the Americans. Then it was the Vietnam War, my own country doing things. And I got to know Daniel Ellsberg and at one point he talked about how he realized that initially that he thought we were on the wrong side of the war in Vietnam and then he realized we were the wrong side. That sort of sense of the world being crazy in peril and now my

own country is wanting to send me to kill people or be killed for dubious reasons. And then I became the straf for Zister and struggling with what do I do with my life. And so I felt that I was the product of three or four generations where the third and fourth generation, my great grandparents and my grandparents, their job was survival. They left poor from pogroms, from Russian Poland. They landed in America. Then they made financial successes, and then I had the ability to look at deeper threats. So I interpreted this freedom that I had to survive, to buy food and shelter, as a charge, as a gift from generations before, for

me to look at deeper threats. And that became the threat of nuclear annihilation or, again, threats of future prejudice. And so I was just very much of a reader in high school and started reading young and thinking a lot about herman's has and kind of spirituality. And I looked at what was going on in the 60s. I initially believed all the propaganda that LSD was terrible, that it would cause chromosome damage, that it would cause chromosome damage, that it would make you crazy if you did a certain numbers of times. But the more I wised up, the more I realized that I had been fed a lot of propaganda. I actually was studying Russian to learn about the other.

My parents sent me to Russia after my junior year of high school, so I spent the summer in Russia learning the language. That would have been unusual, right, in the late 60s for an American to go to Russia. It was incredible. It was 1970. It was with 60 high school students. And we went to Samaritan in Tashkan. People they had never seen Americans. And ones that spoke Russian. It was just incredible. I opened our form to see the other. At one point where we were outside of Leningrad for most of the time for six weeks they were learning the language. I went for a walk with a Russian girl down the beach

and I just thought, wow, you're not this devil or you're not a monster, you're just a person. And then I started realizing that these are conflicts between countries, but the people aren't really necessarily hating each other, political systems, political leaders and conflict. But I did want to study the other. And so I was in my Russian class in my senior year of high school and a friend of mine knew I loved books and he gave me a book to read. I loved this book and I turned it back to him and I said, this is one of the best books I ever read. And he said, do you know that this author wrote some of this book while he was under the influence of LSD. And I'm like, that's not possible. LSD, you can't produce, it makes you crazy. And he assured me that that was true.

And so I looked into it more. It was one through over the kukus nest by Ken Gisi. And it turned out he had written some of it while it was under LSD. So that's what really was the key turning point, as far as me opening my eyes to LSD. And then when I ended up at college, it was a new college in Sarasota, Florida. It was an experimental college that had started

in the 60s and it was designed as kind of a nanodote to traditional education. So the fundamental principle was that the student's curiosity is the most important thing. I am paid the architect had designed the buildings. It was on the Ringling brothers grounds, the Ringling Circus grounds, because that's where they wintered in Sarasota. And it had no grades, it had written evaluations. It was very small classes, independent study, a lot. Everybody had to do a senior thesis. But when I got to this college, this is before I had done LSD. There was two things that they didn't put in the brochure that I didn't expect, but that both I was incredibly grateful for. One was that they had this tradition of all-night dances under the stars with psychedelics. And they had a tradition of people doing psychedelics individually for personal growth.

At the time, the average dose of LSD was 250 micrograms, so that you would go for an existential experience beyond verbal communication, abilities, and that was the standard dose. Now it's really one-fourth or one-third of that dose is the standard dose, because a lot of people got into trouble, and it was too much for them. But they had this tradition of welcoming psychedelic use, and it was brilliant people from all over the place. The other tradition that they had was surprising. There was a woman professor, a Marian Hoppen, who had studied directly with young, and she had married someone who was quite wealthy, and the school didn't have a lot of facilities,

and so they donated an Olympic-sized swimming pool outdoors to the school. And for whatever reason, it turned into a nudist colony. So I was a super shy guy in high school. For two years, I couldn't even speak to a girl, other than my mother and my sister. I was just too shy. I just couldn't even do it. Now here I'm sitting at this pool

with all these beautiful naked girls. And it felt somehow like this was a oasis of sanity that this college had created this place where we could be bringing things up from the underground from suppressed things. So sexuality, physicality, psychedelics, they were welcome. The campus police job was to protect us from the real police. They had two sets of room notes where people were living. There was one where the rooms that you were assigned, the other where the rooms where you really were living. And so they would permit guys and girls to live together on campus. And it was just this oasis of sanity in a crazy world. And then I started

deciding to do psychedelics. And so my first experience really, it was difficult because I wasn't very fluid emotionally, but it touched certain parts of my psyche that I felt that my barmystva had failed to touch. I thought the traditional rights of passage didn't work for me. I was left hungry and wanting more and didn't feel spiritual connection. And so I felt that the psychedelics really had a big potential there. And then I was reading the Whole Earth catalog by Stephen Brand and in it they had this advertisement, this review actually, for a book. And the book was by John Lilly and it was called programming and meta-programming in the

human bio-computer. And it was about the research that he did in the 50s, funded by the Navy, where he developed the flotation tank, and then he started doing LSD in the tank and trying to understand his mind as if it was a biocompute. Trying to really understand, I mean, we know enormous amounts now about how specialized different brain regions are, but they didn't really know that much back then. So this was an incredible book about LSD to go into the unconscious. And at the same time that this was happening, this was 71 and 72, this was after the backlash against the 60s. So the idealism of the 60s, the spiritually motivated move towards the start of a lot of movements,

had backlashed and had failed. And a lot of it was because of the flaws of the advocates, not just the evil system trying to squash everything, which was going on too, but there was also this sense that counterculture had failed. People talk about the 70s as the me decade, but I think a lot of it was about this, where did we go wrong? That our own instrument was flawed. So I felt like this deep work was necessary to kind of purify and to refine so that when we try to bring this back again, that it's mainstreamed and not rejected. And I started doing flotation tank sort of, we tried to create our own sensory isolation experiments with gloves and eye shades and different things.

