Rick Doblin

00:03Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience. TRAIN BY DAY, JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY Hello, Rick. Good to see you again, my friend. How are you? Yeah, I did great. It was so nice to be with you a couple weeks ago. Yeah, it was fun to have you at the club. You were there like one of the first days. Yeah, I think I saw the first event in the small room. Yes. Yeah, did you see Dave Chappelle? I did. Yeah, that was the first one. Yeah, we had Dave there. He wanted to do that room. We opened it specifically for him. That was the first time we did a show there. It's very exciting. Yeah, I really liked having the opportunity to talk to him a little bit afterwards and to listen to him. It was hilarious. Yeah, he's a big fan of what you guys are doing. As is as is everybody. You know, I think what you guys are doing at Maps is one

00:55of the most important things for society and culture and just consciousness in general. It's that's happening today. And I'm very, very happy that you're doing that. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I'm pretty extremely lucky that 51 years ago when I was 18 in 1972 and I decided to focus my life on psychedelics, that now I'm 69 all these years later and it still makes sense. Well, back then it must have been a big risk because in the 1970s, when you focused your life on psychedelics, that was like right after that whole sweeping schedule one psychedelics act was passed, right? Yeah, that was in 1970. Yeah, things looked grim. Didn't look good. Yeah, well, I was a um draft resister. I I thought that I would serve my country by going to jail. Uh which is kind of a funny way to say it, but I had felt that I'm I'm not a conscientious objector. In order to do that, you have

01:49to be a pacifist. And so I'm not a pacifist. I think there are sometimes you need to fight and defend yourselves. Um so, the only options for me as I studied how to respond to to Vietnam was to I didn't want to pretend I had bone spurs or run away to Canada or anything like that and I studied uh Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance and decided that um the thing that I would do would be to not register for the draft. And I was paying taxes, I had a social security number I had a driver's license, I was in high school I figured the government knows who I am and knows where I am and knows my age and so I assumed that I would go to jail and that that would be a way to drain the system of energy and to register my protest that way. Martin Luther King actually said a great thing. He said the person that thinks a law is unjust and

02:48violates it and is willing to suffer the consequences as an example to others about the unjust nature of the law actually has the highest respect for the law. Mhm. He was trying to reframe civil disobedience as patriotism. And that made sense to me. And so when I talked to my parents about it, they were like, well okay, you know, we don't think you should go to Vietnam either. We don't think it's um in America's best interest, but you're never going to be a doctor or lawyer. My dad was a doctor because you'll be a felon and I'm like, that's the price I'll have to pay. What am I going to do with my life? I can't have a normal job anyway. So then when I stumbled on psychedelics, I was like, great. I could be an underground psychedelic therapist that doesn't need a license. Whatever happened? Did you wind up getting in trouble? No, it's astonishing. I think a lot of

03:38times we overestimate the efficiency of the government. Mhm. And so nothing happened at all. I mean, I turned 18 later was the lottery. I did have a higher lottery number but nothing ever happened and and I just was by that. And later what happened was that Jimmy Carter on his first day in office, he pardoned all the draft resisters. And that made me sort of move from my identification as a counterculture drug-using criminal to somebody who wasn't quite a a criminal in that same way. What year was that? This was 76. Yeah, 70 Well, as soon as he got inaugurated, 77 is when when he he did that, the first day in office. And I later read there was about 60,000 people that never registered for the draft. But enough people were going in that they were able to find enough bodies and people to send to Vietnam. Yeah, it's one of the rare um military

04:36operations in history that's like universally regarded as a terrible thing. Yes. I mean, nobody today defends the Vietnam War. There's still some people that think it was a good idea that we got Saddam Hussein out of power despite all the horrible collateral damage and the million people that are innocent that wind up dying in Iraq because that invasion, but nobody thinks Vietnam was good. Right, it was starting to be this uh imperial overreach. Yeah. And we've had a fair amount of that. Based on a false flag. Come Yeah. Yeah, which is very scary. It's very scary that that was just, you know, 1960s. It just happened. Yeah, well, one of the people also quite interested and supportive of psychedelic therapy is Daniel Ellsberg, who was the person that released the Pentagon Papers. Mhm. But the false flag began with the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Mhm.

05:29And so we're we um we're told that our ships were being attacked. And he was um I've gotten to spend some time talking to him. And he said that he had just started the National Security Administration at that time was um looking at some of these cables and realized it didn't make sense, but he thought somebody above him knew more than he did. And he didn't feel like he should say anything about it. And then all these years later when he released the Pentagon Papers, and people think of him as a hero because he was willing to go to jail for decades and decades, potentially the rest of his life, which is what the government was trying to do for him, went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and he won the case or the New York Times also won the case. But he thinks of himself not just as a hero, but that he should have had more courage

06:18early on. And if he would have done something early on, maybe more people would have realized that this wasn't the way the government was saying it was. But but but I do think that there is patriotism in civil disobedience. Yeah, certainly. Especially when you feel it's morally wrong to participate in whatever this thing that you're being obligated to do. Yeah, and I think it's really remarkable for me now that because I was not a pacifist and I was not a conscientious objector. I always felt that the freedom that I had was defended by our military and you know, in World War II, if we had lost and I'm Jewish, I probably would have been killed along with others. So I always felt that the military was essential and it was protecting my freedom. And so now all these years later to have so much work to be done with veterans and with in the

07:14Veterans Administrations and with you know, special operators and all sorts of people with PTSD, it feels right in a way that that a draft resister should form an alliance with suffering um veterans. Yeah, I think that's one of the best aspects at least publicly of what you guys are doing is that you are working with all these soldiers. And so you've got a lot of support from people that traditionally wouldn't be invested in psychedelics, which is really kind of opened up. It used to be that a lot of people on the right thought of psychedelics as a way to waste your life, and you're going to be a hippie and a loser, but because of the benefits that it's been showing to people with PTSD and people coming back from, you know, all these various foreign conflicts, then you're you're getting now you're getting support from veterans. You're getting support from

08:08the people on the right and people that know veterans that have had incredible experiences with psychedelics, where it's completely changed their life and sort of reset their mind. Yeah, just several days ago I was in Nashville with Shawn Ryan doing his podcast, and and he is a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor, and he was just talking about how much he had benefited from his experience with ibogaine in Mexico, and how it's changed his views about things. And we've heard this a lot, but but he still said that if he were to be attacked, if America was to be attacked, he would defend it. It doesn't turn people again into pacifists necessarily in that same way. And there's something noble and honorable about willing to serve your country and be willing to give your life to protect others. I think it's a problem in some cases when the political leadership makes

09:00terrible choices, and you know, you've enlisted to do that. But I I think the other part last week I was in Dallas, and we had an event that Governor Rick Perry attended, and Marcus Capone. Mhm. And Jeff George, who's the chair of the board of directors of our MAPS Public Benefit Corp. Our um And then also Amy Emerson, who's the CEO of that. And we we have Governor Perry's support, because he's heard from so many veterans. He's also talked about Marcus Luttrell, Mhm. who lived with him at the statehouse when he was very emotionally damaged from his time in the military and then he saw Marcus um get a lot better when he went down to Mexico and got Ibogaine. And so Governor Perry there's people that I have never thought that I would find common ground with. And one of the ones that I thought was the most um far that that I I couldn't

09:58imagine building a bridge. I mean one of our themes is be the bridge. But it was with um Ted Nugent. I thought, you know, how would I, you know, build a bridge with Ted Nugent? Well, uh Rocco Moon, his son, connected us. And Rocco is interested in being a psychedelic therapist. And he's been doing a lot of work educating his dad. And we had a really remarkable conversation. Um and Ted actually said that um he could be extremely effective for helping us because he's known as being so anti-drug. Yeah. And yet he can see even he can see that in a therapeutic setting for veterans, that's what he cares about the most, but others, that these things can be helpful. So this idea of building bridges, um there there was one point in time one of the most important uh lessons I learned was actually um from a Supreme Court Justice where I was

11:00sitting next to him at a Passover Seder and Passover this is Stephen Breyer. And I had um accepted a donation from Rebekah Mercer. Now Rebekah Mercer, um her father and she they own Cambridge Analytica, they own Breitbart, you know, she's very much a supporter of Republican causes. And she gave us a million dollars and said that it was uh restricted to use in veterans. And I thought this is really a good thing to do, to take this but I've gotten more criticism from taking that donation from Rebecca Mercer than most anything I've done in the entire 37 years of Maps. And so at this Passover Seder I was sit my wife and I got there late. Our friends were somewhere else. There was this old couple sitting next to us. And um I didn't know who they were and I thought oh this will be boring, you know. And and so I I talked to this guy and I said well everybody else was

11:54pretty much scientist and I said are you um a scientist? He said no, I'm a judge. And then his wife started talking about how she had written a book about uh grieving parents who who have um illnesses that their kids have fatal illnesses and and how to handle grief. And so we had this incredible conversation about um MDMA therapy and about how it can be helpful for grief and all. And then after hours Passover Seders take hours and hours. I finally realized that there was something more going on and I I I thought this guy is not just a judge. I think he's a Stephen Breyer, the Supreme Court judge. And I I I said are are you Stephen Breyer? And he said yes. And I said well I have a uh an ethical question to ask you. You know I have taken this uh resources from Rebecca Mercer and she's very much supporting Trump and supporting Bannon

12:46and and others. And I said what what do you think about that choice ethically? Was that um a wise idea? And he said that the essence of democracy is trying to find common ground with people with whom you may disagree on everything else. And he said in our hyper partisan polarized world there's not nearly enough of that. Yeah. And so he supported that. And so I felt that that was like uh the judgment of the Supreme Court. It was okay what I At least one. At least one. But but I like that concept is that we need to find common ground. I I I mean I thought that was one of the things that Dave Chappelle was saying in there. You know, I thought it was very interesting. he very much is in tune with that and speaks about that all the time. It's very important to him because there's just it's just too easy to just dig in your heels and embrace the

13:38conflict and and push away any ideas that are connected to the other side. If you can get someone who's a Republican, who's a Trump supporter to engage in psychedelics, understand the benefits of psychedelics for whether it's for soldiers or whether it's for grieving parents or anyone, if that can make it into their life and perhaps they can have an experience, I think a psychedelic experience is one of the greatest ways that someone can relax any ideological dogmatic ideas that they might have that restrict them from taking in some of the opinions of the left. Yeah, would would you um feel comfortable sharing some of your own experiences? Well, sure. Well, I've never been a right-wing person. I'm very left-wing for the most part other than um support for the Second Amendment and some some other things and just a general distrust of of government. I I

14:36you know, I was raised by hippies. You know, I I lived in San Francisco during the Vietnam War when I was a little kid. I mean, we were you know, my stepdad as long were had long hair when I was a kid. So, I was you know, but then I also grew up and I was a fighter. So, I was always around these like hard-nosed like very tough, you know, no-nonsense people and a lot of them were very right-wing. And you know, I knew a lot of cops from martial arts and you know, people have these ideas about what you know, what drugs are and that blanket term which I really don't like the term drugs Right. and drug users, what drug users are. And one of you know, one of the things that I'm kind of proud of is that if anybody wants to say that uh people who enjoy psychedelics or people that uh enjoy marijuana are lazy, and they don't contribute, or they don't you know, like

15:29like what about me? Right. Like what about me? Like I work hard, and I work a lot, and I work out a lot, and I have a lot of friends that are very much like me, and they're very open-minded people that are they embrace all cultures and ideas and all kinds of different things, but they're also you know, these hard-nosed, determined, very disciplined people that you would sort of automatically, maybe callously, lump in with people who are cruel, or unkind, or not embracing uh you know, other ideas, and I just think that these ideas that we have of people that we it's so convenient to push people into one category or another, and it's also very convenient to embrace one category or an adopt their sort of predetermined pattern of ideas. Yeah, but but would you be comfortable sharing some of your own psychedelic experiences? Sure. Sure. I mean, um the DMT

16:35experiences are by far the most profound, and those are the ones that have really made me every time I've done it, it's just completely made me rethink how I interface with people, what what life is, and what that experience what is that? Is that a well of souls you're entering into? Is it another dimension? Is it some sort of parallel dimension of uh disembodied consciousness that you seem to be engaging with life forms, with things that know you, that can see your thoughts, and see resistance, and see [ __ ] in you. I mean, it's um every time I've done it, it's sort of just like in one way or another just removed one layer of the onion, you know, one layer of [ __ ] that keeps you from just embracing the great mystery of this existence. Yeah. Whatever it is. Yeah, I think we're built on these layers and layers of billions of dollars

17:39billions of dollars billions of years Yeah. of evolution and and sort of from the single cellular organisms. It's all in us still. Mhm. And that there are prefrontal cortex our brain has kind of helped us focus on what we need as humans in our transition from birth to death, but that when you sort of well, we we talk about the default mode network, which is sort of the part of the brain that's identified as the sense of self. Mhm. And the classic psychedelics weaken that part and then more information floods. So, I think we can get back through all of the intercellular knowledge that is stored in our bodies Yeah. and and connect with this deeper unitive sense. It's amazing. Yeah, it's also they help so much to abandon preconceived notions and and just sort of we don't realize how much of the way we sort of see ourselves and see the world is is a kind of a convenient

18:34set of armor that we put on Yeah. to protect us from uncomfortable thoughts and protect us from you know, just just mystery. You know, the mystery of but there is a lot of mystery in life. Like it's mostly mystery. Yeah. You know, and I think psychedelics are the greatest mystery and there's something about them that's just the idea that it exists, that you can smoke a thing and then 15 seconds later be transported into an impossible realm and that that exists and no one's discussing it. You're every day on the news they're talking about a a million different things that seem so trivial once you've had a DMT experience. Yeah, you're you're reminding me of my 5-MeO-DMT experience that I had. And it felt like I went sort of back to the moment of creation. Yeah. And but that I realized that so much of our life is patterns, like you're

19:28saying, that that we have these habits and we have these patterns and we take them as fixed. But they're not actually fixed. We have put them into motion. And this 5-MeO, by bringing me back to this moment of creation, it it helped me realize that the new can enter at any moment. That there's a way and so I've I've actually felt that that experience has, which I had one time back in 1985, has been a big part of our um success to get to the place that we're at now uh with psychedelic research, with with MDMA therapy, because it helped me to realize that whenever I felt blocked or stuck, that I could try to find something new to enter into the picture. That there's this perpetual ability to connect with creation, to connect with the new and and so much of our life is on cruise control, is on these patterns. It's easier to do it that way.

20:23It is. And and there's advantages to that, so we don't have to rethink things all the time, but it also narrows our vision. Yeah, it very much so does. It's just so easy to fall into patterns, you know, you fall into the patterns of the group that you hang out with, you fall into patterns of accents and, you know, dress and the way people behave and think about things and the concepts that they adopt. And when you have like a real breakthrough psychedelic experience, it just makes all that seem so trivial. My my DMT experience, my first 5-MeO experience, I I've done both multiple times, but the the first 5-MeO experience, I thought I [ __ ] up. I thought it's over, cuz I kind There was a moment when you're entering into whatever that great white field of geometry is, you know, where where you go, "Oh my god, am I dying?"

