Brad Burge: Psychedelic Therapy

today's conversation is about psychedelic therapies specifically the use of psilocybin MDMA LSD ketamine and haasa to treat various ailments such as depression anxiety and PTSD here's some highlights from the upcoming episode most recent trial data these are the phase three Tri outs shows between 2/3 and 3/4 of people who go through MDMA assistant Psychotherapy for PTSD come out the other side without a PTSD diagnosis wow suddenly PTSD isn't who you are it's something that happened to you this is not a countercultural movement anymore it's a cultural M it's not about tune in turn on and drop out it's about tune in turn on and get more engaged get healed do better in work improve your relationships whatever personal thoughts anybody has about about drug use for recreation purposes I feel like we we should all be able to get behind the idea that any substance that can help people live better Fuller lives by treating their trauma deserves at the very least that we look into it and explore it and and see if it'll work for them Brad how are you doing today doing great Nick I'm super happy to be having this conversation and to be getting to know you and be all the sh a little bit about what's going on in the Psychedelic Universe right now yeah absolutely it seems a very interesting space to be in uh let's start with how did you get into this area of study I mean what piqued your interest first about psychedelics uh in for therapeutic use wow what a story I could not have expected that I would have landed up in the in the career that I'm in or that we would be even having this conversation so openly about psychedelics you know if you'd asked me back in high school there's no way I would have expected started out probably when I was I was 10 or 11 years old and um I was not put on psychedelics but put on plenty of other medications I was diagnosed bipolar very young um and uh put on a whole slew of anti-depressants um stabilizer drugs and throughout my adolescence um up um through Middle School through High School through middle of college I was taking anti-depressants I was taking Lithium which is a mood stabilizer to treat my bipolar um as it was diagnosed and uh was in and out of psychiatric hospitals a couple of times when I was very young and had this um had this feeling that had been I now know instilled in me that that there was something well something broken about my neurochemistry about how my moods worked um I would get these mood swains and um not know why so I was raised I was raised on drugs meanwhile of course uh I in elementary school I was also in the Dare program drug abuse resistance education telling us about how bad this category of drugs was and I bought that hookline and sinker sh why would I have any reason to explore illegal dangerous drugs like marijuana or LSD or magic mushrooms he all just scary forget about it why would I be involved in that come around to first couple of days of uh College uh at Stanford University um I just started um working towards my psychology undergraduate degree um I would later add uh Communications undergraduate degree and I was curious to see so many of my peers using marijuana uh I had terrible experiences with alcohol I don't know how people could go have 12 Beers remain cogent I had five beers and I was throwing up in the bathroom in my dorm so so the idea that I could I could use something um very brief ly and feel social and laugh and have a good time with my friends that was that was revolutionary to me I wouldn't have to use the alcohol so I started smoking little marijuana your first time with any sort of drugs yeah yeah first time first first time pure pressure or not really pressure just pure inspiration I would Now call it yeah and I immediately slowed down I remember sitting on the patio of my dor at Stanford looking out across Lake vonas beautiful empty uh man-made lake um on the edge of campus and looking out and watching the trees and watching the the leaves kind of Shake in the wind and feeling like I had slowed down and learned to appreciate the nature around me a way that I had never experienced before that was my cannabis experience um I'm immediately thinking and were you still taking the lithium and other mood stabilizers at this point I was albeit very inconsistent um so I didn't like them I didn't like the kind of dolling feeling that they gave me um cannabis brought out colors uh in a way that I had never really noticed before um so here I am enjoying and appreciating this experience realizing that all of this uh philosophy of the War on Drugs was possibly misinformed and mistaken I started reading up about uh 1960s countercultural history and learning about um these activists who had combined art and political radicalism to to create these Monumental media events um that would get circulated through the news and have these big effects and there was this connection between the substances they were using and the and the art that they were creating and the activism and I'm talking about Abby hofi Jerry rubit the yippy movement um kind of Drew from French um political theater and combined that with these revolutionary just I was just kind of entranced by um this the the these activists as I'm learning and reading about the counterculture uh much of which started right around Stanford University uh so I was there at Stanford University um LSD first caught on as a recreational subance in large part due to Ken key um who wrote once FW over to kuku's Nest Ken keesy being called into the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital to um be a subject in an LSD experiment and they gave him LSD um under flashing strobe lights and hammered him with questions and now looking back I wonder how he could have possibly had a positive experience with this but he came out as a protier he came out saying oh my gosh everybody check out LSD this is an amazing spiritual experience so this this had happened just down the street from my dorm I'll be you know decades earlier and a friend comes up to me and says