We didn't actually have tanks at the time, but some friends and I would do a large shows of LSD and isolation environments. And I started having a lot of problems with my LSD trips. Also, in Mesklin, somebody came by campus with half a lot of problems with my LSD trips. Also, a masculine. Somebody came by campus with half a pound of masculine, so I bought all of it and capped it hundreds of capsules. And friends and I just did it for months.

And just to give you a sense of how new college was at the time, I just had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of masculine capsules in my drawer in my room. And people would come to me and they'd say, I'd like to buy some masculine. I'd say, yeah, go ahead. Here it is. Take as many as you want.

Here's the money. Leave the money. And nobody ever wrote me off. Nobody ever got in trouble. It was just this sense that this was a crazy world. The Vietnam War was raging. And here we were trying to find a new way. Now, at the time, Rick was masculine and or LSD scheduled?

Yeah. Yeah, they were both illegal. Two things I just want to interject for historical context. The first is just give folks a bit of a background on LSD when it was synthesized. It's a completely synthesized molecule, so it doesn't exist in nature, and a number of the psyched elics do exist in nature, so we can contrast that. Give me a little bit of a background on LSD. Yeah, also I'll say that Albert Hoffman, who was the Sandoz chemist, that first synthesized LSD in 38, was the sandose chemist that first synthesized LSD in 38. And they were looking for drugs that might be helpful for... Sandose, by the way, is to this day still a pharma giant. Well, sandose has been purchased by Novartis. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. The sandose makes,

like there are certain hormones, like thyroid hormones, where I actually always prefer patients get the generic sandose, like the one made by sandos. Yeah, I'm very particular about it. If they get, leave both a rock scene, I want it to be sandos. Wow, that's really important for me, symbolically, is that our, the MAP's public benefit corporation, which is what conducts our research, our drug development research was psychedelics.

It's led by a whole group of women who came from Novartis. So we have the, the sandos, the budget. Yeah, training. So we have the Sandos relationship. Yeah, training. So we've got big firm. So what was Albert's motivation or the motivation of the corporation?

Yeah, they were looking for drugs for a stopping postpartum bleeding. Airgott has been used for that purpose. And so Albert was doing various derivatives from Airgott and then chemically modifying them. So LSD25 is in the 25th of the series. And they gave it to a bunch of animals and found nothing interesting. And in the height of World War 2 and 43, after Albert had finished some other bit of work, he had what he called a peculiar

pre-centiment that this drug that had been studied and abandoned might have some potential. He almost never did that, is gone back to drugs that he'd invented that had been tested in animals and found to be of no interest to sandals. He almost never went back. So he writes a lot about this peculiar pre-centiment that he had and whether this was some kind of calling

or so he re-synthesized it in April 16th of 1943. So this was five years after he had originally basically come to the conclusion this was not going to have any efficacy for postpartum bleeding. Yeah, yeah or other things too I mean they were looking for other things as well. Maybe it had other potential purposes, but five years later, he resynthesized it. And during this reed synthesis process, and he's an incredibly meticulous Swiss chemist. He didn't know how he might have contaminated himself, but he started closing his eyes

and seeing colors and visions. It lasted for a couple hours and kind of went away, but it was a weird kind of an experience for him. And he thought maybe, maybe somehow he had contaminated himself with this LSD25 that he was manufacturing. And so that was on a Friday, April 16, 1943. And so he decided over the weekend that he would do a planned experiment on Monday the 19th.

And it would take a tiny fraction of this drug that he thought would have no effect, but he would try to see if there was something to it, if his visions that he had on Friday were related to this drug. And so he took 250 micrograms, 250 millions of a gram. And during that experience,

he went through this similar kind of vision. So he became convinced that this was the cause of what had happened on Friday. But it got stronger and stronger and stronger. And he was starting to lose his normal frame of reference and worrying that he had poisoned himself and that he was going to die. And he started feeling like he was going to die. And so he ended up deciding that he would leave the laboratory and he would go home. And so he wrote his bicycle. So now

Tom Roberts is a psychologist who helped trans-person psychology is called a bicycle day. And so now it's celebrated around the world that he took his bicycle home while he was tripping. And there's been videos made about this. But Albert gets home and they call his wife and tell his wife that he might be dying. They get milk from a neighbor because they thought milk would be an antidote and he drinks gallon of milk and stuff. And none of this helps. And he goes through this whole existential crisis.

But then in the end, he actually doesn't die. And then he has spiritual experiences. He's written about it. It's beautiful. LSD My Problem, Child by Albert Hoffman. We've actually about it. It's beautiful. LSD, my problem, child by over half an, we've actually maps, published that book. We just got 3,500 copies of it delivered on Monday. And so it's a beautiful book about the origins of LSD. And this was just something that Albert was shocked about. And then in the morning, he felt great. And

so he thought that this drug was like a temporary voyage into insanity. So they called it psychotomymatic, meaning it mimics psychosis. And they started sharing it, sand hosted, they started... Well, first off, Albert's bosses didn't believe that this could be possible, that a drug in that small amount could actually have such an effect. It's worth noting for a listener, what you said was micrograms. So you said 250 micrograms. So you said 250 micrograms. But if any person thinking about a drug that they take, if you take a drug for your blood

pressure or your cholesterol or an antibiotic, these are virtually always in milligrams, which is 1000 times greater. So 250 milligrams is 1000 times more than 250 micrograms. Turns out synthroid or drugs for thyroid are some of the few drugs that are actually dosed in micrograms. But you're right, this is a very potent agent to be at the level of millions of grams to reach significant clinical feeling. I mean, they obviously at the time didn't know what it was doing, but they knew that they were dealing with something potent. So several of Albert's bosses didn't believe him, and they tried LSD as well. And then they were persuaded that it really was from the LSD.