21:16Like it it feels like there's no way I'm coming back from this. Like like I've gone so far and then that fear would that fear subsided once the experience just fully kicked in. Like the fear was at the be like the doorway to the experience. Like, "Oh, no, what have I done?" And then you go into that But the weirdest thing about 5-MeO-DMT too is the lack of visuals. It's just this great white pattern, this thing where you don't have any memory, you don't have any you're you're barely a conscious entity and you're experiencing what seems to be like the source code of the universe. I mean, it's just a gap It's like I felt like I was shot through a a rocket to the center of everything. And yet there is an aspect of memory and there is an aspect of us paying attention. Yeah. There There's still this observer in some ways. Mhm. Yeah. It's pretty It's pretty

22:19compromised, but there's something that you come back with. But it's also very difficult to hold on to, right? It It is and that's this process of integration that's necessary. But also for the 5-MeO-DMT, it's so brief. Yeah. So that's where the ibogaine experience can be 12 hours or more or the MDMA experiences we make them into 8-hour sessions. I haven't done ibogaine. Oh. Yeah. I've I've heard a lot of really great things from people that have addiction problems. Like people that are addicted to pills in particular. I've gone to Mexico and one of them was my friend Ed Clay who who went down to Mexico because of a pill problem he had and then he wound up opening up an ibogaine center down there once he'd been cured of it. There There is that phenomenon where people once they get healed, they want to help others. Yeah. in particular, in

23:04the military, you're trained to leave nobody behind. And many people have said that that they once they've gotten help, now they want to bring all their brothers to to have help as well. That there's something about um this feeling that that it can help not just them, but but many other people. Yeah. And I think the other part there's been about why Governor Perry is so interested in a sense is that there's been now um around 800 uh Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico for Ayahuasca for both PTSD, depression, traumatic brain injury, addiction. Yeah. And he's heard just remarkable stories. But but now that you mention um or that we're talking about Ayahuasca, I just would like to say um a bit of We have a mutual friend, Aubrey Marcus. And I've been um texting him this morning and and it's um a bit sad. His father died.

23:55And so um he's sitting Shiva, which is this Jewish tradition where for a week after someone dies, um people come over to the house and you you just mourn for a week. So I'll be there tomorrow morning. But his father, Michael Marcus, actually helped start Ayahuasca research. And so I'd like to explain that just a tiny bit. So Michael had um studied uh a bit of holotropic breath work with Stan Grof. So Stanislav Grof is the world's leading LSD researcher. He's um almost 92 years old. Um but he worked at Johns Hopkins. He was uh did LSD research in the Czech Republic. And when the Russians came in in '68 to crush their rebellion, he escaped and came to the US. Um and but Michael got to know um Stan and did work with him where once psychedelics were criminalized, Stan realized that you can catalyze similar experiences through hyperventilation without a drug.

24:48And that it Oh, I mean, it is like a drug. It changes the chemistry in your brain. Um and so I got to know Michael. And um at one point he was a stock trader. And he felt like he was losing his edge. And this is probably, you know, 15 more years ago. And what he said was, um, he wondered maybe a psychedelic experience could be helpful for him. And I suggested Ibogaine. And he went down to Mexico for an Ibogaine experience and it helped him. And then he felt like he regained his confidence. And then he, um, bet that there was going to be a massive, uh, stock crash. He shorted the market and then there was a major crash. Um, and then he he contacted me and he said this Ibogaine really helped him and he would like to know, um, how he might pay it back. And I said, "Well, we've got this project we're trying to start for a long time.

25:42It's the first project where we're going to look at a clinic in Mexico and test people, do before and after, just how are they doing? It'd be a long-term follow-up because Ibogaine, for no good reason at all other than the drug war, is illegal in the United States. But it and it's not a drug of abuse. It helps treat drug of abuse, but it is legal in Mexico and in Canada. And so, just the day before I'd gotten an, uh, matching grant offer of, uh, $10,000 for a $20,000 study. And, uh, I said, "Michael, would you be willing to match this?" And, um, he said, "Sure, yeah." I said, "Great. Now we're going to have this first Ibogaine study." And then he said, "Um, what else do you have?" And I was like, "Well, okay. If you want to know more, I'd say the most difficult thing for us to fund, the most, um, idealistic thing we're doing, this was

26:31at the time was we're trying to start research in Jordan. You know, we have research in Israel, we have research in Canada, we have research, but we've no research in the Arab countries. And I thought if we could do something in Jordan, uh, and I had incredible connections in in Jordan with the, uh, mayor of Amman who's, um, son-in-law actually had found, uh, LSD helpful for cluster headaches. And anyway, I went to Michael I said the the most idealistic thing, the most far-reaching is at this point would be to do this study in a month. And he said, "Well, how much does that cost?" And I said, "Well, it's about um 85,000, something like that, 90,000." And um he said, "All right, I'll do that, too." And so that started the first project with ibogaine. And then we eventually did another long-term follow-up in New Zealand. And now there are people now we're we're

27:22there's a project in Spain to with a group called Ice Ears. And it's to take um increasing amounts of ibogaine to help people withdraw from methadone. There's projects in Brazil with ibogaine. Um there's uh a company ATAI uh that's one of the for-profit psychedelic companies that's working with the Deborah Mash from uh Demerx. They've merged and they're interested in ibogaine. So ibogaine is one of the classic examples of disastrous drug policy. It turns out that there were um LSD dealers in the '60s who got busted. And they happened to have ibogaine. And so the government made ibogaine illegal. But these LSD dealers, Howard Lotsof, was also uh experimenting with opiates. And when they tried ibogaine, they felt no desire for opiates and they went through the withdrawal without any pain. It's just remarkable what opiates um do for you when you go through

28:18withdrawal. It's terrible. But if you have ibogaine, you can go through it in a couple days and you have a lot of psychological experiences about why you might want to run away from your problems into opiates. Isn't there something that happens with ibogaine where it like literally rewires? Yes. Now, that's true with other psychedelics, as well. It's called neuroplasticity. And so what that means is that there is this um ability for our neurons to have new synaptic connections. And that's what we mean is neuroplasticity. Our brain is constantly being rewired. Every time we have a Every time we do anything, we have memories, and the memories are encoded. And sometimes they get encoded in um harmful ways, like with trauma, with PTSD. They The memories are so painful that they never really get fully processed. They never really get put into long-term storage. Um

29:12there's there's a lot of um changes in your brain when when you have PTSD. Um but that this idea that you can then rewire your brain once you experience them. And so there there's researchers at uh Gul Dolan is at uh Johns Hopkins. She's done studies in mice with MDMA and showed that um it releases oxytocin, which is the hormone that we have for love and connection, nursing mothers, but it also promotes this new neural growth. So ibogaine does that, LSD does that, psilocybin does that. And what Gul has found, which is really interesting, is that the longer you're in the psychedelic state, the longer afterwards this period of neuroplasticity lasts, where you can do more integration work, where you have this uh enhanced ability to reroute patterns in your brain. And so ibogaine uh opens up this uh period of neuroplasticity for several

30:12weeks after, because the experience can last for more than a day or two. Is there any headway that's being made on bringing ibogaine to the United States? Um Cuz like you think about the opiate crisis that we have here, that seems like one of the very best sort of remedies for that. It is. And And this is where if you were to look back over the last um 50 years, um I doubt that there's more than five cases that the government has about anybody abusing ibogaine, if if at all. What's a 24-hour drug, right? It It It I've I've never done it. It knocks you down. I would highly recommend it. Yeah? But but I would rec- I I I've had um I'd say one of the most important experiences of my whole life was was ibogaine. Yeah? Yeah. Um What happened? Well, um so there's a fellow named Leo Zeff who is the um we called him the secret chief. So, he was the leader of the underground

31:11psychedelic therapy movement. And he worked closely with Sasha Shulgin. And Sasha Shulgin was the chemist that invented hundreds of psychedelics. He He He worked for Dow in the '60s and he developed invented a biodegradable insecticide. And they rewarded him with his own lab to do whatever he wanted. And so, Sasha tried to do more psychedelics and they're like, well, maybe these are not going to lead to products. So, so he realized he had to leave and he set up a lab at home and he taught. But they would have this process of um inventing new drugs, new psychedelic drugs, looking for new therapy drugs. And they would then um Sasha would take it into himself. And then if he thought it was okay, he would give it to his wife, Ann. Uh they're now both And they would do these together and then if they then they had a group of 12 people that would meet like once a

31:59month and they would try these new drugs. Sasha, by the way, did go to the Bohemian Grove where he was a musician there. And so, he was able to go. But he would test new drugs with people at Bohemian Grove. Oh my god. It So, like presidents and bankers Different kinds of people like that. Yes, they would try these new things. They'd go for walks in the woods. They cuz you go to Bohemian Grove for a week or two. And so, it's not like you're there for a day or so. But um so, this small group of 12 people decided that MDMA had incredible potential. This is in the middle '70s. And they gave this to Leo Zeff and Leo said, wow. He was uh uh about to retire. He was a clinical psych PhD, and he was um um getting up there in years, and he was about to retire. He he trained a lot of people with LSD and other things. And so, he did not retire in order to bring forth MDMA.

32:51And so, he really pioneered the use of therapeutic use of MDMA. And this is now MDMA being a therapy drug before it became ecstasy as a party drug. And and that all happened in Dallas at the Starck Club, which is, you know, a public place where, you know, incredible stories of start the Starck Club. There's going to be a documentary by Michael Cain is working on a documentary about the Starck Club. But But But um But that attracted Lloyd Bentsen, the senator from Texas. He heard about this, and then he complained to the DEA, and then the DEA moved to criminalize We knew that this public use of um MDMA was going to eventually result in DEA crackdown. This is Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and all of that. And so, we had a jump-start in the sense that that we The DEA didn't know we were there. They They only knew the party drug. They didn't know the therapy

33:40parts. But we knew that the DEA was there, and they were coming after us. So, I started a nonprofit before MAPS in '84, and and that was to prepare and gather this community together in order to um defend MDMA once the DEA moved. And so, Leo Zeff came to me, and he said, "You're starting to be an advocate, and I'd like to offer you an ibogaine experience because we need to um own our own shadow, own our own weaknesses, own own our own um things that we're we're not comfortable with. And and and also, you know, have spiritual connections and things like that. And he said, "If I can help you, this might help in your political work because then you'll see that we're mixtures of good and bad. Everybody is. And that you won't demonize the DEA, and that you may be able to find a way to, you know, build a bridge." And so, he offered me this ibogaine experience. And

34:32I said, "Great. I would love to do this." Um and so we had this whole long day to uh set aside to do this. And ibogaine in plant form takes a while to take an effect. So, uh Leo said, um "I'd like to give you a bunch of LSD at the same time." It was uh 350 micrograms of LSD, which is a pretty hefty dose. Um the first LSD experience that we know of, Albert Hofmann, uh April uh 19th, uh 1943, was um an amount that he thought would have no real effect cuz it would be so small, 250 micrograms, which is a a major existential challenge. So, 350 micrograms is is pretty good as well. And so, I actually um got administered ibogaine a bunch of it in plant form and then also the LSD at the same time. And I could tell the differences between the drugs. I could tell coming up on the LSD and then moving towards this um kind of ego dissolution and opening up

35:34and different my emotions and how am I going to do this political work and and who am I and you know, am I qualified and all of this. Um and I sort of had a lot of experience with LSD. I'd never done ibogaine before and I was able to to open up pretty well for the LSD. But then this sort of low gutteral rumble started from the ibogaine. The LSD peaks around 3 hours or so. And and I could feel this ibogaine building and building and building. LSD is also very much in your head, very ethereal, more so than psilocybin mushrooms, which are more embodied. Um and so this ibogaine started coming up, um this experience, and I started feeling like if I could just let go, if I could just fully have this uh experience and if I didn't have this fears and anxieties, then I would be a better advocate and that I needed to and so much was at stake.

36:26But then I felt I couldn't let go cuz I was too scared and and then I would be um hating myself. So I I I felt that there was this um cycle of oh I'm I'm not as good as I should be. I I wish I could let go. I do have these emotions of fear. Um and then I would feel that and get nauseous and then I would vomit. And and then I would feel relief for like a minute or so and then the swirl would begin and each of them is like 15 or 20 minute cycles and stuff and then I would get to this peak and then I would vomit again and over and over and over. And for um for a Jewish person that the imagery that I had was that I was being crucified on the cross of self-perfectionism. That I didn't want to be human in a way. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be more than I was and that this idea that I was um not perfect that that um you know, it just was this connection between

37:25self-criticism and self-hatred. And I could see that and and it just made me sick and I wished I could do more but I couldn't get out of it and I had like a 12-hour cycle of that over and over and over. I mean I you know, I was like dry heaving. I had nothing left to throw up anymore. And I just so um saw this connection between wanting to be perfect, not wanting to be human, being super self-critical leading to a self-hatred and shutting myself down. And so at the end of that day, I was so exhausted. Um I I called it um transcendence through exhaustion. You know, I just gave up. And I just beat myself up so much. I just gave up and I had the most blissful night. It was so beautiful. It was like no struggle, completely open everything and I realized that what I needed to do was keep the self-criticism cuz that is the drive for quality. You need access

38:17to the self-critical part of your mind. Yeah. But if it's connected to self-hatred, you don't listen as much because then you're a bad person. Right. So I I sort of severed the connection between self-criticism and self-hatred. I accepted myself as a flawed human being that had a lot of room to grow. And that I made friends in a way. I made an ally out of the self-critical part of my brain. And it I think has helped me to learn and grow because we're doing things that I've never done before. We're doing things I've never done before, nobody's never done before bringing this through the FDA so I can looks like a therapy. And we've constantly making mistakes. I like to say that I'm just a [ __ ] up who just keeps on trying. And and so this And then but I told myself this story. This was the most beautiful night. All night I was just

39:06super alert, didn't sleep at all. And just saw the stars. But I told myself a story and and so much is governed by stories as you know. But the story was that I was telling myself is that that I had not earned this. I I didn't have a breakthrough. I just exhausted myself. So I said when the sun comes up, I'll be back stuck in this nauseous space. I don't know why I told myself that story but but I did. And the sun comes up and then I was like stuck and nauseous again and I couldn't move for a day. Actually I had to sit there in a or lie there really in a fetal position. Friend was supposed to come pick me up. I was like I can't move. Do you think you brought that on yourself? In a way I do. I think the stories we tell ourselves I mean I mean that's sort of PTSD or depression. The story and that's what we're saying about you getting these grooves and that that's

39:52where this psychedelics can shake things shake things up and the neuroplasticity is what really permits you to see it in a different way. So I spent the whole next day just curled in a puddle basically. Occasionally they'd bring me a banana to eat or something like that. And then by the third day finally I was able to stand up without being nauseous and a friend came and picked me up. And ended up um driving me away. And and as we were driving I'd I'd only been there once. This was a house I'd never been to before, and we were going back to where I was familiar ground in the same way. And I had this sense in my mind that I knew what was around the corner. And I would say, "Oh, I think we're going to see this." And a couple times we did. And so, what I think happened is that I was taking it in peripherally, but I I wasn't paying attention to it

40:41when I was going there. It wasn't like I was, you know, telepathic in a way or anything like that. It was just that that all these experiences had had sort of been there, but hadn't registered. And I think I'd cleared out a lot of space in my mind from this constant self-criticism. So, I had a more openness and space, and I could remember things. Uh it was the fourth day that I could finally drive, but I felt that ever since then, I've had this increasing ability to um to be self-critical without it being so connected to self-hatred and so painful. And And I really feel that that Ayahuasca experience, although um I've not done it since because it was pretty uh heavy um and exhausting and painful. But But um And I've had other psychedelic experiences since. But But that, I think, was one of the pivotal ones in my mind. And so, here we have an opioid

41:39epidemic. Over 100,000 people died last year with overdoses connected sometimes with fentanyl and others. And a tool that can be tremendously helpful is something that is not being studied at all in the United States, and we're forcing people to go to other countries. So, MAPS is um developing what's called an investigator brochure. And what that means is that anytime a pharmaceutical company wants to develop a drug through the FDA, you have to summarize the world's literature in the peer-reviewed journals. And you look at it from a safety and efficacy perspective. And so, we prepare this brochure for the FDA and it will bring us to what is the latest science. It'll include the study that ICEERS is doing in Spain with ibogaine for helping people withdraw from methadone or the studies in Mexico also for opiate addiction. And then we will propose a new study and