hey I got these uh psychedelic mushrooms do you want to put them in a milkshake and try them I thought well it's not synthetic mushrooms are totally natural I would never touch the synthetic stuff but uh you know it's like cannabis in the sense that like maybe it's not so bad maybe it you know and try it so I so I tried it um didn't have a major experience but I remember walking around with a cluster of my friends this is my sophomore right here walking around at night around the Stanford campus and just seeing these little Circles of rainbows around the street lights I was all I really noticed at that time everything else was just kind of normal I felt happy but uh otherwise that's what I noticed I thought wow there's this this doesn't seem so bad right and it wasn't a huge trip you weren't seeing crazy things it was more of a emotional psychological difference it sounds like rather than yeah yeah something crazy yeah so so again I'm thinking okay the Dare program don't do drives War there's something wrong here there's something wrong and so fast forward another year I'd kind of on and off been trying small amounts of mushrooms walking around it nature sure I'm on the phone with a friend who said hey can I pick you up something so we're speaking in code right because we're all fold uh and I say yeah definitely that would be great just just like uh you know four or something yeah which I meant you know four grams would be fine that's going to last me a very long time and he shows up the next day with four little squares of paper oh okay what's what's that four squares of LSD like you asked for yeah said oh so due to a miscommunication I now have these four squares of LSD and I've been reading about the counterculture and reading about you know Ken key and Mary pranksters and Grateful Dead I just started listening to the Grateful Dead they were great they're actually folk music they're not heavy metal band as I thought yeah right I said okay you know what this is a synthetic I never thought I would try a synthetic it's actually a semi synthetic it's derived originally from natural sources but LSD is a synthetically produced said okay I'll try it so I tried two tabs of LSD one Saturday morning with a buddy M I took those and within half an hour was having the most expansive bizarre experience of my life now a lot of folks when they're finding psychedelics they're at a rave they're at an underground party they're um in this very high stimulus environment um police officers flashing lights and loud music I was you know again at at Lake lamus this expansive beautiful Oak covered Natural Area on Stanford campus um I'd always been into hiking backpacking and nature so I thought okay this this works so I spent the whole after new on 200 mics of LSD which I now know to be actually quite a lot for your first for your first time and um two things stand out to me one the first thing that stood out to me from that was I was sitting on a rock I look over to my right and I realize I'm hallucinating uh like a six- foot rattles SN that's that's that's that's sitting next to the Rock I turn to my buddy and I say are you seeing this he says yeah I'm seeing this and starts to slowly back away at which point I realized it was not a hallucination it was an actual six foot rattlesnake laid out next to the Rock so that I was a little on edge for the rest of the experience everything looked like a snake every Rock every tree limb every piece of grass looked like a snake for the rest of them day yeah that was one thing I remembered and the other thing I remembered was stopping for a moment I must have walked eight or 10 miles this day just staying in movement was was therapeutic to me um reduced my anxiety moving through the trees I looked up at the sky the clouds parted for a moment a beam of sunlight came down I saw it and at that moment I realized that I was experiencing this beam of sunlight so purely with so much just genuine enjoyment and presence I thought there can't be anything wrong with my brain there is nothing wrong with my brain I'm experiencing the natural world in its perfect state of beauty a simple beam of sunlight and I realized all this thought about myself as bipolar as needing medications as being kind of fundamentally broken that would those were ideas that I had taken inside listening to the adults the therapists my parents my psychiatrists around me for all of those years as a kid that I thought that something was broken and that I needed these drugs in order to be a function in person that simple purity of that experience the Simplicity of that experience so the next day I called my psychiatrist and I said we're done I I need to do something else I stopped taking my medications completely at that time and I never started again this was now 20 years ago yeah like I want to pause is like my life didn't like suddenly get perfect like it wasn't that I no longer had any moood swings I no longer got angry I no longer got frustrated of course all of these things still kept happening but rather than putting the locus of control outside of myself on these medications making sure I was taking these medications I shifted it to what can I do with my S how can I adjust my lifestyle how can I take care of my body how can I cultivate my spiritual sense my connection with Community how can I have better relationships I started asking different questions at that point uh so it wasn't the LSD it didn't like fix something um it wor um and uh I just I just kind of left that kind of psychiatric mindset uh for myself now for some people diagnosis is important for some people the medication is an extremely helpful tool I come to understand out over these last 20 years also but for me it was just not the answer um it was really a hindrance and this this uh fairly simple psychedelic experience was enough for me to end that so at like I I I developed this um this this this curiosity this Wonder around psychedelics um at as as these tools that were at the intersection of the counterculture and radical political advocacy and