And then they started trying to figure out what they do with this incredible drug. And so they started shipping it around to different researchers to see if they would look into it. They said, this could be used for psychiatry to help you have a temporary voyage into insanity. The first research in the United States was in 1949 at Harvard, and they ended up circulating it to different places in the 50s and the middle 50s they sent it to Czech Republic. That's where Stan Graf ended up using it in the middle 50s. But it also came to the attention of the military and began this whole effort to study mind control drugs and what they called non-leithole incapacidents.

And it became tangled up in the CIA. They had a project called MK-Ultra. They thought it would be good for certificially dosing world leaders and making them embarrassed when they're giving speeches or different things. Incapacitating a whole group of army people, they tried to see if they could do it in aerosol sprays. So it had this dual track of military applications, which were mostly kept secret, and then also therapeutic or temporary voyage to insanity.

But more people who took it realized that it wasn't temporary insanity. It was something different. And that there was this spiritual aspect to it. It started being used in different ways for psychotherapy. In particular, it was being used for alcoholism and heron addiction in the 50s and in the 60s. And in the 50s W. Bill Wilson, who started AA, actually tried LSD. His first experience of a psychedelic was with Beledana, which was kind of something used by the witches. It was more disorienting. But during his belladonic experience, he decided to get sober. And then years later, when this work with LSD was being developed, he explored it. And so, Bill W. did LSD and thought

it had tremendous potential for treatment of alcoholism. And it helps the spiritual sense, and it also brings to the surface things that people have suppressed. And so it's good for psychotherapy, and then it's also good for building sources of strength from these kind of spiritual experiences. What also happened is the CIA funded some expeditions, sent people to Mexico with Gordon Wassen in 5758 to search for mushrooms for other drugs that might be psychedelic. Now, why did they realize that was it based on the similarity and chemical structure between a completely synthesized molecule like LSD and what they knew were similar molecules

that would exist in nature? Well, mescaline had been extracted, synthesized from peyote in like 1895 or so. And it had been used in research a lot in the 20s and 30s, mostly in Europe. Also William James, the father of American psychology, had experimented also in like 1896 or so with nitrous oxide and wrote about it in the varieties of religious experience. So there was already knowledge about how other substances had these properties. I mean, the word psychedelic didn't get developed until 1958 by Humphrey Osman, who wrote this poem to Aldous Huxley. I'll just say that you're wearing the doors.

I've got a door. I'm sure. I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a door.

I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a door. I've got a name from the doors of perception, which I read in high school and became obsessed with the band. Yeah. And so that was from Aldous Huxley's discussion about his mescaline experiences, his writing about that. And so there was this whole awareness of these kind of substances. And so there was this expedition, Gordon Watson was going to track down this idea that mushrooms

might be used as spiritual tools by the Mazatech Indians, and the CIA had somebody go along secretly as part of that expedition. And once they got these mushrooms, they did have these psychedelic experiences, but they gave it to a bunch of different chemists, and they weren't able to figure out what was in it, what was the active ingredient. So they decided they would send it to Albert Hoffman. And Albert was able to figure out that the active ingredient was psilocybin. And the reason he said that he was able to figure it out

and nobody else was, is that he was willing to drink the different fractions. And see which produced the similar effect to what he had already known. Yeah, and then he would continue trying to separate it out to find out what was the active ingredient. Oh my God, do you want to talk about the citizen scientist, right?

Oh, yeah, but he's, again, working for sandows at the time. And so Albert figured it out. So 15 years after he discovered LSD in 43, discovered really the psychedelic properties, he was the one that isolated cell sivine. And then shortly after that, there was this whole effort to understand other sources in nature of psychedelics. And it turns out that morning laryseeds have

also been used for psychedelic properties. And then Albert looked at that. And morning laryseeds have LSA, which is lysergic acid amide, and LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide. So there is, even though LSD came from airgot, was modified so that it doesn't appear in nature. Decades later, Albert was able to figure out that there is something in nature that's quite similar to LSD. It's not the same, and LSD I think is more powerful, more effective. People have had a tradition of morniglory seeds for getting high in different ways.

So because I know Michael Pollan has done a great job writing about this and I would encourage anyone who's interested in this topic to sort of go back and read his book, How to Change Your Mind, where he details the history. There is an important point I want you to bring up because his legacy in many ways provides a little bit of an undercurrent of the work you've done, and that is the work of Timothy Leary. Where does Leary fit into this story specifically? So, Leary was an incredible psychologist who had written a book called the interpersonal diagnosis of personality. That was Harold Adesbrilyan. It was the most important psychology book of the year.

This is like 5859. He was working for Kaiser out in California as a Kaiser psychologist. He was very rebellious kind of guy. He had been in West Point and got kicked out of West Point for, I think, sharing alcohol and doing different things. And he had actually had a friend who was involved in the CIA who was a psychologist, did a lot of work on creativity, Frank Barron. And Frank Barron had had knowledge about the mushrooms and had tried them.