42:39ibogaine is is in some ways one of the most dangerous of the psychedelics in that there are a small group of people that can have problems with the heart. And so, some people have died from taking ibogaine. But, if you do it under medical supervision, particularly for people who are at weaker physical states because of drug addiction, that nobody needs to die and you can reverse it if something does happen. So, we're probably going to propose um and and we're we're we're working with um Joe Barsuglia and Martin Polanco who have um developed a company to try to make MD ibogaine into a medicine. And they they ran a lot of the clinics also in Mexico. Um so, a medicine like a pharmaceutical medicine that'll be available for prescription? Yes, that that's the Well, there's two tracks again and and this is that's one track, but the other track is from a

43:33policy point of view. So, MAPS you know, our nonprofit, we have a policy and advocacy team. So, if ever there was a drug that we could make a strong case that should be removed from schedule one. Schedule one is a drug high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use, it's the worst drugs according to our scheduling system. Um you know, if we make MDMA into a medicine, what's going to happen is that the will have what's called bifurcated scheduling and that means is that our particular product in this particular capsule for PTSD would move out of schedule one, potentially schedule three or schedule four, but MDMA itself would still stay in schedule one. Um so, getting MDMA out of schedule one so that it's um hopefully, you know, more accessible not just for medicine is part of our goal as well, drug policy reform post prohibition world. But, ibogaine,

44:29there's no reason for it to be in schedule one or schedule two. Schedule two is drugs that have a high potential for abuse, but also have a medical use. So, I think we need to have a um two-pronged strategy with ibogaine. One is to try to work through the FDA to make it into a medicine, but other is to try to make the case that it never should have been criminalized in the first place, and it's not a drug of abuse, and at a time where we have so many people dying from opiate overdoses, and so many other people suffering even if they're not dying from this, that this is something that um a logical rational country would make this available, and we should have clinics right here in Austin and all over the country um because we have a massive problem, and and yet it's this remnant of the drug war, which and again, I would say Nixon, well, John

45:18Ehrlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy adviser, uh came out in the late '70s, and he said that the Nixon White House had two main enemies. Those were the blacks for civil rights and the hippies, the anti-war. And he the what Ehrlichman said is, "We realized that if we could criminalize the drugs that they did, Yeah. we could bust them up, we could uh arrest their leaders, we could bust up their meetings." And then Ehrlichman said, "Did we know we are exaggerating the risks of those drugs?" Uh of course we did. So, I I think we could make a good scientific and rational case now that ibogaine never should have been criminalized, and it should be legally available, but by trained therapists in proper circumstances so that the safety is is fine. Um but I think what has happened and what we've seen with the medical marijuana leading to marijuana

46:07legalization changing people's attitudes, we see that a lot of the psychedelic research with MDMA and psilocybin has led to Oregon decriminalizing drugs and making the Oregon psilocybin initiative with a sort of state legal program that they're trying to implement with local guides Colorado. Um in November the last election legalized the natural plant medicines. So I think with Ibogaine we will see a similar kind of a thing that there will be a lot of hopefully research over the next couple years and that will change people's attitudes and then maybe we can remove Ibogaine from schedule one and then the bigger question is the you're saying like you know nobody really looks back and thinks Vietnam is was a good idea. I'm going to pause you right here cuz I have to pee so bad. I'm really sorry. Just hold on one second. Right back. So. Yeah. Vietnam. Yeah so um

47:03nobody looks back and thinks Vietnam was a good idea you said. I think it's going to be the same way for the drug war. Yeah for sure. And so I think we will think of it as a massive tragic experiment that has been exported all over the world caused enormous violence and I think the idea of Ibogaine removing it's getting it removed from schedule one could be really important. But I have a little pee joke if I could tell you. Okay. People will know that you just went out to pee and come back but that's what brought us divine. I actually was I'm very lucky. I had prostate cancer. And I had it was caught early. And so I but I had prostate surgery and and now I'm fine. But it it affects your ability to control your bladder for a while. Right. Right so I had to wear and still do these sort of basic depends and pads and all this kind of stuff. So you know but

47:53there was a time shortly after the operation this is very short I was at Burning Man. And we had to you know we have a village at Burning Man. We do psychedelic harm reduction there. So a group of us were in this um sort of cuddle puddle in this you know I was not doing MDMA at the time but other people were. Um and it was like 3:00 in the morning and we've been there for hours and we're just like 14 of us or something just talking and and this one woman goes out to pee and comes back and you know other people do that and then she this one turned turned to me and said I don't understand you do you just had this operation you know you're supposed to you know pee more often and um you know what's up with you is like you're just sitting here the whole time. Doesn't matter. So you know diapers at the Burning Man is like a new fashion trend.

48:46How many people adopted this? People were talking about it. This was the god you started a trend. That seems like it would be uncomfortable. Like it would be better to just go pee somewhere. It it would be but then you interrupt the conversation and all that stuff but but I just did. Maybe I should do podcasts with a diaper on. Well it wicks it away. It's not even I just had to do the pee joke. I'm sorry. Yeah no worries. So back to um this idea that in the future we're going to look at the drug war as being an overall negative thing and a mistake for sure. I think the biggest thing is going to be this blanket definition of drugs. You know that there's especially things when you have things like psilocybin in schedule one where it can help people in so many ways and we're denying that help. And I think one of the keys just like Rocco was the key to get to Ted. Yeah.

49:46I think that someone's son having a bad experience with opiates someone in a great position of power someone who's a politician or a governor or someone like that who sees a big turnaround from someone using ibogaine or using psilocybin. Like that's going to aid us. It It's when people see members of their family or somebody that they care about that's suffering that gets better, that's when change really happens. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it it's sad that it takes that that you can't sort of look at look at the world and think you know, those might not be me or my friends, but but something new should change. Well, it's just not having an understanding of what it actually is. And it's because of that term drugs. The term drugs is almost always associated with someone being foolish, wasting their life, doing something dumb. And the word hallucinogen, too. Yeah. I

50:39mean, it's a delusion. It's fake. It's not real. It's like pink elephants when you're, you know, on alcohol or something. It's It's not real. And so, I think it's very pejorative, the language that we use about it. We try to talk about these things as medicines instead of drugs. And I think that the way in which we have drugs um have become scapegoats. So, you know, they become the shadow. They be They become the source of all the problems. And the fundamental mistake, I would say, of the drug war has been to say that certain things themselves are good or bad. These are bad drugs. And they have to be illegal. These are okay drugs or these are good drugs. Of course, good drugs have included tobacco alcohol. But But we make the thing itself good or bad. And what we miss is that it's about the relationship that we have with the thing. And that it's not

51:34the the substance, it's the relationship. And so, by focusing on the thing, then we say, "Oh, we got to reduce the supply. We got to, you know, do all this kind of work to make it so difficult or expensive for people to get to." And then we have to threaten them that there's a a man named Carl Hart who is on our Yeah, I know Dr. Carl Hart. Yeah, he's on our He's fantastic. He's on our board of directors. And he's a neuroscientist. Um uh And he is you know, in New York City and and he's a drug policy reformer. And and one time we're talking and I we were we were talking about drugs and I said, you know, I I think that the the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal. And he he said he'd like to say that and that that he believed that also. And and what I mean by that is that the the dangerous drugs are ones which

52:31when people get into problems with them, we need to offer them help as soon as possible. And then we stigmatize them and drive them away. The more more dangerous drugs also get mixed with other things. So, like fentanyl mixed with opiates and that's where you have the overdoses. So, people don't get pure drugs. They don't get support. They don't get help. They're not treated as humans. They don't get really access to treatment as much. We we just punish punish punish. So, our goal is to make drug users, particularly these people, feel worse off so that they're an example. So, nobody will want to do it. But that's not a really good example. People won't do that. So, I think this idea of the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal, I think makes a lot of sense, and we need to really offer treatment on demand and on peer support, and and

53:19when we think about drug policy, too, you know, people don't understand as much lost opportunities. You can see things that have gone wrong, but lost opportunities are like invisible. But when I think about MDMA having been criminalized in 1985 by the DEA on an emergency basis for bogus reasons about neurotoxicity, but they used that as a rationale. Then the hearings that we had going on with the DEA administrative law judge, they said that it should stay as a medicine. And the DEA overruled them and we sued them twice in the appeals courts and won and on the third time DEA lawyers figured out how to satisfy the courts to keep it illegal and that's why again in '86 I started MAPS to go through the FDA. But that when I think of the number of suicides that have happened in both veteran communities and everywhere since 1985 hundreds and hundreds of thousands I

54:15think of of lives. We should talk about this while while we're being brought up because there's a common misconception about MDMA that has been proven to be false. And it it was like that it makes holes in your brain. Well, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Oprah is a big person responsible for that. Actually. So um there was it started on MTV and went to Oprah. This is around 2001. So what had happened was that there was a young woman who her mother worked at a drug abuse treatment center and she had problems with cocaine, she had problems with marijuana, she had problems with ecstasy, other things and so they arranged and this was for this MTV show that that this woman would go and do a brain scan, a SPECT scan which is blood flow in the brain and then they would reveal the results to her live on TV. And this was at this drug abuse treatment

55:16center that that their her mother worked at and they they revealed the results and the results showed these holes in the brain. And it was a graphically manipulated image. So SPECT scans show blood flow through the brain and there's certain areas that light up when you have more blood flow than others. And so they took an arbitrary cut off, any place that had lower than a certain amount of blood flow they showed as a whole. And And it was just complete propaganda. It was to scare this young woman to supposedly do it. She'd done all these other drugs and ecstasy anyway. So, short time after that Oprah decides that she's going to do a show and she contacts me and us cuz we are now, you know, advocates and she she knew about what we're doing and we're trying to start MDMA research. She She says she She Her team says that the they want to

56:02do two shows on ecstasy. It's such a big thing. They want to do one on the risks and one on the benefits. I like great, sounds great. And they say, "Well, we're going to do the one on the risks first." And they they brought this woman who had all these holes in the brain supposedly to be um on the show. If you had all the holes in the brain that they showed, you wouldn't be walking and talking. You would be I was just big holes in her brain. So, nobody seemed to put it together. Here this woman, she seems fine, but this is her damaged brain. And we told Oprah's team, "Don't show this. This is fake. This is not real." And um and they did it anyway. And they had one woman who was um a 24-year-old woman that was a raver, but she had um positive experiences about MDMA. So, they said, "Okay, she would be the one that would sort of

56:51um say something positive about MDMA." And And then Oprah said to her, um "Do you know what you might be doing to your brain with all these holes in the brain? Um we'd like to offer you a brain scan. And if your brain scan looked like hers, um would you I think it was Lynn Smith was her name that that had the holes in the brain. Um would you stop using if your brain looked like that?" And And she said, "Well, I'd be willing to do a brain scan." But the very next day she contacted MAPS. She contacted us and said that um should she do this brain scan? And I said, "You definitely should do it, but do it with different people. Don't Don't do it with the people that there. But definitely do this brain scan and and then you'll be on the show again and you can show what the what what are." So, she did the brain scan and um then she wrote me back and she said,

57:39"Well, no holes and they've canceled the next show. There's no show on the benefits and they're not bringing me back." And I'm like, They tricked you. They did. And then years I I I Hollywood producer [ __ ] It was just and yeah, no show on the benefits. Um but then years later, over a decade later, when Oprah was just a short time from closing her um her show, uh but she had O magazine. So, she decided she would do a story on um she would assign a senior editor to do a story on on MDMA and the therapeutic use. And it was it was like Oprah doing atonement. I said, "Would you be willing though to do another show on your TV show and bring this woman back who had all these holes in the brain and let's see what she's doing now." And and she actually did show some some signs of brain damage in that she was working for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.

58:34And she was as the exhibit of you know, MDMA's terrible. they scared her with the holes in the brain to the point where she thought that drugs were ruining her life and she wanted to save other people? I think I think there was that, yeah, and I think that uh she wanted to get back in the good graces with her mother and that that then she gets supported and then she gets a job and there's a whole thing. And so um Oprah said, "No no, she's not willing to do another show, but this article would go forward in O magazine." And the article was great and the the woman um who was the reporter ended up um going for um an underground MDMA experience. Which which I helped arrange and it was very successful and that's how the article ends. But it's great cuz it didn't like make a big deal of oh, this is illegal underground. It was just

59:18like here's what happened to her to her to MDMA. Um but it was in some ways propaganda in the positive way. It was like, "Can a single pill save your life? Right. You know, before it's like, this is going to like cause holes in your brain. Now, one pill is all you need, a magic pill, and then you're going to be better for everything. Ignores the whole point that it's about the therapy and the context and the relationship. It seems like unfortunately, because of those kind of television shows and because of up until podcast and the internet, you you had a limited sort of ability to fully express the pros and the cons and explain the nuance of what these experiences are about. You're you're instead dealing with this sensationalist perspective where they're just trying to you know, just trying to highlight whatever the most wildest aspects of the experience, pro

60:18or con, would be so they can get a lot of people to pay attention to it. It's like it's becomes prostituted. Yeah. Yeah, and and I think that like long-form podcast where you can have the whole story. Mhm. You can get the whole story out unedited by people that are willing to do it. But I will say in terms of educating people about psychedelics, what we're doing is um a lot of MAPS is about public education. And so we're hosting the world's largest conference on psychedelics ever. And it's going to take place June 19th through the 23rd. How many DEA agents do you think will be in the audience? Well, I think um some. We also have some police officers who are We have one, Sarco Gregorian, is a full-time police officer in Winthrop near Boston, but he's also a psychotherapist. And he's been through our training program Oh, wow. in order to give MDMA therapy to other

61:11police officers. Mhm. We we just had a incredible the first psychedelic conference in Iceland. And Sarco came and also did his police chief came. And we met with the Minister of in Iceland. The conference was phenomenal. This the psychedelic conference in Iceland. And now the Minister of Justice is interested in having Iceland fund a study to give MDMA to prisoners to work with them to see about dealing with their traumas to reduce recidivism, also with victims of crime to help them deal with their PTSD, and also with prison guards and police. So, we have this um opportunity in Iceland to potentially make it a example of a countrywide approach. Our new big vision and I'll get back to the psychedelic science conference in just a second, but our new big vision is a world of net trauma by 2070. So, this idea of every year we're adding

62:12to the burden of trauma that people are experiencing. And um and then at last, there are some people that get better, but that there's many people that get stuck in PTSD. And then there's multi-generational PTSD. There's uh what's called epigenetics, which is um you know, biological evolution takes place over long periods of time. But what turns the genes on and off is epigenetics, above the genes. That can change from your own experience. And there's a woman, Rachel Yehuda at the Bronx VA, that has done studies with Holocaust survivors and their children. And has identified an epigenetic mechanism by which this is passed on from um parent to child. And it could be either from the father or the mother line. It's it's in either of our genetics. So, this idea that we are increasing the burden of trauma by um there's some estimates that by 2050,

63:01that if climate change continues as it does, that there will be about a billion climate refugees from um droughts and poor crops and you know, lack of water and and all of this. So, that it feels like the humanity is going to be burdened more by trauma. We have incredible problems with mental health because of both the COVID and and and other things. So, that what we want to do is reduce the burden of trauma every year and get to net zero trauma. And that that's and it will take multi-generations. And the end goal is the mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity. And and that's the hope for the for the future. And we will be talking about this at the Psychedelic Science Conference. So, it's going to be at the Denver Convention Center. We have the entire Denver Convention Center. We already have um yes, be part of the break. through 23rd?