history on one hand and then on the other hand as having something very close to do with Psychiatry with my pharmaceutical tools that they can teach me something somehow now I didn't know anything about research that had been done about psychedelics to treat mental illness that was not on my radar uh at all I thought they were kind of a thing of the past so I'm majoring in Psychology and Communications interest in journalism interest in marketing interested in uh there was a a book by Todd gitlin who was um one of the presidents of uh students for Democratic Society SDS one of the big student activist movements in the 1960s early 1970s he wrote a book called uh the whole world is watching okay uh mass media in the making and the unmaking of the new left one of the pieces that he pulls out is he shows these examples of how camera angles when journalists in the 1960s were filming demonstrations depending on their camera angle you could show either the protest or the counter protest as being bigger you could just show you could show a 100 radical activists and one anti- activist or you could show a hundred anti-activated by this by by by how camera angles media can in can can shape politics so so so powerful absolutely I mean I'm a big believer in that book uh the medium is the message I've got a marshall mclen right here on my desk probably yeah yeah because the way that that event is captured becomes the message it's not and and we tend to think of a camera as just showing what is actually happening but there's so much behind who's holding the camera and how they're holding it I mean your setup is beautiful but you might be in your garage for all I know it's amazing magic that is that is possible with media so this was part of my passion and so now hope hopefully maybe you can see kind of how these things are coming together by the time I was in graduate school I was I was looking for what I was going to write a dissertation about um and I thought well at the intersection of politics aing with psychology and my interest in psychedelics I could write a dissertation about scientific uses of psychedelics and how drugs become medicines what is this shift that happens anthropologically scientifically politically from drugs into medicines um how could something that I thought was A Dangerous Drug when I was in elementary school LSD also be such a powerful medicine and how can that shift for that broader culture so in the process of doing that I look online and I find the maps website anary Association for psychedelic it's and a dissertation written by this guy Rick doblin called the medical ation of psychedelics and marijuana it was his public policy dissertation he was writing about a process that he had found through the FDA that you could take psychedelics specifically MDMA which I had not yet experienced MDMA through the FDA drug development review process get an FDA approval for one of these drugs for a specific indication and that that would open up funding it would open up um more supportive political and cultural perspectives around these substances and it would open up a whole field of inquiry and a whole industry so I read this dissertation I thought based on what I knew about political science and activism this is going to work so this this has to work our American pharmaceutical industry institutions are so powerful so entrenched they're not going any where anytime soon everybody in their mother believes almost without exception there are some minorities but that the FDA drug development process is the be all and end all of how we make sure that medicines are safe and effective so this is going to work I immediately reached out to Maps I applied for an internship um they offered me an editing position um at this time Maps had eight employees they've been around since 1986 Rick doblin had carried it on his back entirely himself until probably the mid 1990s HED his first couple of staff so they had eight or nine employees working in Santa Cruz California on Mission Street and a converted house where I found them uh I started editing the maps bulletin which was their tri-annual magazine about psychedelics I did that for a couple of years um as well as volunteering at the music festivals where Maps could go and um have a table and a basically a goldfish jar for donations so that they could raise the millions of dollars needed to make MDMA and Medicine out of dollar or five doll contributions at festivals and that was blast getting to tell people at festivals hey did you know that the substance you're on right now is being explored in in in research and it might be available as a medicine someday soon and people you could see their minds blah didn't sign you know sign me up for the email list and uh I did that for a couple of years okay until uh uh the communications director at the time Randy hkin uh who remains a great friend of mine um uh left to go do other things and they offered me the job of uh communications director for the nonprofit which meant hey we need uh um more posts on Twitter can you please write the email newsletter and help us build a Communications program that's bigger right um and I was there for for 10 years um until 2020 now you mentioned the Dare program uh earlier in your talking about your story and discovering all of this and I'm I'm curious to get your thoughts on the Dare program because now that started in the in the 80s and here we are 40 years later and there's a lot of data that has come out about the Dare program and some of their messaging that in some ways it actually encouraged some groups of kids to explore illegal drugs and and in a in a bad way for a lot of those kids because a lot of their messaging was around hey you think all the cool kids are doing this this is why you shouldn't do it and they they can now see uh looking at at what happened where they in the communities where they ran that messaging that a lot of kids who weren't going to go explore illegal drugs they didn't because they weren't going to but there were others that the kind of that middle group