And he recommended to Timothy Leary that he tried these mushrooms. And then Tim had now also been offered this appointment at Harvard. So he got this appointment at Harvard before he'd even done any kind of psychedelics. Then he does these mushrooms, and he thinks that he learned more from these mushroom experience than in his entire time in school about the mind. And so he started trying to study psychedelics and got interested mostly again in psilocybin.

And so there was a series of projects that Tim was here at Harvard only for three years from 60 to 63. I've done long-term follow-ups to two of his main studies that he did at Harvard. One was the Good Friday experiment that actually Walter Panky, who was a doctor and a minister, did this for PhD and Tim was his PhD thesis advisor. Can you explain that experiment to people? Yeah. I'd say the other is the Concert Prison Experiment, also explain. So, because of Aldous Huxley and writing about Dora's perception and writing about the sort of spiritual aspects of masculine and even Bill W. feeling that LSD had spiritual capacities.

So, what Walter Pankey wanted to do was originally he was interested in doing something about the sex lives of Radcliffe students, which his wife wasn't too happy about. And he met Tim and Tim suggested that they do something with psychedelics. And since Walter Pankey was both doctor and minister, they decided to look scientifically at whether psychedelics really could produce spiritual mystical experiences, whether they were similar, identical, pseudo, whatever. And so the first thing that Walter Pankey did was he spent a year trying to devise a questionnaire to evaluate what the mystical experience was. Aldous Huxley had talked about the perennial philosophy that keeps coming up. And so what

Walter did was he looked at WT Stase who had done work on the theory of the philosophy of religion and how you describe mystical experiences. There's actually a scale that Stase had made and others. And so what Walter did is he spent this year developing a series of questionnaires that he spent this year developing a series of questionnaires that were independent of any particular religious symbols or any particular religious system. So even though this was an experiment that took place on Good Friday, it didn't have any references to Jesus, this questionnaire. And so basically the fundamental core element of this perennial philosophy of the mystical experiences, the sense of unity, and you get this from all different religions about everything's one, everything's united, everything's somehow one big system. So there's external reality where you

can see that nature is all connected or internal reality, sort of everything, you know, without form is still connected. But that sense that it's all one thing, transcendence of time in space, deeply felt positive mood, a sense of something sacred or holy, a sense that it's ineffable, that there's something beyond language about the experience. So Walter had developed this questionnaire, which is in very minimally modified way is still used today in all of the psychedelic research to evaluate the mystical experience. So what they decided to do was to take a group of 20 Christian divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary and bring them into church on Good Friday at Boston University and the minister was Reverend Howard Thurman and he was Martin Luther King's

mentor. He was an incredible dynamic black preacher, and actually I was able during my follow-up study to obtain copies from Walter Panky's widow, Walter died in 71 in the Scoop Diving accident. But his widow had the actual copy of the service that they listened to during Good Friday, which is just profoundly moving. And it shows that in 1962 on Good Friday, when they did this experiment, that psychedelics were just beginning to be controversial. They really were not. And so this was an experiment to see if these 20 Divinity students in church on Good Friday, and this was like a 3.5 hour service, 3.4 hour service.

They all got a pill, half got placebo, half got psilocybin. And they were divided these 20 people into groups of four, five groups of four, and two experimenters were assigned to each group of four. And the experimenters also took these pills. And one of the experimenter would get the placebo one would get the psilocybin. These were people like Tim Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, who later became Ramdas, Houston Smith, incredible people who were experts in the philosophy of religion and psychology, and they were trying to break down the us-them experimenter subject, dichotomies, and that's why they had the experimenters

also took the pills. And what they then did was after the experiment, after the service, they had a chapel in the basement. So while the main service was taking place in the upstairs chapel, downstairs was the chapel where the experiment was taking place. I've since visited this marsh chapel done Kamino-Authai out for Boston University, there's a statue out in front of it for Martin Luther King that actually talked about my approach towards draft resistance. And the quote there is, who believes the law is unjust and breaks it, and is willingly suffering the consequences to be an example of others actually has the highest regard for

the law. So it's sort of showing the syllabus obedience as people that believe in the law, but want to modify it. So that's out in front of Mars Chapel. But then over the doorway to the main chapel, before this experiment even took place, is a quote about experimental religion. It's just amazingly historically resonant that that place was sympathetic with this idea of experimental religion. But the idea was then that they would go through this experiment. They would then give questionnaires about what their experience was, how they described it, and then they would do six month follow-up about the long-term

effects. As I mentioned, Walter died in a scuba diving accident in 1971. So I was convinced in the middle eighties when I was wanting to do a thesis at New College. I had to do senior thesis. I want to do something with psychedelics, but it was at a time when psychedelic research was all blocked. And so I thought, wow, I could do a follow-up study and ask people what they thought about it. It wouldn't involve drugs, so I could get permission to do it. So I ended up doing it since 25-year follow-up to the Good Friday experiment. What was the finding of the original experiment?

That nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin. So they concluded that under the influence of psilocybin, people who were religiously inclined in a religious setting could have what looked like a mystical experience. And so either it was genuine or it was similar, but they concluded that according to this questionnaire that that psilocybin did indeed have the potential to catalyze mystical experiences. And what was the approximate dose of psilocybin they took? It was 30 milligrams. So it was a major dose of psilocybin. And the placebo it turned out was niacin. To give them a flush without knowing that, yeah, we'll come back to this and psychedelic research.