63:57Yeah, and it's uh or we got over 5,000 people coming. We hope there'll be about 10,000. And we'd also like to say that we have um a special discount code for people who are listening. So, it's psychedelicscience.org and if you just put in Rogan 20, it's a 20% discount. All right. And so, we we think if people really want to get involved in this field in any way to be a therapist or to run clinics or to manufacture drugs or start new companies or just um how do you blend this with meditation? Anything. There's going to be over 300 speakers. We we have um incredible uh opportunities for people to to learn and grow and get involved. We have this uh the Denver Convention Center. We have enormous number of exhibits from, you know, probably 150, 175 different exhibits and um you know, Deepak Chopra will be there. Um you know, I mentioned

64:52Aubrey Marcus. He's coming with Aaron Rodgers, the the football player who's used ayahuasca, which is DMT in tea form. Um Michael Pollan is going to be there. Paul Stamets is going to be there. You know, pretty much the research community from around the world doing psychedelics research. And also drug policy reformers. And Denver was the first city that made mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority. Mhm. So, we're going to have uh experiential opportunities for people that will be um federally legal. I think Denver was also the first city that decriminalized marijuana. They've Yeah, they have done um Cuz it was a long time ago when marijuana was not state legal. Yeah, I think Ann Arbor might have been one of the first in the nation. Yeah, well, just cuz of the college there. Oh, interesting. Yeah, but but Denver uh and Colorado is

65:40very progressive. The mayor is going to help us open the conference. We've got the support of the governor. We're actually doing uh a project with the Denver police. Because mushrooms are the lowest enforcement priority and we want to educate police on what happens when you encounter somebody with a difficult trip. You know, you could make it worse for them or you could try to treat them in a certain way so that you calm them down and you know, they don't need to be tased or you know, however. So, so we're trying to educate police on how to de-escalate people with difficult psychedelic experiences. So, the the conference is going to be um the theme We We've had This is our fourth psychedelic science conference that we call that where we bring everybody together. The first was in 19 is 2010. And there we had about 400 people, something like that. But that was

66:29enormous for us. Um this and that was in San Jose. The second one was in 2013 and we had um at this point about a thousand people. And that was in Oakland. And then in 2017, we had another one and that was um over 2,000 people. And that now is still the uh world's largest uh conference. We had like 2,500. And now this one we think is going to be way more. So, it And the theme of it, why we've waited so many years between 2017 now is that we are now at uh the doorway to a new world. A- And what by mean What I mean by that is that we are at an incredible moment in time where there have been um probably two and a half or more billion dollars have gone into for-profit psychedelic companies. They haven't done so great in the stock market. A bunch of them have gone broke. What is the idea behind these companies? What are they trying to accomplish?

67:22Well, some of them were trying to develop new drugs. A lot of them were trying to set up networks of clinics. Um we also have ketamine, which is now been S-ketamine, an isomer of ketamine has been approved for treatment of depression. Um you know, we ended up um in November 29th, 2016, we had a what's called an end of phase two meeting with the FDA about our research with MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD. So, it took us 30 years from the start of MAPS, 1986 to um 2016, um where we presented our data to the FDA and they said, "Yes, you can go into phase three." Phase three's the final stage of research, where you need to do um uh safety and efficacy. And if you prove that to the satisfaction of the FDA, you get permission to market. So, some of the new for-profit companies, Compass Pathways is one, and Usona is a nonprofit, are trying to develop

68:18psilocybin into a method uh a treatment with therapy. Um Compass for uh treatment-resistant depression, Usona for um major depressive disorder. And so, a bunch of these companies are trying to develop new drugs. And I think some of them are thinking, "Well, the classic psychedelics, like uh LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, MDMA we wouldn't say classic, but the classic psychedelics like uh you know, ibogaine, mescaline, uh psilocybin, LSD, uh DMT, all these are in the public domain. And so, there's no patents on them. So, people have tried to say, "Well, we'll patent the manufacturing process, or we'll do something." But, there's also use patents. But, the use of psychedelics for therapy in different conditions is also in the public domain. So, a lot of these companies are going to try to develop new molecules that they can patent. So, that's sort of

69:13a classic pharma strategy. But It sounds horrible. Well, it I think that thing is that it'll be legal, the bad thing is it'll be owned by pharmaceutical companies. Well, I think they're make it's true. It will eventually these new drugs. But but these No one should own them. That doesn't make any sense. That that that anybody should get a patent on. I understand that we're trying to undo 53 years of you know, what criminalization. But I just think that that's a bad strategy and you're getting in bed with some demons. Well, there there is that tendency and then you see what pharma does to try to protect the patents. And and and and On the other On the It deserves to be legal. Well, the the classic ones that are off patent do. I I mean, I am supportive of people patenting original ideas. Sure. And so, if somebody develops some new

70:03molecule and and you know, for us it's going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars to make MDMA into a medicine. And so, we've done that the the So, we've done that in an incredible set of ways and I think this is why um what what I explained to you just a couple weeks ago and and why you were so gracious to invite me back now is cuz I talked about this crossroads that we're at. Yeah. And so, MAPS has raised about $145 million in grants and most of it donations in our history. And we have gotten enormous value in people's donated time, expertise of all sorts, and it's hard to even put a dollar number on that, but it's been tremendous. Um and so, we have used that to do this MDMA research. A couple years ago um with the rise of all these for-profit psychedelic companies, So, became more difficult for us to raise donations because people are like, why should I

71:02donate now, you know, you can I can just invest over here and you've got a story now. Your story is that it looks like you're moving into phase three. Maybe you can get investors. Um and so we didn't want to sell um equity at the time and so we we do have as I said, about 145 million in grants and donations and and a lot of free donated time, but we also have 43 million dollars in what's called um a royalty share. So, it is money from investors. They're mission-aligned investors. Ryan Zurrer organized it as the lead one called Vine Ventures. And they have about 3.8% of North American revenues once from MDMA once we make it into a medicine for about 8 to 10 years afterwards. And if we don't give them a certain amount of money back, then it continues. But they don't have ownership and they don't control what we do and we can end up

71:54you know, prioritizing public benefit um over profits. So, we also have uh around 20 million dollars in a um in a loan that's um potentially convertible into equity if we don't repay the loan. And we've got a couple years there. But we have reached this spot where we have the nonprofit MAPS which has about uh 35 people is the 100% owner of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp which is about 135 people, something like that. And so we have this situation. We we also tried to do something new with pharma so that and something new with capitalism. So, that capitalism when you have for-profit companies, you're supposed to maximize profits. And if minority shareholders don't like the fact that the management isn't maximizing profits, they can try to throw them out. And so that that produces a prioritization of profits over people, profits over um social benefit.

72:58And so capitalism has been modified in a way with the public benefit corporation. So that's a new corporate structure, maybe 20 years old, but but relatively new. And there's thousands, you know, not hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands, I don't think, but there's thousands of these public benefit corporations. And what you do is you can maximize public benefit over profit. So that you cannot be sued by majority by by minority shareholders to try to force out the executives because you're not maximizing profits cuz your goal is public benefit over profit. So we want to create a new model for how pharma drugs can be distributed. So we have this remarkable moment where we have the nonprofit is 100% owner of a for-profit but public benefit pharmaceutical company. But we need to raise additional capital. We are now at a place where we recently

73:55announced that our second phase three study was successful and was confirmatory. Our first phase three study was incredibly successful. Um and to give you a sense of how successful, um and we published this in Nature Medicine. The FDA looks at statistical significance. So there's efficacy and safety. So efficacy is determined by basically statistical significance. And you have to have .05, which means 1 in 20 chance that it's random, that it's not from what you think it was. You know, that your intervention, your experiment said, yes, it's statistically significant. That means it's 1 in 20 or lower chance that it's your finding is random. And you have to have two of those. And the And so if you have 1 in 20 and then you multiply them another 1 in 20, it's 1 in 400 chance that that these two independent studies have produced results that are random and then the FDA

74:58will approve it. Our first study was one in 10,000 chance that it was random. It was just incredible. Now, how do you do that? How do you get such great statistical significance? You get it because you have um a big difference between the two groups and you also have not that much variability. So, what it means is the people that got MDMA pretty much of them got major benefits and the people that got the therapy without MDMA, so I should say the people that got therapy with MDMA did great. And pretty not very much variability. It doesn't work for everybody, but we had 88% responders. We had 67% no longer had a diagnosis of PTSD. These are severe PTSD patients that um had PTSD an average of 14 years, 1/3 over 20 years. And then we had um just uh another 21% had uh what's called clinically significant response. And uh they still have PTSD, but over time they

76:03might get better if they could have had a fourth session, they might get better. So, and we had a great safety record. We had nobody attempt We had actually nobody in the MDMA therapy group tried to kill themselves, tried to hit themselves. We enroll people that have previously attempted suicide. We did have one woman try to kill herself twice during the study, but she was in the placebo group. She got therapy without MDMA. We had another woman it was so difficult for her to confront her trauma that she checked herself into a hospital to not self-harm. She also was in the placebo group. So, the results were phenomenal. And uh Science, the journal Science, one of the most important uh journals in in the world in science, At the end of every year, they publish a list of what they think are the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year.

76:52And they chose our study in Nature Medicine as one of the world's top 10 breakthroughs of the year. It was It was phenomenal. And we had um special um appreciation for what science was willing to do. Because you talked about beforehand about holes in the brain. Mhm. So, 20 years before science had published this article that they never should have published. Um and this was by researchers at Johns Hopkins that had been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And what they claimed is that MDMA could hurt dopamine. This was a study in primates. And they said, "Oh my god, MDMA can hurt dopamine. And it could cause Parkinson's. And that this could be a real danger." Now, this was around 2002 to 2003. And they had um since 1985, it had all been about MDMA supposedly hurting serotonin and causing holes in the brains from serotonin.

77:47And we had done studies in primates before with these same researchers where none of the primates died from overdoses. There didn't seem to be any problems with dopamine. Um but the the narrative of the anti-drug people in the National Institute on Drug Abuse about serotonin neurotoxicity was sort of diminishing. People weren't showing problems. And so, what they were saying was, "Well, you're reducing your cognitive reserves. And so, you don't show problems now, but when you get older, you're going to show problems." So, the time bomb theory. have evidence of this? No. And not only did they not have evidence, but a lot of older people took MDMA and they were fine. So, if they had had this, you know, decline of aging age-related decline, they they would have So, so does drop your dopamine levels, right? Or serotonin levels? It It In a short term, yes. Yes. Yes.

78:35Yes. Yes. Yes. It It does, but it doesn't do this kind of damage to the brain in that way. They recover within a day or so. And there's mitigation techniques like with 5-HTP. We don't use those, but people do use those. So you use those? Because we don't think it's necessary. So, what we what we we first proposed we in 1992 is when we got permission for the first study with MDMA. Mhm. And people had been using 5-HTP after MDMA. But there's there is a benefit to using 5-HTP. It boosts your serotonin levels quicker, correct? Yes. Yes, it it can be helpful, but what we do in a therapy context. So, the FDA we said should we try administering with 5-HTP or something of that. They said Um they said don't do that. You know, let's do everything under observation and see what the problems are. And if you need if you see problems, then we

79:22should figure out how to mitigate the problems. So, the key thing that we do is to say to people that when you take MDMA, it's a 2-day experience. It's not a 1-day experience. And the second day is for rest and for reflection. And they have no obligations, no appointments, nothing that you need to do. Just take the second day and and rest. And that's where people would take 5-HTP if they wanted to, but we don't see this dip in mood anymore in the MDMA group than in the group that gets therapy without it. So, this people talk about suicide Tuesdays or, you know, this this the depression after you've used up serotonin. Um but I think the rest part is part of the therapeutic process and it So, we have never felt the need to recommend that people do 5-HTP. I don't think it's a bad idea to do. I mean, if people wanted to do it, it

80:16can be helpful, but we just feel that the rest is just as helpful and it's more therapeutic. So, But but but they're not mutually exclusive. No, we could do both. Yeah, for sure. For sure. But but we don't in the research. We have we haven't found the need. So, but what science had um Yeah, so so this idea of serotonergic neurotoxicity and holes in your brain and time bomb theories just wasn't working anymore. It wasn't persuading people. It wasn't persuading the FDA. So NIDA funded this study Unna McCann and George Ricaurte and it was in primates. And as it turned out a bunch of the primates died of overdoses and and they published the paper in science that said that MDMA could cause Parkinson's that could hurt dopamine. And the editor of science is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The president of that was Alan

81:12Leshner. He used to be the head of NIDA. And he fanned the fears of MDMA and he he did that in Congress and it was great because then he got more money for NIDA. He got him over a billion dollars a year. So he published a press release about this article and it said that taking MDMA was like playing Russian roulette with your brain. All right. So it didn't seem right this article. We we knew that we'd given MDMA to primates for research and nobody died of overdoses. None of them did. So we we wrote a letter to the editor. And we questioned it. They they didn't give it the way people take it which is orally as well. And so we kept they gave it subcutaneously. So they injected it sub-q. And so we ended up um forcing them in their minds to try to replicate the results. Can I pause you for a second? How did these primates die of overdoses?

82:03Um they would just have like heart attacks or or something like that. Um is that common with humans? No no. So so here's how this continues. So so they they Also you get more neurotoxicity in crowds for some reason when animals or people are uh together than when they're alone and when the temperature is higher there's more neurotoxicity. So they tried giving um more MDMA to primates with higher temperatures, more crowded in the cages, and they couldn't replicate the results. And they but they kept defending it in public. And finally, a year later, they said that this was super embarrassing. They they had to retract the study because they were puzzled why they couldn't replicate the results. And so they took some of the tissue from one of the animals that had overdosed and and died. And they discovered that they had mistakenly given methamphetamine instead

82:57of MDMA. And that the bottles, they said, that were labeled MDMA actually had methamphetamine in them. And so these they they they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina. They provide all the schedule one drugs for all the NIDA-funded researchers. So the Hopkins people blamed the people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the bottles. The The people from Research Triangle Institute said they never do that. They always test that they have quality control. They think that it got switched something or other at the site at Johns Hopkins. The National Institute of Drug Abuse didn't want to find out what was going on. Or if they did want to find out, they never made it public. So it's never clear how did this happen. But they had to retract this data and retract their papers. And it was um

83:49the high water mark of neurotoxicity fears. And at the same time, Peter Jennings was doing a documentary called Ecstasy Rising. And this was the first documentary that really had a bunch of people talking about the benefits. And he also talked about this um problem with the methamphetamine. The The other thing about methamphetamine versus MDMA is that, you know, for people that know about Adderall and other things, 10-15 mg is a hefty dose. But MDMA, it's 125 mg is a full dose. And so they were giving the wrong drug in MDMA quantities. And that's why they knocked off a bunch of these primates. And that's why they they claimed that they saw this dopaminergic problems. And so, ever since then, and that's been 20 years ago now, think do you have speculation that was sabotage? Somebody sabotaged it somewhere. I don't think it was from Research Triangle Institute.

84:42it's accidental sabotage or do you think it I don't I think that the researchers um wouldn't have done that intentionally, but maybe somebody in the lab did it or something. But, I do think that the researchers were fundamentally irresponsible to put the paper out because they should have known um that there was prior primate studies where dopamine hadn't been damaged. So, the other thing is in the late um 18 19 uh 80s early 1990s, we were trying to talk about yeah, MDMA serotonergic neurotoxicity. And so, I went to George Ricaurte, the same researcher that did the primate study with the methamphetamine instead. And I said, I want to buy you some monkeys. You've just done studies in rats. Can you study this in in monkeys uh in primates? And he he said he did. And again, there was no evidence of um overdoses or dopamine. Also, this was before brain scans came in.