that went oh all the cool kids are doing this a lot of my friends are doing this and kids are pushed by peer pressure of course at that age and actually we more inclined to go look at that stuff um I mean I think the Dare program had good intentions but when we look at the actual effects of it um they're they're they're mixed at best is my understanding but I want to get your your thoughts on on that yeah uh absolutely um you know I remember not not knowing anything about um elicit drug until we had our drug education program in elementary school um where they give you a list of ilicit drugs right it's it's drug education about what's out there and yeah there's the issue of hey all the cool kids are doing it and we're like all the cool kids are doing it but I'll tell you a story um that I remember that stands out to it um so they brought um one of the the dar days in elementary school um the police officers that were educating us you know fully uniform police officers they come in um they they they drive in in a in a um I forget what it was it was either a Corvette or a Mustang convertible but like a very nice sports car flashy sports car they come up in that um the reason they came in the sports car is so that they could say we confiscated this from a drug dealer now it's ours so if you're a drug dealer we're going to take all of your cool stuff but you can see immediately how that's going to backfire talk about the medium is the message oh my gosh you're like I could score a Corvette if I sell drums yeah yeah yeah um the the program was designed by old people not by kids they had no idea what it's it's like if you look at Children's programming from the 1980s or before on on on TV it's all what old Network Executives want kids to do and so they're instructive they're stodgy and kids can pick up on that stuff like that and I was like we're just going to try to instill this this this moral sense into kids and it just it totally backfired on the whole generation right well and it's an interesting shift on how when a substance is labeled a certain way that it is then vilified in the minds of a whole lot of people I mean I you know my absolute favorite drug right here I mean I I love coffee um but I I recognize that it is it is a substance that I take to change the way that I feel and think and that makes it a drug right I mean real real simply and I think we're in an interesting time where suddenly you've got the legalization of marijuana happening but that was when when I was a kid growing up with the Dare program I mean marijuana was described to me as a drug that would destroy your life it was described as being just absolutely terrible for you I remember discovering in high school that the young L one of the young ladies I don't want to OU her but let's just say one of the young ladies who um was was going to be in the running for valedictorian and that was obvious from an early age this is maybe 10th grade that uh I discovered that she smoked pot and I thought well that doesn't jive with everything I've been being told um and that made me question like once that was solidified as not being true it was like well well how can I trust any of this stuff coming from this type of messaging that really wasn't it wasn't exploratory it wasn't honest it was so Draconian in nature and I think that made it extremely ineffective I think you're right I think you're once once one piece of it is shown to you to be untrue the whole rest you know why not why not pick it apart so I was saying I I I I thought for sure I would never I would never touch sythetic substances right well after that experience with LSD I thought hey you know why not you know there's a lot of these substances that have been out there like MDMA for decades and decades if there was something fundamentally toxic about it we would no uh so yeah years later I tried that one too and that was also very different experience than I'd been told to expect uh yeah that was after I'd already known that MDMA had been being looked at for therapeutic purposes right well so that and that brings us to where we are today so where where are we at with these various substances in their you in in a therapeutic use not um not necessarily for recreation but if we're talking about ketamine MDMA psilocybin LSD for therapeutic use um tell me tell me more about where that's all at right now yeah it's really exciting um really exciting um there hasn't been a new class of pharmaceuticals added to our Western contemporary psychiatric toolkit since anti-depressants since ssris ssris are to dat the newest class of drugs that are available um and we're learning more and more about what those can do and a lot more about what they cannot do turns out there's a lot they cannot do and it's unclear if they even do anything for most people that use them not to mention the side effects so our views on ssris we already get um complicate psychedelics are a new addition to this this this this Western Medical Kit um and a huge new addition there in a lot of ways first of all they've been around for the entirety and more of human history um it's only the last hundred or so years that our society has criminalized before then they've been used for thousands of years in spiritual ceremonies religious ceremonies recreational uses creative uses so that's one way that they're special is that unlike ssris or anti- xiety drugs a lot of the drugs that we use most of us use on a daily basis um they have thousands of years of human use behind it uh another way that they're special is that they're not just one drug they're not even necessarily related to each other the only thing that cannabis and LSD and MDMA and ketamine have in common is that they have been classified as recreational drugs as drugs of abuse or party drugs otherwise those four substances have nothing in common pharmacologically or chemically speaking they're very very different from each other a third thing that makes them special is most of the researchers uh the doctors uh patients who have been looking at these drugs for the last