One of the challenges is the placebo has to give you some feeling. Yeah, my dissertation at the Kennedy School, a big part of it was on how to do double blind studies with psychedelics. And the conclusion I came to, and we'll get back to the good Friday experiment, but the conclusion I came to was that the best way to do a double blind experiment with psychedelics was to use low doses of the psychedelic versus full doses. And that way everybody has the same demand characteristics. They all think they're going to be getting the test drug. They just don't know what dose. And all the experimenters know everybody's getting the drug. And I thought that the real challenge was going to be to find the level of the low

dose. Yeah, so that it's below this step, it's below the real activation. Well, it has to be high enough so that you would have enough confusion between the full dose, but not so high that you get all the therapeutic potential. So I thought you'd get a little bit of the therapeutic potential, but you didn't want to get too much because the more therapeutic potential, you got the more difference it would be to find differences between the two groups, the more difficult it would be. And so in our work with MDMA, we'd looked at zero milligrams, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams,

40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150. What we discovered was that the low doses did produce blinding. That's what I had anticipated. But what I didn't anticipate is that the low doses actually made people uncomfortable. It activated them without reducing the fear. And so the therapeutic effect of just the therapy was compromised. And so people who had therapy without any MDMA did better than people that had therapy with low-dose MDMA. And low in that situation was how low?

25 to 40, 25, 30 and 40 milligrams. And then the 75 milligrams actually was very therapeutic. So when we opened our meeting with the FDA to talk about our phase three designs, I started by saying there's a quote from, I thought it was William James, but it turned out it was Zool, I think one of the early presidents of Harvard and he said never forget there's always a Harvard man on the wrong side of every issue. And so I open the meeting by saying there's this quote and unfortunately I'm the wrong side. This person that's wrong is me because my dissertation was wrong and there is no solution to the double blind problem at least for MDMA. And so the FDA

accepted that and I said you could have us use low dose, but you're going to make it easier for us to find a difference between the full dose and the therapy with low dose, because it blunts the effect of the therapy. And so the real question is, if you can do it without a drug, why add a drug? If the therapy is effective, why add a drug?

So I said, the best way to do this is therapy with inactive placebo versus therapy with FLDOS MDMA and FDA accepted that and so has EMA, the European Medicines Agency. But back to the good Friday experiment. So what they discovered is that the double blind did not work, NISON did not work as double blind. People were initially confused. But after a while, this NISON flush off, and then you've got these other people seeing colors and seeing sparkles in the candle flames and having all these unusual experiences. So everybody was clear by the end of the experiment, who had the nice and who had the psilocybin. And at the six month follow-up, they showed that people had had reported long-term positive

benefits. And so this was considered to be the most sophisticated experiment in the history of religion looking at the mystical experience, and a demonstrated positive long-term benefits. Although compromised because of course it effectively wasn't blinded. To the extent that you would say that's compromised, yeah. Yeah. What makes me think that it wasn't so compromised is that I did my long-term follow-up, 25 years later, 87, 86, 88, is when I kept,

so I went to Andover Newton, theological seminary, I went to the alumni office and to the present, and I said, could we send a letter to everybody on your alumni newsletter asking who was in this experiment? Oh, because you didn't know their names.

There's no record. Leary had no record. The records were gone of who the people were. And over Newton, this was at a time of Nancy Reagan, escalation of the drug war, and this was probably the native of views towards psychedelics and society. And over Newton refused to cooperate with the study. They wouldn't put even a notice in their alumni newsletter or help me in any way find out who the subjects were.

And so I was super frustrated and I said, well, I was there, I thought, okay, I'll just go into their library and see if they've got thesis and if they've got the commentaries, any discussions about this most important study that was done with their students. And so it turned out that they didn't even have Walter Pankey's thesis in their library. It was so controversial actually that after the study was done, you had to

get a permission directly from Walter in order to look at the thesis in the Harvard library. They didn't even put it out there. They didn't want any people to know about it. So I didn't even see the thesis. I thought this is like massive cultural amnesia. And here, how embarrassing. This is a school of religion, and this is the most important study done, and they don't even have a copy of it. They don't even want to talk about it. And I just wandered through their library a little bit, and then I saw coincidentally, a booklet of all of their alumni, and their addresses, and which years they were in the school.

And this was from like a 1972 book, but it had people who were at school in 62 when the study was done. So I ended up writing letters to like 300 people, and I got about three responses back that they were actually in the study. And it took me multiple years, but eventually I was able to identify 19 out of the 20 of the people who were in the study. And my parents were sympathetic at this point, and so I would fly to wherever they were in the country and then interview them in person. And what I discovered was first off shocking to me. So at a point where every cultural indication would be that these persons should deny the value of the psychedelic experience, massive escalation of the drug war, Republicans in charge, people going to jail for all this kind of stuff, everybody who had the psilocybin experience, except for one person, said that they had a mystical

experience back then and they still considered it to be a mystical experience. And they had had many non-drug mystical experiences since then as well, to compare and contrast. And they said that they preferred the non-drug mystical experiences because they tended to be more positive, more in nature, more just coming over them, gratuitous grace, sometimes they would call it. But the psychedelic mystical experiences were more oscillating between fear and unit of experiences that they were deeper,

in some ways, but were more difficult to manage. But they validated the importance of the experience. And then I felt like I discovered the clue to the 60s by doing these interviews, because what they told me is that first off, everybody who had this little Simon could remember with crystal clarity some moments of their psychedelic experience, something about psychedelics imprint on memory. You don't remember everything, but some portions of it are just indelible. And they validated that they were genuine. But the key to the

sixties for me was that they talked about how that unit of experience motivated them in different ways to get involved with social justice struggles. Now, of course, these were all ministers anyway. They were thinking in that way. It's not that everybody who takes this will be motivated in that way, but one of them worked against the MX missile basing others that I'm participated in the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the environmental movement, they felt that there was this connection between this spiritual experience, they lost a certain fear of death. So there were more willing to take risks in their lives. They learned the appreciation of the moment. It's not that

they didn't care about death, but they, death made life more precious. They didn't go for this idea that heaven is later after you die. It's like more that they wanted to create it on Earth. And so they used that signal experience to be involved in challenging the status quote, try to make it a more spiritual, loving world. And I felt that that's where I really learned that the crackdown against the 60s was not because of psychedelics going wrong, but because of psychedelics going right. But I also learned something else, which is that the placebo people had a hard time remembering what was going on. I mean, they knew they were in the experiment, but they didn't have as clear memories about what happened. Some of them were so upset by what they saw.