85:40And so, the most sophisticated way that was available at the time to look at what's going on in the brain was to do spinal taps and to take spinal fluid and look for metabolites of neurotransmitters in the brain. And I felt like I could not recommend uh try to get other people to volunteer for it unless I did it myself. So, I was I was the first one to get a spinal tap. Jesus. And it was really hard. But, the the imagery that I did, and again, this is the kind of this idea about storytelling. So, the story I was telling myself as this big needle is going into my spine to try to draw out the spinal fluid was that if a woman could give birth to a child, I could at least give birth to my spinal fluid. It was like way less painful, much shorter, but I could do it. And so the imagery was I'm giving my birth to my spinal fluid to these researchers

86:33so that we can understand what's really going on with MDMA and hopefully make it into a medicine. And it didn't hurt terribly. And there was spinal headaches that you get afterwards. So a couple days afterwards I had headaches, but I felt like I could um enroll other people. I could encourage other people to do it. So I was going to New College in Sarasota, Florida, um which by the way DeSantis is now trying to kill, um and has fired the president. It's the most um it's the honors college of the state of Florida and um it is a he trying to kill it? Um it's just uh what he's doing to public education. I mean, this was the symbol of the most what he called the most woke school and bunch of transgender people, a bunch of open-minded people. Um it started as a private school in the '60s, merged with the state when they ran out of money. So he fired the

87:22president, he stacked the board of trustees, and he's make he's wants to turn turn it into a conservative school. He's doing it for political purposes to try to show that he's anti-woke and that he is um wanting to he he What's going on in public education in Florida is is really frightening. Um George Soros is actually interested in trying to help out at New College, um because George Soros actually, even though he's the boogeyman he for a lot of the right wing, he he funded the Central European University in uh Hungary as as after communism. And it was killed also by Orbán in Hungary. So you go after public education as a way to try to control uh intellectual narratives. But but anyway, I was at New College the school and we were experimenting with MDMA, and so I got about 35 people or so to get spinal taps. Not just from New College, but from from

88:17all over. And um the spinal taps showed that there was no problems with dopamine. It was there was a little bit less uh serotonin metabolites, but also lower serotonin has been linked to risk-taking behavior. And so taking drugs is risk-taking behavior, particularly when they're heavily criminalized. So it was not evidence that it was serotonin neurotoxicity from MDMA, but it cleared dopamine. So the these researchers should never have um ignored their prior data. They were just so willing to um demonize uh MDMA to get more grant money. So so they were addicted to grant money. Yeah, that seems to be uh the case with a lot of scientific studies, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's It's a real problem when you're not just you know you're not just trying to find out what the truth is. You're You're trying to find data that would reinforce whatever idea that you

89:08went into it looking to find in the first place and throw out information that Yeah. I I I'll say Yeah, I'll say the the best example of that for me was that um I've done long-term follow-up studies to the work that Timothy Leary did at Harvard. Um so the Good Friday experiment was in 1962. The Good Friday experiment? Yeah, the Good Friday experiment is incredible. So this was um Aldous Huxley had had written The Doors of Perception and was talking about mescaline and spiritual experiences. And a lot of people who were doing work with LSD, with alcoholics and others in the '50s would have these spiritual experiences as part and um Bill W, who started Alcoholics Anonymous, actually had an LSD experience in the '50s. And what he actually his first place getting sober was belladonna. And um so Bill W, the founder of AA, had a psychedelic

90:00experience that got him sober in the first place. Yeah. And then later, uh about a decade or more later, he experimented with LSD. And he felt that this um LSD could be tremendous for What was his initial psychedelic experience that led him to get sober? Well, it was belladonna. What is belladonna? It's kind of when you think about what drugs did the witches use in the Middle Ages? It's a disorienting psychedelic. What's it was scopolamine. Oh. That stuff is crazy. That's the devil's dust [ __ ] Yes, exactly. Exactly. And you That's the stuff that's supposed to turn people into essentially into zombies that are like very easy to suggest. Wade Davis has done studies about the voodoo cults in Haiti. Yeah. And what drugs they use and they kind of can tranquilize people. They bury them alive. They think that they're blow dust in their nose. Yeah,

90:51scopolamine is also the stuff they use to stop people from getting motion sickness on boats. Which is really crazy like Dramamine patches. Well, that that illustrates the exact point though that it's not the thing itself. It's how it's used. It's the relationship you have with it. It's the dose. It's the route of administration. It's how you do it. So So he had scopolamine helped him get off of alcohol. Yeah, you have this terrifying experience. Things come to the surface, but it Yeah. And and and it did help him. And then when he did LSD in the 50s and I met the one of the women uh that gave him the LSD, Sidney Cohen. Was the the man. Um and what he felt was that um we talk about in in AA about hitting bottom. Mhm. You know, that that people's lives when they hit bottom then they're finally ready to make a a change. But that means that they've destroyed

91:45their families. They've destroyed their jobs. That that that that that their health. And so what what Bill W felt is that you could give LSD to people and they could psychologically hit bottom. Yes. While they still had some intact relationships that would then help support them as they tried to move to sobriety. And he felt that this could have a major role to play in AA, but Why didn't he ever incorporate it? Um it became too controversial. And and and so he ended up working with crude tools. Working with crude tools. And but there was a lot of work with LSD in in the '60s for alcohol use disorder. And it it proved to be quite effective when supported. So that these substances can be extremely helpful again used in a careful careful way. So the Good Friday experiment was an attempt to understand do um can psychedelics produce a mystical experience?

92:48And the Walter Pahnke was a doctor and a uh minister and he was getting a PhD at Harvard. And he was uh interested in in looking at the spiritual potential of MDMA. And he I mean of of of psilocybin and he worked with Timothy Leary and they did this experiment. And they did it with a Reverend Howard Thurman. So Howard Thurman was an African-American uh minister at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. And Howard Thurman is um someone who deserves a lot more attention because he studied with Gandhi. He studied non-violence with Gandhi and then he became Martin Luther King's mentor. And Martin Luther King got a PhD at Boston University. And Howard Thurman was his mentor. So Howard Thurman really helped the American Civil Rights Movement adopt the strategy of non-violence that he got from from Gandhi. And that's what we see, you know, in all of the uh

93:46stories about you know, people being beaten by police trying to protest different things and they try to react. So non-violent resistance was a key to the American Civil Rights Movement. And Howard Thurman was very interested in this connection between the mystical experience and political action. So the mystical experience, you move beyond your sense of I'm you know this biographical person, you know, I'm my tribe, I'm my country, I'm my religion, that there's something deeper. That we're part of humanity, we're part of I mean if you look at the quantum level, right? We're all energy. We're all connected in these different ways. So when you feel that and um Rita Marley has this incredible album, Bob Marley's wife, and it's called um when you who feels it knows it. You know, who feels it knows it. So you can say this and I can say this and

94:38people can hear it, but if you have an experience that you feel it, then you know it. And so Howard Thurman was very interested in this idea of uh what are the political implications of this mystical experience? And so Walter Pahnke was willing to um to work with him. Um and Howard Thurman said, "I will let you come to my church, Marsh Chapel, on Good Friday and you can do an experiment with 20 divinity students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary and you can um give them all a pill and half will be psilocybin, half will be placebo, which was nicotinic acid, which gives you a flush. Um and so this was done and it was considered to be the most eloquently designed experiment ever done on whether psychedelics could produce a mystical experience. And it showed that um nine out of the 20 people had a mystical experience, eight out of the nine had the psilocybin.

95:44And then they did some long-term like six-month follow-ups and they said it impacted their lives in certain ways. And then Walter Pahnke um died in a terrible scuba diving accident in 1971. Um and so a lot was ended with him. And then the the 1970 and the backlash against psychedelics. So, now it's in the '80s and I'm um undergraduate. I dropped out of college for 10 years from uh 1972 to 1982. And and you have to do a thesis, a senior thesis at New College. And I wanted to do psychedelic research, but psychedelic research was wiped out at the time, nothing to do. You couldn't get permission to give psychedelics, but I thought if I go back to the Good Friday experiment that I could do a long-term follow-up that is just asking people what happened to them when they uh took the psilocybin and how do they think about it now? And I wouldn't have

96:38to get permission from the FDA or the DEA. I would just have to get permission from what's called an institutional review board, which our college had. Just about the safety of the subjects, but I'm just asking them questions. Mhm. So, that was the only way that I could do psychedelic research. And it was incredible because in the mystical literature the real test of the validity of a mystical spiritual experience is called the fruits test. Means, what are the consequences in your life? What are the fruits of the experience? Does it make you more peaceful, more loving? Does it make you more uh reduce your fear of death? Does it give you more spiritual sense of how we're connected? So, that's the fruits test. And so, what I you know, cuz people can describe all sorts of things, but what impact does it have in your life? So, I figured I can do a long-term

97:24follow-up and that's the fruits test. And Walter Pahnke would have done it if he hadn't um died. Uh but nobody else was doing it. So, I ended up um trying to figure out how to do it. I went to Andover Newton uh school and I said um I nobody knew who the subjects were in the study. So, I went to the school and I went to which is outside of Boston and I said um I'd like to put a note in the alumni newsletter. Would you be willing to do that?" Um and they said, "No." They refused. They I said, "This is the most important experiment ever in the history of mystical experiences and psychedelics with your students. And I just want to ask them questions. Would you let me put something in the alumni newsletter?" And they said, "No." This is now 19 '86. And so, I was like, oh God. I was blocked. Nobody Tim Leary, nobody had the list. So, I went to their

98:16library. And I thought, "Maybe I'll see some books or something on this experiment." Nothing. The thesis that was done at Harvard, nothing. They had zero about this experiment. It's like cultural amnesia. But I'm wandering through the library and I notice that they've got some books of the alumni. And one of them had the list of all the students that were in school in 1962 and their names and their addresses. I was like, "Wow, this is bonanza." So, I photocopied it all and then there was like 350 of them. And I wrote a postcard to every single one of them. And that led me to three of them wrote back saying that they were in the study. And over years and years it took me but I identified 19 out of the 20. And I was able to go see them in person and interview them. And this really validated my theory of change. So, my my my theory of change also which which

99:08which you've shared a bit is that if you have these spiritual connections, these spiritual experiences, that will make you think about the world in a different way, think about others in a different way. And so, what people said is that their mystical experiences really did reduce their fear of death, made them feel more connected to other people who were from different faiths, made them more ecumenical in a way, deepened their faith in their own religion. It didn't turn them away, but they saw it in a more symbolic rather than literal way. Um but what I discovered, so it it validated the the results. But what I discovered is um a big mistake that that one of the persons in the study had heard the Howard Thurman, by the way, um the audio of that service is up on our website. If you go Good Friday experiment, you can listen to Howard Thurman's

99:57uh Good Friday experiment uh speeches, you know, his his sermons and stuff from 1962. One of them was you have to tell people there's a man on the cross. You must tell people there's a man on the cross. And one of the students under the influence of psilocybin said, "Yeah, I got to tell people there's a man on the cross. I'm going to do it right now and I'm going to run out of this room and I'm going to run down the road and I should tell the president, but the president is in DC, so I'll tell the president of the university." And he goes running down the street and um Walter Pahnke and Huston Smith go, you know, running after him. It's a busy street on Commonwealth Ave. in front of the Marsh Chapel and they finally catch him and um he doesn't want to go inside. He's outside, he's tripping, he's like got this mission. And they give him a shot of Thorazine

100:41to tranquilize him, to bring him back inside. And they never mention that at all. Wow. Completely not mentioned it. So, I had this decision when I'm going to write this follow-up study, you know, I said I can't hide that. So, I did report that. And what what was going on, I think, was in the culture was this uh exaggeration of the risks and suppression and minimization of the benefits. And I think what Timothy Leary did in response was the opposite. Yeah. He's like, "Okay, I can exaggerate the benefits. One dose, you're you're enlightened, you know more than everybody else." And then he would minimize the risks. Yeah, that's not good. It's terrible. do that. You know, I think um I had um I don't know if you ever saw the podcast, I had Alex Berenson on who wrote a book called Tell Your Children and it's all about the dangers of marijuana. Wow.

101:35And I had him on with Dr. um Mike Hart who is a cannabis doctor in Canada. Mhm. And you know, one of the things that he was talking about was people for whatever reason when they have a high dose of of marijuana, there's something that happens to some of them where they have like a schizophrenic break. And I have heard of it. I know people who have had this. And the pro-marijuana people do not want to acknowledge this danger. They want to paint marijuana as a completely innocuous substance that no one should worry about. And I think it's way too powerful for that and I think too many people are psychologically or physiologically vulnerable. We're not all the same. And if someone is particularly vulnerable whether it's towards schizophrenia or whatever mental illness it might be, there's something about these experiences that seem to send them over

102:34the edge. And that's something that we should be concerned with. We should talk about it. We have to because if if we become what we the opposite of what we are worried about actually we don't become the opposite we become like them. We just do the same. So I think what It's the same thing. It's like we become the polar opposite. We just we just justify things that are we find morally reprehensible, we find ethically terrible and we justify it because we're doing it for the right side. You can't. You can't do that. completely wrong. So what we have to do is we have to do what we You know, people talk to me a lot about where might the backlash come from. You know, for now we're we're very close. We we think now with two successful phase three studies. The second one was confirmatory so it's you know, millions of chances that it

103:20was random and not real. You know, it's incredible results. Um so we think by um potentially June of 2024 we should have um FDA we have a good chance of having FDA approval. I have a question for you. Are there people I've heard of people that are for whatever reason resistant to DMT experiences? Like it doesn't work with them. I I think there there are some and it could be biological. We don't know. It could be that they're just so Okay, they could be that they're so resisting the experience. So Stan Grof actually talked about work with obsessive compulsives that he did with LSD and he had some that he could give over a thousand micrograms of LSD. Enormous amounts of LSD and they could still play chess. Wow. So there's a way where you can control your mind so much that that even psychedelics won't won't won't happen. Wow. Yeah. So so I think

104:16I wonder but but there are people like Jamie has a thing about edibles. Mhm. Like Jamie can kindly eat like a like a foot long sub from Subway. I'm not kidding. He can put down extraordinary amounts of edibles and he feels nothing. Yeah, 1350 is the highest I've gone. I Do you know how crazy that is? It's amazing. 1350. Dude, 200 will put you on the moon. at a concert, watching the concert, having conversations. Well, what about when you smoke? Is it different? No, sure smoking works just fine. Smoking works better than edibles. It is a different drug when it's passed through your digestive system. And that's right. I I have a talked about it ad nauseam. It's 11-hydroxy metabolite, right? Yeah, yeah, so I'll just tell you a funny story about my wife, Lynn. Which was that her mother had pain. Maryann, her mother had pain. And Lynn thought that

105:11and I suggested actually maybe small amounts of THC or CBD might help her mom. And so Lynn was like, "Okay, I will try it first before I give it to my mom." So she took a I brought home a edible, some chocolates, and she took one square which was 10 mg of cannabis. She took it at her mom's assisted living place about an hour about a mile away from where we live. And then she's ready to drive home and so she's driving home and she thinks nothing much going to happen. So the road starts tilting. She starts having a terrible time. She barely gets to our house and and then she's got this panic reaction because she is thinking that she might forget to breathe. She might she might die because she's going to forget to breathe. Oh boy. And our daughter our daughter Ellie were were there with us and we were like trying to cheer her up and like you're

106:00not going to die and but we're also like massaging her feet and laughing at her but it was a horrible experience. Yeah. So some people have edibles and and they just have horrible experiences and and other people I guess get edibles and nothing happens. Yeah. I mean it depends on so many factors, right? I think there's biological factors, there's your current level of anxiety. But to just claim that it's innocuous I think is just so foolish. Yeah, I think if there is a backlash where I you know the the backlash in the 60s was political. You know, against psychedelics and hippies and stuff. The backlash that happened in the late 70s early 80s when it looked like marijuana might be legalized was parents against you know Right. Well, it's also all that Nancy Reagan just say no [ __ ] Yeah, yeah. That was that was when we have to really