at psychedelics for the last 15 20 30 years they seen them as adjunct adjunct treatments uh to psychotherapy not as treatments in and of themselves our Western pharmaceutical model our uh our payer or our insurance company model the way that we administer and pay for medical treatment now kind of generally relies on having these these these drugs that you just take and they're supposed to fix a problem a a chemical problem it's this kind of key in the lock cot's um philosophy um going back to my story like if you remember like I I I I had this moment with the LSD of realizing there's nothing actually broken in my brain um I don't need mood stabilizers to fill a gap um fix it in some in some way I need a reorientation of my perspective which if you in if you in therapy that would be considered a major breakthrough right if that had come out in a therapy session with a psychologist we we would see that as major progress that would have been major progress had I had an actual therapist but no I was just being prescribed drugs and you go into your psychiatrist once every couple of weeks just to make sure it's the right dosage to reup your prescription without therapy um I can't even remember having therapy I can't remember a psychiatrist who asked me about my early home life what's your parents relationship like said nobody right for 20 years of therapy right nobody asked this question now I know that this is where some of my mood challenges came from as a kid was coming from a very unstable home life where my parents were fighting all the time okay uh wasn't internal it was external but I needed something to help me see that that was outside of the Contemporary Western model so where are we at now um it's been an exciting 10 years 15 years ago if you were passionate about psychedelic therapies medicine research and you wanted to have a a career or to work legitimately with psychedelics that is not just the out there selling drugs and you wanted to have an actual career you could put on your resume um Maps was the only organization one of only two or three May organizations worldwide where you can get a paycheck pay your taxes and say that you worked for psychedelics in some way now there's a there's a whole industry that industry is clinical trial organizations pharmaceutical developers um academic centers there are clinics now in the US and internationally where you can get access to different kinds of psychedelic assistant therapies here are training providers um so who is training the therapists and the psychiatrists who are administering these drugs somebody has to train them so there's educational organizations there's nonprofits harm reduction there are many places around the world where you can access psychedelic Therapies in a psychological care setting or in in a a spiritual setting ceremonial way depending on where you go we can get iasa in Peru you get uh legal psilocybin therapy in Jamaica and Netherlands uh you can get ketamine assisted Psychotherapy here in the US and international so there's been an explosion of Investments and research and the reason being is because there's been a just a few organizations Maps is one of them that have done enough research piece by piece in this in this bootstrapping kind of way for last 30 plus years and educating the public through the media about that research um I've been loving just it's been such a joy to be able to take these revolutionary scientific insights that are happening now and to translate them into a language and story that the broader public the mainstream public can can understand and get behind and then there's little moments uh every once in a while that catapult the movement forward even more um MDMA is actually poised to be proved this year uh we may hear in August of this year that um MDMA has been approved by the FDA in combination with Psychotherapy for the treatment post tromatic stress disorder psilocybin is probably not far behind uh as um as a treatment for depression and ketamine or at least a A variation of it called esketamine is approved uh here in the US for the treatments of depression as well every time an announcement like that comes out there's this renewed interest and renewed excitement and then you have people like Michael pollen who's a good friend of mine lives here locally um in Berkeley I'm in Oklahom California where we have decriminalized um Psy you know like substances here in Oakland Michael Collin's work has turned on an entire generation of relatively well Todo Baby Boomers um hey maybe maybe I can maybe this is right for me maybe I should think about this people are aging people are looking for alternatives to um conventional psychiatric drugs which hav't worked for a lot of people um we're getting celebrities talking about their of iasa NFL players talking about how iasa has helped improve their game um Prince Harry is is is a fan of of psychedelics and psychedelic therapies it's really reached like the next level of visibility and now it's kind of become kind of popular and cool and Cutting Edge to talk about psychedelic therapies and that's all super exciting I um take some responsibility for for blasting it from the rooftops and helping everybody understand I also take some responsibility for some of the tragedies are that are happening um like like want to take a breath because there's been like a hype train that's been rolling down the tracks for years now and um I've noticed that like I've shifted we were talking a little bit about this before the show I think um you know just like wanting to um just like share a few words of caution that is you know drugs are drugs um there's still drugs it's exciting that we're seeing the shift from drugs into medicines but uh medicines have risks also well and that makes sense I mean I if I needed to take uh I'm just going to pull something out at random Prozac or um I don't know a heart medication I wouldn't just call up a buddy who happen to have some and say I need four uh like like you did with the um with the mushrooms and then there turned out to be