So, in the others? In the others that they were disoriented, that one person went up and tried to be the preacher, it scared them. And they decided never to do psychedelics. Others decided that they were so inspired by what they saw that they wanted to do psychedelics. So, some of them did go back and do psychedelics from the placebo group. But then what I discovered, I started hearing these stories about how one person who had received the cell siren had been listening to Reverend Howard Thurman at one point where he's telling people that you need to tell people there's a man on the cross. This is your obligation. This, Jesus' story that you must tell others about it. And so this one person started to realize that he should do that. And he thought, well, I should tell the president. If I can tell anybody,

I should tell the president. And he then said, don't you know, the president's in Washington. Okay, I'll tell the president of the university. And so he left the basement chapel. He went outside and he was wandering on the road going towards the president. And this very much scared Timothy Leary and Houston Smith and they went after him. And they finally got him. They protected him.

He didn't get hit by a car, but he didn't want to go back in. And so they ended up giving him a shot of Thorazine, a tranquilizer, which was used at this time when people had difficult trips. Sometimes they would tranquilize them. We would not do that today. It freezes the struggles in place. It's not helpful at all. Better to just wait it out, even if it's terrible, because then at least you don't get the message you can't handle it. If you wait it out, at least you survived. So it turned out though that this whole administration of thorazine to this one person was completely missing from any of the reports about the study, which I consider to be another key to the 60s,

in that Leary and the advocates underestimated the risks and over and exaggerated the benefits. So the way this story, the Good Friday experiment was reported in Time Magazine and elsewhere, was that everybody who got the psilocybin had the mystical experience, which is not the case. Eventually, I did manage to figure out who was the one that was tranquilized. And when I called him, he was still a minister, he was married, he had kids. But when I identified myself as wanting to talk to him about this experiment, he was very upset And he said if I ever called him again, he would sue me. He didn't want to talk to me at all So I think that this idea that he had been traumatized by that experience

He was very traumatized by it and was embarrassing and so he didn't want to talk about it But I heard about it from others and was able to figure out who it was. And so, I felt that this was the height of scientific irresponsibility. And many people who have been through what you've been through, meaning we have watched this journey, are not especially sympathetic to Leary. In fact, many people just single-handedly identify Leary's irresponsibility as the sole reason for the backlash, which of course strikes me as hyperbolic and unlikely to be the case, but I'm certainly read accounts that you've written that come across as being slightly more sympathetic to Larry. Yeah, I'm much more sympathetic in the sense that it psychedelics gone right that really caused the backlash and while he was

irresponsible in a lot of different ways and was delighted to be a rebel and to be against the backlash. And while he was irresponsible in a lot of different ways and was delighted to be a rebel and to be against the system, and I think this identification as the counterculture was in itself a self-fulfilling doomed prophecy that you identify yourself as counterculture, you're going to be crushed eventually. But I think he saw that the propaganda for the other side, the negative exaggerations of the risks, were so strong that he justified in his own mind that he could exaggerate on the other side and minimize the risks. So I do think he deserves a lot of criticism for what he said, but he was very much about thinking for yourself, questioning authority, challenging the system,

all of which we need more of. And what I fought him for the most was misrepresenting science. It's okay to be a cultural advocate, but when science is holy in itself, holy up meaning H-O-L-Y, meaning that it's sacred. There's something sacred about our quest for knowledge through our bias. I mean, how we just discussed the double bind. The whole purpose of the double bind is to eliminate or reduce experiment or bias. We see what we want to see. So how do we actually see what's really there? And I think that's the beauty, the holiness of science. And so when Tim misrepresented the scientific findings he had, that I thought was a tremendous violation. Being a cheerleader against the drug war and for consciousness, I

think he deserves a lot of credit for that. I think where he's also wrapped up in deserving criticism is that he underestimated the risks and overestimated the benefits. So you take this drug, you get enlightened, you're smarter than everybody else, and now you're part of this new counterculture, and all you have to do is drop the pill. That's wrong. People don't always have these good experiences. People do get messed up and end up worse off. So what I discovered during the Good Friday Experiment follow-up was that there had been this overhyping of the results, and also this hiding of a problem. And as it turned out, Houston Smith then validated it, that it was true, that this had really happened.

And that somebody did get thorsing, and it was really the case, even though that one person wouldn't talk to me. But overall, my conclusion was that the experiment was essentially validated, that people did have mystical experiences. They had subsequent experiences in their lives that were without drugs, mystical experiences, that they then said that made them think that the psilocybin mystical experience was legitimate, and had positive benefits in their lives, and had long-term impacts. What I find most interesting having experienced this myself, what resonates is this notion that after the fact, years after the fact, in the case of your subjects, 25 years after the fact, with crystal clarity,

you could remember something from that experience. And I don't think I've ever been under the influence of psilocybin that I can't look back and recall with just the most vivid detail, some aspects of it, positive and negative, some incredibly positive, deeply emotional, moving beyond words, and also at times very in different settings or different times within the same experience, incredibly frightening, an incredible feeling of despair, but with a degree of vividness that I can't remember many things. So what do you attribute that? I don't know.