106:48for a person that's alive today to understand the influence that media had on you when you were a child, it's almost impossible for you to wrap your head around. But I want you to try. The kids of today, you kids with your internet and your Google and being able to watch whatever you want to watch on television any given time. When I was a kid when you saw something on television, everybody talked about it. Those just say no commercials. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? And it's someone Friday. Well, it led to like a lot of funny stand-up comedy bits like Bill Hicks had a funny bit about it but it also led to a lot of people thinking literally you're going to fry your brain with drugs. Yeah. And it worked. It worked on us. It worked on a lot of [ __ ] people. Like the the influence that they had by being

107:34able to do those kind of things and put them on television back then, it it it's it's it sets things back. Like everything takes like a whole generation for people to get over. Like if we go back to the early days of canna- cannabis prohibition, when you watch the Reefer Madness film, Yeah. and you know, and you find out about this whole Harry Anslinger, William Randolph Hearst connection, and that it had a lot to do with It actually had a lot to do with commodities like hemp Yeah. versus nylon. And there's so many aspects to it that you would have never guessed, but the point is that that propaganda from the 1930s turned something that had thousands of years of human use, demonized it, created a new name for it, used a a Mexican slang name for a tobacco, Yeah. and they turned it into this new drug. And they labeled it saying that it was

108:32Mexicans and black black men were raping white women on this drug. And then they have the guy smoking pot, jumping out a window, and it's Reefer Madness is hilarious. It is. I I have a poster of it. long. It does. I have a poster from Reefer Madness. It's a classic. Think about that time, right? So, that's the '30s, right? Yeah. And then what? You got to get into the '60s before marijuana's popular again. Yeah. Like it literally it has to burn through a generation of propaganda. Their children have to learn from their parents' mistakes and realize that their parents are dumbasses, and then they experiment with things, and they they have to learn from other people that are doing it. And then it goes to a point where it's at now, where now because of the internet these conversations are just everywhere. There's so many maps videos. Yes. work that you guys have

109:17done is so extraordinary and so important. Guys like Dr. Carl Hart, all these different people, Michael Pollan and his amazing book, all these people that are talking about these experiences now, there's just this flood of information. So, you can't demonize it the same way. But, it's very important that the people that are on this side don't [ __ ] anybody. It's so important. And And all of these people will be at Psychedelic Science, too. And I think that the trap that we have to avoid falling into is And where the backlash will come from now, if there is, it's if we exaggerate the results and minimize the risks. Yes. Yeah. And we have to be very careful that we don't do that. It should be honest across the board. And I think if it is, there'll be an understanding by most people that you should be able to make educated informed

110:04decisions as to what to do with your consciousness, because there might be a significant benefit available if you do that. Yes. Now, how will you educate your own kids? I know they're little, but how will you educate your own kids about drugs? I tell them the I talk to my children the same way I would talk to a regular grown person. I mean, I treat them with much more gentleness and kindness and as much love as I have, but I try to talk to them about things. I'm like, there are drugs that are very, very dangerous. They'll They can kill you. And one of the reasons why they can kill you is because they're illegal. Mhm. And I explain the whole thing. I explain that if drugs were legal, then you would know what the dose is, you would know who's making it, and it would It would be taxed. Yes. drugs are made in these other countries

110:51where no one's watching. And so, they're bringing across drugs, and to make these drugs cheaper for them and make it more potent, they mix in fentanyl. And I was explaining fentanyl. And I was explaining that fentanyl is not just in cocaine, but it's also in fake Ambien. Somebody might give you a sleeping pill, fake Xanax. So, we talk about these things. That's so good. Ecstasy has gone people have gotten contaminated ecstasy with fentanyl and people have died from that. In the stand-up comedy community, there was a group of guys who died from fentanyl-laced cocaine, I believe. That's That was what it was proven to be, wasn't it, Jamie? That sounds right. I think pretty sure. It's It's a It's a real problem. It's a real problem. So I talked to them about it and I explained that we have we have stuck our heels in the sand. We've dug our heels in on something that

111:45is objectively not just ineffective, but very detrimental to society as a whole. And that's having drugs be illegal. Because if you have drugs illegal, you're not going to stop people from taking drugs. What you're going to do is funnel all the cash to criminals. Exactly. It's what happened in prohibition in the the 1900s in America and it's what's happening right now in Mexico. Well, and after prohibition ended of alcohol, shortly after that, marijuana became We have the police apparatus. They needed something to prohibit and they said, "Oh, we'll we'll go after, you know, Mexicans and blacks and cannabis and and now marijuana." Exactly. It was literally right after prohibition ended, then the marijuana prohibition began. It was very very closely connected. And such a coordinated effort. But back then, if you had the newspaper, if you were, you

112:33know, William Randolph Hearst and you had the newspaper, you could write whatever the [ __ ] you wanted. Well, you could just make up the news. Well, we've got a lot of that going on right now. have a little bit of that going on right now. But at least now you have enough people that can point that out and say that's not true. But back then you had nothing. Yeah, but people may not be willing to go to multiple sources. A lot of times people only stay It's also when you find out that like someone that you respect, like a newspaper you respect, is bullshitting. Like which does happen. You go, "God damn it, why are you guys bullshitting? You can't [ __ ] I love you. I trust you. You're are journalist. You're the real journalist. We need them. We need the New York Times. We need these people. But they have to be real journalist. You can't be an

113:17ideological soldier who like hide certain information to protect what you think is right. Okay, so that that gets me to the Concord Prison Experiment. That was the other thing that Timothy Leary did. So, what he said was that yeah, people talk about their mystical experiences and then maybe they can say how that's changed their lives, but that's sort of subjective. But if we can give psilocybin to prisoners and then help them have these prosocial experiences, work through their traumas, and then when they're released then we can reduce their recidivism. They will now be ready to make a new reentry into society and that that's an objective thing. So, the next thing that Timothy Leary decided to do was the Concord Prison Experiment. And this was tremendous experiment and they they gave about 35 people psilocybin experiences um inside prison. Uh Timothy Leary and

114:08others, the the researchers would go into the prison and half the researchers would also take psilocybin. Woah. And with the prisoners in prison. And this was a way to try to help them to to reduce the experimenter experimentee kind of idea. And the Concord Prison Experiment was considered to be one of the most successful psychedelic experiences and studies of the '60s that ever there was. And unfortunately all the records were lost of who was in the experiment. So, after I did the Good Friday Experiment follow-up after 25 years and found 19 out of the 20, I went to Tim and others and like do you have any idea who was in the Concord Prison Experiment? They had no records whatsoever. So, I didn't think I could do anything. 1991 I published a uh paper in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology about the Good Friday Experiment and there was an uh editorial

115:02in the Boston Globe about it, op-ed. And I got a call afterwards from a fellow Michael Forcier, and he said that he worked for the Department of Corrections, and they had a special room where they collect the records of their famous and interesting prisoners. Like they had Malcolm X and his records and others. Um and they had the records of a whole the people from the Concord Prison Experiment. And he said, "Would you like to do a follow-up study?" I was said, "I would love to do it." And um it took us a whole year to get permission. We had to go all the up to the governor. It was Governor Weld at the time. And the paper that came back was hilarious that said uh that we got permission cuz somebody had scribbled on it, "No psilocybin." Like we were not planning to give psilocybin. We were just going to look at their prison records, but they were

115:46like, "No psilocybin." For sure. Uh isn't that funny? It was just uh Imagine if they had done psilocybin. They would have never written that. They would not have. Never. It's only people that haven't done They must be curious. Well, I have had a lot of good conversations with the gay people and police because what they're taught about drugs, if they believe it, nobody would ever do these drugs. Right. And so Why is Why is everyone doing it if they're not awesome? They're horrible. So I tried to explain to them and I could oh I did it when I was legal, but but you try to do it in a way where you don't encourage them to react in a negative way. Um I so I so I did this follow-up to the good to the Concord Prison Experiment. All right. So while I'm doing this experiment and tracking people's criminal justice system records in the decades. This was like a 34-year

116:32follow-up. Um it started becoming clear to me that the experiment wasn't a success. That but it was and I was the one that was like wanting to do the follow-up to bring attention to it because I thought it was a success. Now, was it Here's a thought. Um were these people still in jail or they free? Some of them were in jail. Some of them were in jail. Some of them were free. But what I discovered was a trick that Leary had done to try to make the results look good. Oh. And and then it was like and the trick is simple is that just think about this when when you're in jail the the first day that you get off jail you probably have nobody goes back to jail. You know, but if you look 2 years out more people will have had a chance to commit crimes and go back to jail. So the longer you're out of jail the more likely you are to go back. So the group

117:24of people that had been in this experiment had been um and on average they'd been out of jail 10 months when they looked at their recidivism. Some had been longer some some had been shorter. And the researchers Ralph Metzner and Tim Leary they had done a base rate study of all the people that got released from the Concord prison experiment in the years before they did it. And they published their results. So they compared it was a little bit historical but so things don't always stay the same exactly in history but that was the best that they could do to compare it. But what I discovered is that they had published the results of the base rate study in a really obscure journal of British Criminology Journal. And you know I had to go down in the dusty libraries of Harvard Law Library Widener Library to even find this journal. And when I read it what I

118:14learned is that they had taken data from people that were out of prison for 30 months and compared it to people that were out of prison for 10 months. Hm. Complete scientific fraud. And so then I'm like [ __ ] How is it that all the people that hate psychedelics didn't discover this? And everybody has thought including me that this is a great experiment and tremendously successful. And now what do I do? And I'm like I've got to report what I find. Yeah. So I ended up So what what were they what were they pretending they had done? They were pretending to have reduced recidivism. Then they were also pretending that um By a significant amount? By by a substantial amount, yeah. Um the the farther And they were just monkeying with the numbers. Yeah, well, the farther away it was in time from the original experiment, the better the results were reported over

119:06and over in time. So, what they'd also said is that um some of the people that had gone back to prison who'd gotten psilocybin didn't go back to prison for new crimes. They'd gone back because they had violated their probation for something. Could could I Here's a thought on this. What the like the recidivism stuff is definitely fraud. But um asking for someone to not go back to a life of crime after they've been incarcerated is a tremendous ask. And I think that if you're measuring the success of a psychedelic experience for the normal person, if a normal person doesn't have a pattern in their life of committing crime and being incarcerated, the the problem with becoming sort of institutionalized and you you you you become accustomed to certain patterns of behavior. To ask someone to just stop doing that forever is a it's a huge life

120:05shift. Like even if they had a positive net benefit of their psychedelic experience, asking them to not commit crime, if you know a guy who's been in jail a couple of times and you know, he grows grows up in a terrible neighborhood and there's crime all around him, his parents are committing crime, it's normal to just do crime. And if you have a psychedelic experience, getting you to stop doing any crime ever again is a big ask. It's a big ask. Yes. But the recidivism rate is really high for a lot of criminals, right? Yeah, and and Leary and um Ralph Metzner, they realized that that what they needed to do was to provide support and aftercare after people got out of prison. And just as they realized that, they started creating support groups, that's where they got kicked out of Harvard. And so those support groups fell apart. And so what kind of an

120:58experiment we would need to do today would be to both See, this was an overvaluation of the psychedelic experience by itself. Right. And it didn't really understand the social support that you need and all the cultural determinants of people that go back to prison. And so the experiment that needs to be done is helping people have psychic delic experiences, move through their traumas, kind of have these powerful uh positive experiences of connection, but then the support that you need afterwards. Just the same way in our research, you do the therapy with MDMA. Um and then you do integrative work without the MDMA afterwards. And that That's what makes it last. Yeah. And so what we're going to try to do in Iceland will be with the Minister of Justice. It will be the proper kind of experiment. And so it would be both work inside prison and then support afterwards. And

121:50so I think there is this tendency, yeah, to overvalue the psychedelic experience and separate it out from the therapy and from the aftercare and from the integration. And I think that So I felt like I had to report and debunk this experiment that was considered to be the one of the best examples of the power of psychedelic therapy. I'm glad you did. It's very powerful and that's absolutely the correct thing to do. Yeah, it I feel like having one psychedelic experience for someone who's gone through a lifetime of crime, is currently incarcerated or just got out of jail is like someone having a terrible staph infection and giving them a small amount of antibiotics. And and going, "Oh, but it didn't work." Like you don't have the right dose, you don't have the right duration and you don't have the right care. I think someone who's in

122:39that bad, like there's people that have pulled themselves out of being incarcerated and become exemplary human beings, right? Bernard Hopkins, one of my favorite boxers of all time, is a great example of that. Learned how to box in jail, got out, and became like a just all-time great. And was super disciplined, never drank, never smoked, just ate clean. But to get someone out of that life, and have them reincorporated into society, it's a task. I think it's a task. And I think it's a task that could be accomplished with the right tools, and I think the right tools are psychedelics along with counseling. If they could do I mean, they do that with drug counseling, right? Where someone has a an addiction, they'll put them in a rehab, they they have this rehab place they stay at for 3 months. Like, they do that to people all the time. Why can't

123:28they do that the other way? Like, rehabilitate them back into society, not just Well, and not just that, but when people get out of the military. Yes. Right? You could do all the boot camps to get into the military, and then when you're done, you're just like, okay, you're done. Especially guys that have seen violent combat. Yeah, I think that there should be Well, that that raises another issue, which is that we're now in about starting research in about eight different VAs. With different studies with MDMA. Actually, one thing I did last night, um which was tremendous, and what I really like to do, cuz I got here early, so I could be here on time today, is that I love to smoke pot and go wandering around cities after midnight. Whoa. Because Well, you You're a risk-taker, Rick Doblin. Well, you kind of get a feel for the city a little bit different at night

124:19than during the day. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what I did is I went from the hotel, I just wandered, and I wandered to the capital. Mhm. And I just walked around the capital. It's a beautiful building. But nobody was there. Nobody was there at all. You know, occasionally I would pass people who were homeless, or You know, people talking about crack or something to to there. But they were talking about crack, were they offering it? somebody No, I heard somebody across the street like yelling about crack and so but but I get to this um the the Texas uh you know, the statehouse and I'm just like it's it's gorgeous, it's beautiful. I noticed that there was a lot of uh scaffolding on it. But I thought here in the middle of the not not quite the middle of the night but but well after midnight um in a place where so much conservative policies are coming out of it

125:12the Texas legislature is currently considering a rider to allocate $2.1 million to to a study of MDMA at the Houston VA with veterans with PTSD. And 2 years before they have uh allocated similar amount of amount of money for a psilocybin study in veterans with PTSD at the Houston VA. And uh Lynette Averill who's going to be the principal investigator has been She hasn't started the psilocybin study quite yet cuz she got pregnant and had a child and now she's getting back to it but it's going to Baylor College of Medicine and the Houston VA. So I just had this feeling of the legislature is under repair with all of the scaffolding but in this place out of which so much conservative policies are coming so is support for psychedelics. And it just gave me such a warm feeling and again it's like not demonizing everything's all bad so but it but it

126:09was really a nice way to feel the um the grandeur of the building and and to think that yeah we we need to do a lot of renovation of our policies and um and and this um work that's being done yeah Governor Perry is is helping with it um the new governor people of his generation in particular get invested like people like Nugent. Yeah. You know, it's but it seems like we're on the right end of this cycle because of the internet. I don't think you're ever going to experience a this is your brain on drugs moment again. That's not going to work anymore. I don't think so. I think you're right. So because of the information that's available, because of the work that you guys have done, because of all the various videos and podcasts and books and there's so much work, documentaries, there's so much work that's been got done that people kind of understand

126:54there's real great benefits. I I think the Michael Pollan's book how to change your mind and then the Netflix series, the four series about that has changed lots of people's minds a respected journalist, you know, from doing the Omnivore's Dilemma was amazing and then so to get him invested in something like this is very very powerful, very influential. Yeah. Yeah. So But again, like what what you're saying is so important. You got everything has to be completely honest, all of it. Every Yeah. It And it doesn't work for everybody. We don't have to say it works for everybody. And we we shouldn't get in the trap mean it doesn't work, it just didn't work that way. And and also there can be risks because it's always a benefit risk balance. We don't have to pretend there's no risks. So the moment that we're at is just this incredible moment. So now we have two

127:40successful phase three studies. We have a nonprofit that is 100% owner of a public benefit corp. We do have um some money from investors, but our challenge now over the next couple months is where do we get the money and to get us to two different points. The first point is from here to FDA approval. We think that's going to be potentially, if all goes well, something like June 2024. But then there's going to be about another year and a half or or a bit more potentially till we reach what's called sustainability. And so sustainability is when income from the sale of MDMA um equals what all of our costs are and then we start amassing resources for more research, for more studies, for work that MAPS is doing because maps would still be the So, what we have this chance to um either keep maps as the sole owner of the public benefit corp or we may have

128:42to turn it into a publicly traded company if we don't find the philanthropy that we need and we need to take investors and these investors want us to turn this into Yeah, that was a that was a wild conversation that we had the other night before. Yes. Yes. And And one of the things that you said struck me and I thought about a lot is you said these are sacred substances. And when when you get them mixed with commerce, you have to be really careful. It's very dangerous. You're you're mixing something that could potentially change the way the whole world looks at life. And you're mixing them with something that doesn't give a [ __ ] about anything other than profit. And that's just what the nature of that thing is. Like that's the nature of corporations and capitalisms and capitalism they they they constantly want to make more money. Every quarter,

129:32every year, more money, more money and they're trying to figure out a way to benefit their stockholders. That's their primary concern. You unless you got some Well, it would have to be private. It would still it would still it would have to be some genius benefactor who's a or some Elon Musk type character who comes along and decides to fund it which could happen and would save you from that. But if you just went public my worry is that you're getting involved in you're getting involved in commerce with psychedelics and that just doesn't feel that doesn't feel like the way to do it. It feels like it feels like all that stuff should be completely legal and we should kind of wait until you guys and the way your work kicks in and and all the influence and the people that vote get an understanding of what the real landscape is.