I mean, I suspect that I don't know enough about neuroscience. I'm probably the wrong person to ask, but I suspect that if you look at parts of the brain, the hippocampus where we imprint memory, there must be something about these molecules that enable during periods of the time, because it's a thing. It's such a nonlinear experience. It's sort of vacillating. But there might be moments in there where there's an overlap.

I'm sort of putting my hands like you sort of have to get an alignment of a couple of things. One, the experience itself is profound enough. And two, so that's like the seed. And then the soil itself at that moment neurologically is fertile enough to take that seed and that produces this plant, but isn't the metaphor is this memory that is never going away. And what's also interesting is I can still describe in some cases the feeling that accompanied that vision or that hallucination and what it connected me to someone that I care about or something like that. So that to me is a very powerful part of your follow-up,

whereas I can completely imagine that if you were getting the placebo, I mean, I've taken Nias and I know what it feels like. It's miserable actually. If you take a high enough dose, the flush is real. I mean, there's no denying it. But if you asked me to recall a Nias and flush I had two years ago, let alone

20 years ago, I'd be hard pressed to remember anything about it. So the sensory experience alone is not enough. What I really want to get to now is, and it will require backing up slightly from historical context, is let's talk about what's happening right now with MDMA. Before we do that, let me just explain briefly about the Concord Prison Experiment. Oh, yes, yes, yes, that's right, that's right. This is the second major experiment. Yeah, so what Liri recognized was that

the Good Friday Experiment, you're basically relying on people to tell you what happened to them. So that's sort of subjective reports. He wanted to try to find an objective way to talk about the benefits of psychedelics. And so what he started thinking about was prisoners at the Concord Prison, which is not 20 minutes away from here, we're not that far from Harvard Square,

we're doing this four miles from Harvard Square, Concord Prison, it was nearby. And so he thought that if you could work with prisoners while they're in prison and help them have a pro-social experience, this kind of mystical experience, that that might once they were released, it might reduce their recidivism. And he thought that that is an objective measure of benefit. If we can show that people don't go back to prison once they've released and that it's somehow correlated with this mystical experience with psilocybin, that that would be a really good way of communicating to people. So from

61 to 63, he started working with Ralph Metzner, who is his PhD student as well. And they started doing a project at Concord Prison and they ended up getting permission to do psilocybin inside the prison with prisoners. And the same situation is that the experimenters, some of them would take the psilocybin as well. And then prisoners were released. And how many prisoners over the period of that time were treated? About 36 or so. And what was the average number of treatments per prisoner?

Two. And so what they ended up saying, though, is that this was one of the most successful experiments in the history of psychedelics showing benefit. Was there a control group that were interacted with, but without an agent? No, the control group was they did a base rate study of everybody that had been released from prison in the year before. They did this, and then they tracked them. And so they had this base rate study, and then they compared against the base rate. So one obvious flaw in this is that the people who are motivated to volunteer for this experiment

might be more likely to want to stay out of prison. Maybe they're more motivated to get better. That would be huge. And then the other one, of course, being this performance bias, which is just the fact that they're getting some positive attention while they're there. It's funny, if you were to redo that experiment, you would randomize people. You take everybody, you randomize them. You're either randomized to the intervention with the psilocybin, or the best example you can come up with of an intervention that is without psilocybin,

counseling, positive therapy, et cetera, et cetera, where you, so you're not trying to be blinded to your point, you're not going to be able to blind people, but at least you can try to identify that if there is a benefit in the psilocybin group, it's much more likely to be from the psilocybin than it is from selection bias or performance bias. Exactly. And so from the FDA's point of view, once we discussed how there is no solution to the double blind problem for MDMA, they said that there are two other main ways that we had to incorporate into our protocol design to reduce experiment or bias, and one was random assignment. That everybody's similarly motivated, and then they just happen to get either your control group or your test group. The other is the independent radars, and how you evaluate the outcomes. So it can't be done

by the experimenters. You have to have a whole different pool of Raiders and then how they are structured so that they don't track the people through the study. They don't know if it's the beginning measurement, the baseline, or the follow-up. So what was the difference in recidivism between those two groups? Well, it was substantial. And so it was terrific, positive experiment. So after I had done the, or so it seemed. So after I had done the Good Friday experiment, follow up, and published it in 91 in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, then there was an op-ed about my study in the Boston Globe.

And I got a call shortly after that from fellow Michael Forca, who worked for the Department of Corrections. And he said, you want to do a follow-up to the Congress prison experiment. I said, I have been interested, but there's no record of who the people were in that study either. And he said that they actually had those records,

that the Department of Corrections had a storehouse of information about all their interesting prisoners. Malcolm Axe had been a prisoner, they had all these stuff. And he said that they had a record of who these prisoners were and that I could work with him

if we wanted to do a follow-up to the Concord Prison Experiment. And I thought, kind of, this is fantastic. Now, I can help call attention to one of the most important and successful experiments in the history of psychedelic research. And so it took us a whole year

to get permission to do this. We had to go all the way up to the governor's office. It was William Well at the time, who's now going to be running for a president trying to knock off Trump in the primaries, which won't work, but it'll be good. So William Well, so we got this piece of paper finally saying that we could go into the criminal justice system records and track people's criminal records after they had been released from Concord. But somebody had written on it, no psilocybin. So we weren't asking for permission to give psilocybin,

but they just wanted to underscore that we could not give psilocybin. So I ended up going into the criminal justice system records and it took quite a while to do this. And the more that I looked into it, one by one, and tracked people, the more I started realizing that there had been something amiss that it didn't look like it was really working. The data that I was getting about their arrests were that they were arrested.