130:25Yeah. Now, um there's a fellow that uh Jeff George is on our um he's the chair of the board of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp. And he used to be the CEO of Sandoz, which is one of the world's largest generics, but also Sandoz was where Albert Hofmann invented LSD and where they first Albert also first synthesized psilocybin. Right. So, Jeff has um got incredible pharmaceutical experience and he's been trying to help um educate me about um that that we have a tremendous opportunity in a way if we do need to take investors and do need to become a publicly traded company that we could be an example for the entire pharmaceutical industry, that we could be an example of a public benefit psychedelic pharmaceutical company with majority control. Hopefully, we could uh remain a majority control owner of a nonprofit. And so, I I I'd appreciate your reaction

131:18to this cuz he said there may be several different ways in which there could be benefits from going public. I got to pee again. I hate to say it. But, I want to hear these benefits though. So, when I come back, we'll we'll go over these benefits. The the diaper idea, you're not No, no, no, no diapers, man. I'm just drinking a lot of water. Sorry. Sorry, folks. We're back. Okay. So, um where were we? We you the benefits of taking your company MAPS public. Yeah, so and I'd appreciate your reaction. My reaction and my initial knee-jerk reaction in the bar and even now is like uh idealistic. Yes. like I'm looking at like man, don't mix don't mix love with money, man. You know, so I recognize my own bias in it, but I just get nervous when you're talking about a But, then the pro- probably is some upside and one of the upsides is maybe that would accelerate

132:09the path to legalization. Well, um I I my preference is philanthropy. And so, I'd like to appeal to anybody who's listening if they want to donate uh substantial amounts of money. How much do you need? Well, we are currently developing a budget in the range of uh $75 million to FDA approval. And then after FDA approval, there is going to be another raise that we're going to need to make to get to the sustainability point. But once we have FDA approval, there's many options that we will have that we're not so much open to us now. So, for example, um we've been approached by people uh big company um in Korea that was interested in buying the rights for Asia for MDMA. So, we're trying to narrow them down to Korea. But we could uh with FDA approval, it'll be pretty clear that other countries will give reciprocity that we can make it So, we might be able to sell rights

133:08to different countries so that we can keep the nonprofit the 100% owner of the public benefit corp. We would have more options to do royalty shares because then there are people that um the mission-related people that have with through Ryan Zura that have given us this $43 million. Um they're gambling that we may get it approved. And then the royalties come only if we get it approved. Post approval, it will be able to get a much better deal. Our valuation will be higher. We could get loans potentially on this income form uh that that looks likely. What's the downside? of going public. Okay, so um Well, the downside for me is right right now the potential downside is right now um with MAPS as the 100% owner of the benefit corp, net zero trauma by 2070 is the new vision. And what that means is we've talked about working with prisoners. Um

134:04but I want to work with refugees. I want to work with um people in Rwanda that have been traumatized by genocide. I want to go all over the world and try to um globalize MDMA-assisted therapy in a way where we go where the trauma is, not necessarily where the money is. And that we put this global perspective of net zero trauma by 2070, mass mental health, spiritualized humanity. You know, we're destroying the environment. We've got incredible proliferation of nuclear weapons. You know, whether humans survive is not a sure thing. And so I think if we're more stable, if we're not seeing the world through all these filters of pain and past traumas. So I think one of the upsides you could say of having the public benefit corp be wholly owned by the nonprofit is that we can focus on public benefit. And that that's the thing. I think that when you start having

134:57publicly traded companies, you could say there's no one It's not pure public benefit or pure returns to investors. But it's somewhere in along the line. Where along this line? Some ethical capitalism balance. Yeah. And so I think that with all the money from philanthropists, it will be towards public benefit. We're not going to be trying to prioritize giving returns to The returns to the donors are in a better world. Right. That's the return. The the And that's I'd say the advantage. The the the the risk, depending on where the capital comes from and what kind of conditions they put on it, is that we not start now maybe need to think about more returns to investors. And where does the Where do we go for the money rather than where do we go to reduce the trauma? So but I think we can have a good example of a public benefit corp, hopefully at least

135:55majority owned by the nonprofit, that can do a enormous amount of good in the world. But I just think that we could do an enormous amount of good plus if it's funded by philanthropy. So I think the worst loss of public benefit for us would be to run out of money and to never make it into a medicine at all. So, if we have to take money from investors, um I think we should do that. And and so, we're exploring different options. You know, is it uh biotech investors? Is it hippies are definitely going to push back. Yeah. Right? They they will, but um And and I I I hope that some of these wealthy hippies decide to donate to make it into a Yeah. you know, philanthropy. So, but I do think that it's our obligation to make it into a medicine one way or another. And if we do take it from um investors to do it in structured in such a way where

136:47um it's it's still within a public benefit structure. And so, we will try to develop uh metrics to evaluate public benefit. We will try to ensure governance controls so that does stay more focused on public benefit. But, you know, it it'd be a lot easier if we could do this um in a way through philanthropy. And also, we are the leading There's hundreds of psychedelic for-profit companies and a few nonprofits, but we're the only one that has completed phase three. So, we have two successful phase three studies. I'd like us to be a model for the entire field. And again, what you're saying about um telling the truth or underestimating you know, risks or overestimating benefits. I I would like us to be a model and that that was my dream from when I first started MAPS in 1986 because I um assumed erroneously that um MDMA would immediately become generic

137:42if it was made into a medicine because I knew it was invented by Merck in 1912 and so, the molecule is in the public domain. And I also knew that the use of MDMA for PTSD was um going on before I even knew about MDMA. You know, I I worked with the first person with PTSD. I talked about it in my TED Talk in 1984 is the first person that I actually saw suicidal with MDMA, no other options, and she was able to get better. And And Marcela is her name, and now she's one of our lead therapists and trains other therapists. But um but I thought it would be coming generic. I did my PhD, I got it in 2001 um focused on um how to FDA regulation of psychedelics and marijuana. I took a class at Harvard Law School uh around '96 from the the leading pharmaceutical expert uh Peter Barton Hutt. He wrote the textbook Food and Drug Law. And uh he later became on my

138:37dissertation committee. He's with Covington Burling, is in his 80s. He represents us pro bono. But throughout my entire education, I still thought that MDMA would be immediately become generic. It wasn't until 2014 that um I went to a uh a party in a way and ran into a patent lawyer. So, this was uh my my wife was head of what's called Foundation for Belmont Education, which is a local group that raises money to supplement the money that goes into public education. And so she was president, she had to give a little talk, and it's mostly a lot of food and silent auction and stuff. So, I'd worked all that day, and I thought, "Okay, great. You know, I'm just going to get super high. I'm going to get the munchies. I'm going to go eat all this food. I don't have to talk to anybody. My wife can do the speech, you know, and I'm done working."

139:27So, I'm like So, this moment where I was done working and just going to munch on all this food is where I ran into a patent attorney who I had had known, he was from locally, and he had previously gotten patents for bromo LSD, which is a non-psychedelic version of LSD. And bromo LSD What's the benefit of it? It for cluster headaches. So, people that have cluster headaches had discovered that LSD or psilocybin breaks the cycle of cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are suicide headaches. They're way worse than migraines, and and there's not many good treatments for it. They had approached me uh around 2004, 2005 saying, "We don't want to be criminals anymore. What can we do?" And I started doing work with them at Harvard. And uh they did medical records of all these people, and they they verified that that they had terrible cluster headaches,

140:16then they didn't, and intervening was LSD or psilocybin. So So it's just one trip to break a cycle or is it Well, they do it uh three times uh every 3 days. So, you know, over 9 days you'll you'll you'll do um the the psilocybin or the LSD. Um I mentioned about uh this project in Jor- Jordan that um Michael Marcus uh helped fund. It was because uh a young Jordanian came by to uh McLean Hospital at Harvard to learn about the cluster headache study, and it turned out that um his cycle began, and they they weren't giving psilocybin or LSD at the time. They were just studying it, and so his uh cluster headaches started, and they referred him to me, and so I thought, "Okay, I'll I'll give him LSD." Um but I thought he's he's he's never done um LSD before, and I said, "We have no idea why LSD works. We have no idea why psilocybin works. I

141:15I and I thought he's scared of these drugs. You have to give it in a fairly, you know, it's not microdosing. Right? So, I thought maybe give him MDMA, too, at the same time. The MDMA will calm him down, and maybe whatever LSD does, it won't be blocked by the MDMA. Uh I I didn't know, but I thought, "Let's let's give it a try." And it worked. It worked, and it was incredible. So, anyway, he goes back to Jordan, and um after a bunch of months, he said, "You know, my life has changed. I feel much better. It was just terrible burden. I've met this girl, and we fall in love. We're going to get married, and I would like you to come to the betrothal ceremony." Turned out her father was the mayor of Amman. And I'm like, "Great. Now we can do research in in Jordan. We can finally get into an Arab country to do Arab-Israeli stuff. So, that's what I talked talked to

142:01Michael Marcus about, and that's why he supported that project. But, in any case, the Harvard people said, "Oh, Timothy Leary was here, and this is like we're not going to let you do psychedelic research unless it's the last resort." So, Torsten Passie John Halpern were the two that were doing this. Torsten was at Hanover University in Germany, and they said, "All right, let's do bromo-LSD. We don't know why it works, but bromo-LSD is a non-psychedelic version of LSD, and we'll give it to a bunch of people, and it won't work, and then we'll come back to Harvard and say we got to start giving LSD or psilocybin to people." So, I said, "Great idea, great plan." So, I keep waiting for the results and waiting for the results and waiting for the results, and they're not telling me. They're not telling me. They're not telling me. I'm like, "What is going on

142:45here?" Finally, they told me that they thought I would be terribly And not only did it work, but it worked better than LSD or psilocybin. So, they were hiding it from you? They were hiding it from me cuz they thought I would be really disappointed. And I'm like, "It's not psychedelic therapy. I'm about the patients. If this helps the patient because LSD you give in micrograms, psilocybin you give in milligrams, but bromo-LSD because it's not psychedelic, you can give it in grams. You can give So, whatever it does floods the brain. So, it works better than LSD or psilocybin? Because you're just We still don't know why. But, anyway, so Harvard then gets a patent on bromo-LSD for cluster headaches with the University of Hanover. And a fellow Kerry Turnbull is now trying to move this through the FDA. So, the patent attorney for Harvard

143:37was also part of this, you know, local. So, he was there at this party. And so, I go to him again, keep in mind I'm super stoned, just munching on all this food, and I'm like, "Oh, it's very interesting. How's this going with the patent for bromo LSD? And And I said, "Too bad there's nothing like that for MDMA." And he said, "Well, there is something. It's called data exclusivity." I'm like, "Data exclusivity? What's that?" He said, "Well, it turns out in 1984, Ronald Reagan signed a bill to provide incentives to develop drugs that are off patent. And what it means is that if you are the first to produce the evidence to make a drug into a medicine, even if there's no patents, you have exclusive use of your data for 5 years. Now, it's different from a patent in that another person, another company, can develop their own data. So, it

144:26doesn't block anybody like a patent would block anybody. Then, if you do studies in pediatric populations, so the FDA has right now forbidden us to do studies in people that are younger than 18. We can only work with 18 year older. We've had a a mother with a daughter who'd been terribly raped and was mute and wanted to be in the study, and and the FDA said, "No." But what they did say is that if you succeed in adults, if we do give you permission to work in adults, you must do studies in adolescence, and you get an extra 6 months data exclusivity. So, that's 5 and 1/2 years. Then, it blocks the FDA from reviewing a generic applicant's file until the 5 and 1/2 years is over, and it takes FDA an average of 2 years to review a file. So, there's this period of data exclusivity that we would have a monopoly potentially on the sale of MDMA for PTSD. Um Europe,

145:25the European Medicines Agency, after Ronald Reagan signed this in '84, they said, "Yeah, this is a good idea. We should provide incentives for drugs that are off patent." So, it's 10 years data exclusivity in Europe. So, everything changed. I thought, "How is it that I took the class from the expert? I read the textbook. My whole dissertation is on it, and I never even heard about this. And the reason is pharma doesn't use it. They only want drugs that they have patented. And we've had a bunch of potential biotech investors tell us that they don't really want to invest because they don't like the fact that data exclusivity isn't as long as a patent. Mhm. All right. So, but what what that that changed everything for me. Now, that's why we created the MAPS Public Benefit Corp. Because now it's not going to go necessarily go generic. We can

146:12then have this period of time where we can make an income. And then what I can tell and How much is left on that time? Well, it doesn't start until the FDA says yes. Oh. So, June 2024 is when it starts. Now, I'll say that the DEA then has to reschedule, and that will take maximum of 90 days. DEA by law must reschedule within 90 days after FDA has said yes. So, there will be this 5 and 1/2 years, and then it could be year and a half, 2 years, or 6 month or who knows how long it'll take the FDA to actually review this um file. But, I think that uh we have this period of time where we have this opportunity for income. So, that's the story to the donors has been and the story to the investors and is is and don't well, donors is if you help us make MDMA MDMA into medicine, we're not going to be coming to you for money all the time because we will be able to make

147:05money to use to more research. MDMA is not just good for PTSD. It's tremendous for couples therapy. It's tremendous We think it would be tremendous for eating disorders, for postpartum depression. Of course, we have to do all the research to see if this is really the case. Has to be data driven, but we have this opportunity to become self-sustaining. And so, that's the situation that we were able to tell both donors and then also investors that we can return money during this period of data exclusivity. Do you feel confident about this? You feel like this is an inevitability that there will be You automatically get it. Yes, you don't have to apply for it. You automatically get data exclusivity. No, no, that's only me. I mean them deciding to let like how how much No, I don't think it's inevitable, but I do think it's extremely likely. And one

147:53of the things that make Okay, so we've done this very patiently step-by-step. And so there's a big methodological problem from a scientific perspective. You have to do double-blind studies. And that's required. You need randomized placebo-controlled double-blind studies. That's the gold standard for phase three studies. So well, Jamie, you you may get these edibles and nothing happens. You know, but most people that get MDMA or LSD know they've got it or psilocybin. So the the double-blind doesn't work too well Right. in these kind of studies. So the FDA offers what they call special protocol assessment. And that's a process where you can opt in once you've been approved to go to phase three and you negotiate every aspect of the design with the FDA and all the other material and other scientific studies, all the other data that they want to see in the review

148:50package. And the goal is to have these special protocol assessment negotiations to end up with what's called an approval letter. An agreement, yeah, a formal agreement that they agree with the special protocol assessment. Often you don't get that and big pharma doesn't use this a lot of times anyway because it delays things by quite a long time. But they often don't need to do it because they're not doing something novel, they're not doing something controversial, they're not doing something that's a challenge with the double-blind. So we decided to elect to do this. So we went through this special protocol assessment. And it took us eight months and in the end we did get an agreement letter. And The brought they the FDA brought in the old wise man of the FDA fellow named Bob Temple who was at the FDA since 1972 their office of science policy policy

149:43and what we said to them is it was it was kind of funny we we said to them that there's a quote from an early president of Harvard which says never forget there's always a Harvard All right so I opened the meeting and I said this is the quote and the person on the wrong side is me because my dissertation was I thought I solved the double blind problem and it would be therapy with low dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA and people would be confused about what they got and our challenge would be to find the dose of the low dose that was high enough to cause confusion but not so high that it caused so much benefits that we'd never be able to see the difference between the two groups. So over the course of from 2000 to 2016 when we did all these phase two studies we tested inactive placebo 25 milligrams 30 milligrams 40

150:41milligrams 50 milligrams 75 100 125 and 150. And what we discovered which was again a little bit difficult for me to discover is my dissertation was wrong I was not right I was partially right is a better way to say it that it did cause confusion between the low dose and the high dose but it made people uncomfortable so the low doses it's like turbulence when you take off of an airplane at the very beginning there's more turbulence and then when you get above the clouds or so your cruise control it's smooth. So early small doses of MDMA they have an activating effect without as much of the fear reduction so what we showed is that people who got these low doses they all still got better but they didn't get as much benefit as if we gave them an inactive placebo. If they got therapy with nothing, they did better than if they got therapy with

151:36low dose. And we discovered that the 75 mg dose group was actually surprisingly helpful and beneficial. So, that it's a narrow range between when you're in the turbulence zone to when you're getting benefits, when you're cruising. So, there's no practical way to do that. So, we went to the FDA at this final meeting for this special protocol assessment. And we said, "Um I'm wrong. Uh we'll do whatever you want. You tell us what you want us to do, but we can give you blinding, but you're going to make it easier for us to tell a difference between the two groups. Because the people with the low dose don't do as well as the people that got nothing. And the real challenge is to show if we can do this with therapy, why bother add a drug? So, we said to the FDA, "We suggest you make it harder for us to find a difference by letting us use uh inactive placebo." And

152:27what they said is that often times what Bob Temple helped them come to this conclusion is that often times the double blind doesn't actually work anyway. Like there's sexual side effects from SSRIs. There there's So, you can learn from side effect profiles that people talk to you. If you're giving a you're doing an experiment and you're collecting adverse events, they'll they'll tell you what the problems are. And you'll say, "Oh, this is probably this or that." So, they said there's two main ways to reduce experimenter bias. The first is um random assignment. That means everybody is similarly motivated, they come from the same kind of background, they all fit the inclusion criteria, and then they're all willing to do whatever, and then half get your treatment, half get the control. The other is a robust system of independent raters to evaluate the

153:13outcomes. We don't want the therapist to say how well people did because they they will most likely, over 90% of the time, they can tell who got MDMA, who didn't. There There's still is some confusion. That sometimes people are not responding very much. Maybe like Jamie, they have something biological where MDMA doesn't do that much or they're you know, obsessive you know, they're they're controlling or something. So, but most of the time people are able to tell the difference and what the but the the question is also that the side effect profile will be better if it's no MDMA as well. So, that when I said that we had one woman tried to kill herself twice and she had the placebo. It's from the therapy. If she had gotten low-dose MDMA, maybe it's this low-dose MDMA that made her uncomfortable. But now we know if you have severe PTSD and you go into therapy

154:05and you're starting to uncover things, that's a risk because you know, you're having to you've got some balance. It's difficult. It's not healthy, but but when stuff comes to the surface, it can make you really disturbed. Yeah. So, so Bob Temple came and said, we will approve this idea of therapy with inactive placebo. So, we got an agreement letter from the special protocol assessment. So, we have a situation now to to judge your question, how likely is it that it's going to be approved, is that the FDA is legally bound to approve our drug if we get statistical significance, which we've got in spades, tremendous, if we have an excellent safety record, which we do, and if we've gathered the data in a proper way so that the FDA considers it valid. And we've recently had a big inspection by FDA and Health Canada. We've had loads of people from the

154:57public benefit corp who did a phenomenal job to try to respond to all the questions from the FDA and we we we got some findings, but nothing serious. So, we know that they're going to consider the data to be valid. So, I do think that the chances are they cannot say we don't like your design because the the double blind didn't work because we have prior agreement to use that design. There's no safety issues that they can point to. Um so of significance. I mean there there's acute effects from MDMA. Um most of it was like sweating or muscle tension or these are transitory side effects from the MD. All more from the MDMA than placebo. So I think that the other big factor that that makes me um somewhat confident is that we have bipartisan support. It's not a political issue of so much in America is politicized is part of the culture wars. But we have

155:53managed somehow well consciously, intentionally, and a lot of it is working with veterans and others is to take the psychedelics out of the culture wars. So I I don't think there's going to be political efforts uh uh to um There's actually um I I won't mention uh names or anything, but but but there is a uh member of Congress that has PTSD that's a Republican that wants to go through if possible um a study in the open, a legal study, then to publicize the effects of of MDMA therapy for PTSD. So it's amazing. It it it So So I I think that we're in good shape. I think the how it gets regulated is going to be more of an issue than if it gets approved. You know, what what kind of controls are put on it. If that if it does get approved and if MDMA does get rescheduled, how quickly do you think that would open up the door for other similar substances?

156:49Well, the other similar substances, the next one in the line is psilocybin. And they're going to have to generate their own data. So we we just sort of have So we we got um breakthrough therapy designation um in um 2017. Right after we completed the uh special protocol assessment, we got breakthrough therapy. And we were the first one for uh any kind of psychedelics. And then um a year two later, uh the psilocybin Compass got breakthrough therapy for psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and then Usona got breakthrough therapy for psilocybin for major depressive disorder. So, I think that the psilocybin people are going to be the next through the FDA system. They're just starting their phase three studies. So, I think by 2026 maybe psilocybin will be there. So, we're we're opening the door politically, but they have to come through with their own data.

157:36Right. And then there will be other people trying to work with 5-MeO to make that into a medicine potentially for depression or something. I began hopefully we can get So, I I think that we are the leading example. That's why I would like to ideally do it through philanthropy to a But but I think that um we've got a real hope that this will be approved. Well, listen, you just shot out the bat signal. So, we'll see uh who responds in terms of philanthropy or what hardcore capitalists think that you could save the world with this idea and make a [ __ ] load of money. Yeah, and and all those that want to go to the Psychedelic Science Conference Rogan 20 to get the discount. But I would I'd like to read you these potential benefits. Okay. Just to see what you think about that. Okay. Okay, so the first potential benefit um is um

158:25that it permits us to scale to reach our full potential. Now, what that is assuming and I'll say is that that there's more access to capital from going public than from uh philanthropy. Well, that's not necessarily true. Now, I'm writing this by the way. My notes are on Allen Institute. So, it's Paul Allen who was the co-founder of Microsoft. And he started this Allen Institute for brain science. And he's donated almost a billion dollars to that. Wow. So, if we can you know, Paul Allen this was one of my frustrations years ago. Paul Allen donated $25 million to the SETI project, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Mhm. And I'm like, where's the intelligence on Earth? Why don't you give us 25 million to find if there's intelligence on Earth? Let us do psychedelic research, but you're willing to see if there you know. Well, how about both? Both, exactly.

159:16Both are interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, I think that this idea of scale to reach full potential Do you know what this list sounds like? Hm. You have kids? I I have three kids, yeah. You know how when you uh your kids say they want to do something and you don't think it's a good idea. We'll say, "Well, why don't you give me three examples of why I should let you spend And then they go, "Because I think it'll teach me responsibility and even though sometimes I stay up late with her, this time I definitely won't." That's what it sounds like. Well, that's funny. Well, before I get to the rest of this, just about kids. So, I've got Eden is uh 28, Layla's 26, and Ellie's 24. Um but when they were their Bar Mitzvah age, and and this is where I'm curious more how you're going to teach your kids uh is that I remember my Bar Mitzvah as

160:10being a massive disappointment. Why? Because you thought it was going to you'd feel different when you went through it? I thought I would be different. I thought man? Yeah, I did. I I'd skip adolescence. I'd have a spiritual experience. God would come. I would be I'm the oldest of four kids in my family. So, I had no older siblings to tell me it doesn't happen that way. I just thought, "Oh, okay. Great." But in the that in the morning after my Bar Mitzvah, I'm like, "God didn't come." I'm still the same. Still the same. I liked the party. Well, yeah, it's a rites of passage ritual, right? So, when each of our kids turned 13, my wife and I, we went to them and we said, "If you want marijuana or MDMA, we think you're old enough for it and we'll do we'll do it together and you can have it." And all of them were like freaked out like um "No, no, we're not ready. Do

161:02drugs with my parents, no way. Yeah. It turned to be the best anti-drug strategy we could have thought of. That's hilarious. Just give it to them and they're like, oh no. Now, they they did come around later. I will say, but so I'm curious for your own kids, are you going to say don't do it when you're teenagers but do it later or how how do you think that? Well, we're going to have that conversation. Um I think my my concern is I don't want them doing things with people they don't know the source of those things. That's very important. Um my concern is uh they understand that there's a giant difference between different types of substances. And these are the kind of conversations that I think everybody has to have with their kids. Like there's a giant difference between smoking pot with your friends and doing coke. Yeah. It's a giant difference and it's not

161:49just the cocaine, it's the potential for it being laced. Yeah. It's very high. That's the most dangerous thing about drugs today. I mean, really is the what we said earlier is the illegality. Yeah. That's the most dangerous thing. So, what are the other fake reasons on Well, Well, Dad. Okay. Well, the other is that they'll be more support for MAPS. I mean, if the benefit corp does well and MAPS is the owner, then we'll have Sure, to make money. Yeah. Now, I think that these two arguments for me at least um are true whether you have access to capital. It's all about access to capital. And if we get it from philanthropy or we get it from investors, it's the same reason. Okay. The third one I think is um somewhat of different. It supports the organizational maturation and development. So, we may have uh investors that have lots of farm experience or something and

162:45then they may um help us to um improve our operations or some ways. Right. Now, I think that you know, potentially that these external capital partners um you know, we we can get expertise in other ways, but but that's there's something there to it. And then the discipline of the marketplace. Now, but that's the discipline of the marketplace is about efficiency and maximizing profits. It's not necessarily about maximizing public benefit. But that's something. Then the um the other part is attract outside cap- outside talent. So, this argument is this idea that um we don't have uh stock bonuses for anybody. You know, without you know, equity investments, then we we can't use that as incentives for the staff. So, this idea is that if you do go public and then people get invested in uh vest or vested in stocks. Yeah. On the other On the other hand, um I

163:49think that there are other ways to reward people through royalty share. It doesn't have to be equity. The same way that we could do royalty share to investors, we should be able to do that to staff. But this I think is the the best argument of what might be a um benefit of of going public. Um and it's that we could build a new public benefit-driven, mission-led model for the entire pharmaceutical industry. Cuz most of the pharmaceutical industry is for-profit. It's not run by nonprofits. Most of it is not public benefit. But we could become a model for the um the the industry. So, I I think there's a lot of merit in in that idea. Well, I hope you figure out the right path. Yeah. I I do not know what it will be, but uh I appreciate everything you guys do. Yeah. And and I think that once we talked about it a couple weeks ago, why you invited me back is because um

164:46you wanted to help us highlight this crossroads that we're at. fascinating. Cuz uh I'm Look, I'm not the person to ask about business. My Again, my reaction to it was completely knee-jerk. Like, don't mix business and psychedelics. These things are sacred. And I think they should just be legal. I mean, that should be the primary concern that we're being deprived of these experiences because of ignorance. And because of propaganda and because of whatever [ __ ] weird political reasons. Yeah. Now, and I have I have another um I got to wrap this up. Oh oh okay. I got another quick thing to get your reaction to. Okay. Okay. Um This is uh so Dan Grossman is also on the board of the MAPS Public Benefit Corp. Uh-huh. And he is the um from the Boston Consulting Group. So, he he's got uh he's a managing director, senior partner, and he does a lot of bio firm

165:34stuff. So, I'll I'll just say that there's various theories of pricing. So, once we make it into medicine, whether we do it even in a public benefit um with only philanthropy or if it's investors, we still are going to be look at how do we price the drug? And there's it's it's interesting ways to do this. So, the first is called price to value. And when you consider the value, it's And this is how insurance companies will often look at it. It's uh both to the individual, the family, and the society. Mhm. So, there are substantial values in taking people who have uh severe moderate severe PTSD. They can't work, things like that. So, But you also want it to be available for everyone. Yeah. Okay, then Right? very much. And so, the the the key challenge that we have is that when you when you look at pharmaceutical ads on TV, they'll say, "Oh, if you can't afford the drug,

166:28you know, we'll give it to you. You know, we have a patient assistance program, you know, and apply to us." So, our situation is fundamentally different because the treatment is therapy augmented by the drug. So, if we give people MDMA, it's not going to do them any good whatsoever if they can't afford the therapy. Right. The therapy will be 10 15,000 dollars. So, in order for us to really have a an effective patient assistance program, we can't just give people the drug. We also have to give them 10 or 15,000 dollars worth of therapy. And the drug is going to cost a tiny tiny tiny fraction of that. Um so, that's a one argument for making it equitably available. The other I think is the drug legalization. We need to make it available for people outside of medicine, outside of religion at low cost. And Well, that way also it doesn't encourage

167:20people to sell it illegally. Yeah. Which is going to be a problem if it becomes legal. If it becomes legal and you're the only ones manufacturing it. Well, I I don't think it'll be a problem because again the the difference is that it's not a take-home medicine. So, it's only administered under direct supervision of a therapist. You know, we've heard about ketamine sometimes is available you think that just opening up the door to legality is going to make it more prevalent? Well, not our supply. It's going to be more in the public's eye. guys. It will. It will. It will. Which will potentially open up the door for criminal activity, right? I think so, yes. I I think that there'll be more demand, right? Well, well, once we Rick, I really have to end on time. I'm really sorry. I got to get out of here. I have a hard out today. Uh okay, could I just

168:02one more minute? I'll just list list these things. Okay, so one is price to out-of-pocket, which is really good. Meaning that you just make it so that people don't have to pay more. Whatever the price is, insurance companies pay, but you price to make sure. And that that is um the lower profits the least. Then there's to savings. That's to the payers. So, you try to make it so the insurance companies then there's price to ROI, return on investment. So, that's where you profit maximize. weeds. I really I really do have to wrap this up, but I appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thanks for coming on here, man. And thank you for all that you do to legalize psychedelics. Thank you, Joe, to have me on. Uh tell everybody the website and the social media. Oh, okay. So, the social media Yeah. Great. And then just again, Rogan 20 for psychedelics and our um social media

168:53is the the uh for the the conference in June. Yeah. Yes. maps.org. Yeah. And Twitter is @maps and @rickdoblin and Instagram is @mapsnews and @rickdoblin. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Appreciate it, brother. Bye.