It didn't seem like there was this benefit that had been reported. Meaning during the period when they were initially reported to have had a benefit, you felt that those data were incorrect or over a longer follow-up period of time both groups converged. It was more that there was some tricks in the way that Leary and Ralph Metzner reported the data. And it was also the case Ralph Metzner once I published my findings, basically it was scientific fraud, not by Ralph, but more by Tim. Who was still alive at the time, wasn't he? He was. And I eventually visited him shortly before he died.

I mean, I got to know him in a bunch of different ways, but I also visited him with two other prisoners, one who had never gone back to prison and one who had gone back to prison. And we had kind of a reunion that was really nice. But I didn't have the courage, I guess, to ask why he fudged the data. So what it turned out to be is that the longer time had elapsed from when the experiment took place, the more the Tim would tell the story of how more successful

it was. So the results kept getting presented in better and better ways. The longer it was from the study. But even at the early stage, what they had claimed was that they're very initial thing was that while some people did go back to prison from the psilocybin group, that they were monitored more carefully than others, the normal prisoners, and they went there for parole violations.

Minor things, not new crimes. But then over time, the results just kept being presented better and better and better. and they went there for parole violations, minor things, not new crimes. But then over time, the results just kept being presented better and better and better. And so I had not actually looked at the very early things, but I'd looked at all their other reports. So once I started doing the follow-up, I looked at everything, and I could track it. And I got back to the base rate study, which I'd never looked at. And what was surprising to me is, here I am an advocate for psychedelics,

and this is one of the premier studies in psychedelics-jewing benefits. But none of the critics had ever actually gone back to the very original documents. The base rate study was published in a journal of criminology, an obscure British journal of criminology, which I managed to find. And so what it turned out, first first off is that the base rate study was done an average of people out for two years. The actual research with the prisoners was done when people were out an average of 10 months. And so what had happened was that obviously the longer you're out of prison the more likely you are to go back to prison. Right. It's an apples and

oranges comparison. Yeah. And so it turned out that the original study actually tracked people over time. So there was the data for 10 months in the control group, the base rate, when they were out 10 months, their results were the same as what was reported in the social side group. So there was no difference whatsoever. But what I also discovered is that the way in which Tim was saying about how, oh, yeah, people did go back to prison, but for parole violations, that they were actually parole violations because they had committed new crimes for which they were later convicted.

So I figured out how his counting rules permitted him to say things that weren't true, but that might look on the surface to be true. And I found the original base rate study. So what I concluded and what actually happened was that Leary got kicked out of Harvard in 63. He thought of it as the scientific prison. And they had started to recognize that just having a spiritual experience, which many of these people did have in prison, is not enough that you need support afterwards.

You need to integrate the experience and have support. Yeah. And the same with treatment for addiction, that you need support groups afterwards. And so they had actually created this support group for the prisoners. But then when they got kicked out of Harvard, that fell apart. So my conclusion was that this experiment, scientific fraud, it didn't work, but that some of the people who did have the psilocybin, who I was able to contact, that was delicate because you're contacting former prisoners. So I had to make sure that I only spoke to them.

I didn't speak to their family members, so they might not have spoken about their experiment. But some of them said that the psilocybin was really helpful. So what I concluded is that this was an experiment that should be repeated with the combination of the experience and the support afterwards. And that it showed promise, but what I really felt also was that this was leery violating something that was sacred, which was the scientific data and presenting it in a wrong way. And so I think in some ways people appreciated the fact that even though I was an advocate for psychedelics, I was willing to report the data as I found it, rather than as I wanted it to be. So I think it was good for personally, for my credibility, but it was me ending up delegitimizing this crucial experiment that everybody had

thought was really successful. That was my problem. So those are the things that I fought Leary for. And I also do fought him for just encouraging people to take psychedelics without sufficient cautions about the need for people who are not tripping to watch over you, about the need to integrate it, about how it's not automatically you learn something new. It can be very frightening or terrifying. who are not tripping to watch over you about the need to integrate it, about how it's not automatically you learn something new. It can be very frightening or terrifying. But overall, I do think that Larry was a positive. And I think that I might not have ever taken LSD if it weren't for him. And this idea that he was trying to democratize the mystical experience. And I also think, I'll just say, that I had a ketamine experience where I was

transported above and behind Hitler as he was giving one of those rallies. This is one of the more profound psychedelic experiences in my life. And I was, I think, primarily traumatized by the Holocaust. I've had dreams of Holocaust survivors telling me that I needed to be a psychedelic therapist, and that that was, they'd survived the Holocaust miraculously, and that that was their mission. They didn't know what it was, and it was to tell me to be a psychedelic therapist. So I think fundamentally what I've been motivated by is how do we help people feel the connection so they don't dehumanize and murder others. But there was this way in which that I felt that the problem of Leary trying to exaggerate the benefits, left people unprepared, but that the effort to have people to think for themselves and to question

authority was inherently a good thing, but that the justification that he gave himself for twisting the science because others were twisting it in the negative way was ultimately very harmful. Rick, on behalf of many people who are never going to necessarily know your name, even after your long gone from this planet, people who have already benefited from your work, I want to thank you in the most sincere way that I can, what you've done is beautiful. Thank you Peter. Yeah, I think the ultimate success is being taken for granted.

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