miscommunication you don't know how much you're getting and then just hoping that it'll work and fix my heart or or stabilize my moods um I mean it seems if we're going to go about this to treat actual maladies that people are suffering from it needs to be done with proper science to figure out the the set the setting the dosage all of these factors that either lead to positive outcomes or negative outcomes and I I appreciate the fact that you want to control the hype machine it's not as simple as if something's wrong uh go go try one of these five different drugs or try them all and and everything will be fine um and I I appreciate about that that about your approach to all of this thanks yeah I think it's it's it's really important um ketamine stands out to right now especially because it's legal um here in the US for the treatment of depression proved by the FDA as spado which is a nasal spray what that does is it allows generic ketamine in the US anyway to be prescribed off Le we love drugs here in the US legal system uh just like there's there's so much um more than in most places in the world as far as what prescribers can do um off Lael prescribing as something that uh you don't see uh in other parts of the world as much so as a result of that um there's been a way of advertising um corporate development fundraising for ketamine therapy that's ketamine clinics where you can go in and receive Academy and under the um consultation with the supervision I'm a trained medical therapeutic professional and there's um there are camine providers who will meet with you over video like we're doing right now and send you ketamine lozenges that you can take at home and they just trust you to only take a certain amount or to do it under supervision or with support or with somebody else there advertising about ketamine on on Tik Tok and Instagram where you have a lot of young people I still see these on my social media seeds on a daily basis it's like uh just download the app we'll send you ketamine at home and all these pictures of smiling happy 21 year olds uh it's um really disturbing um as a result of this increased access and and I think over promotion of the benefits and under promotion of the risks of ketamine um we have a we're in the early stages of a ketamine abuse epidemic right in some some parts of the country um where kids and um adults are accessing ketamine and they're using it on their own um in huge quantities without knowing what the telltale signs of ketamine addiction or ketamine toxicity are someone here in the Bay Area has finally started organizing a ketamine support group uh for people who are um experiencing difficulties with their ketamine use uh I'd never heard of anything like that it's like Narcotics Anonymous or Alcoholics Anonymous but for by for ketamine and that wasn't an issue even maybe several years ago and it's it's really scary okay well I did want to get to big Pharma and then companies that are pushing these new treatments and how their incentives are different let's let's put a pin in that for one second I first I want to get your particular viewpoint on the positive results you've seen in clinical settings especially for treating PTSD and and other situations for people using these drugs I mean that might be a nice dichotomy to talk about the positive use cases and then get into the negative use cases for sure so I guess maybe we can take a step back what is a psychedelic what does that even mean um what does psychedelic come from um the word itself um it's co in the 1960s I think it was hre Osman um psyche and Doos psyche the mind and Doos which means to to create or to bring forward or to manifest so psyche and Doos manifesting mind bringing the contents of the Mind out making the contents of the Mind more apparent or more visible another way of saying that would be taking subconscious material whether it's emotional material or sematic material or psychological material memories and bringing those up to the Forefront making visible for the first time so you can see how that would be useful in therapy people could go through therapy especially for something like PTSD and being therapy for years or decades and make only very small improvements because the very nature of PTSD is the mind just wants to push it away we just like don't don't want a deal and it's just too much we got stuff to do we're not going to go reflecting on our difficult path it's a totally normal natural adaptive response to Trum that that we all have U MDMA has pharmacological effects such that it makes looking at difficult memories easier does that in a bunch of different ways MDMA is a very special compound it works on the serotonin system dopamine system it also works on the hormonal system LSD works very very Dent Works very potently on the serotonin system and the serotonin system alone um it actually mimics serotonin very closely in the brain it's almost almost the same while you put it side by side LSD and serotonin very similar whole other story whole other conversation but we wouldn't have discovered the serotonin system work it not for LSD research oh wow there's a whole book to be written there around LSD and the discovery of Serotonin system and the production of SSRI selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors there's a whole story there um psilocybin Works similar to LSD where it's mostly on the serotonin system um iasa works very differently ketamine works very differently from both of those IO works very differently from those cannabis totally different from all of these so depending on which one which tool we're talking about it might be better for different kinds of psychedelic therapy so different ways of bringing different kinds of material tonight um and Talking Now how effective have some of these substances been uh with veterans let's say suffering from PTSD um because I have heard of a number of very positive breakthroughs uh for people suffering from severe PTSD and and with using uh different treatment options can you speak to some of those uh the most recent trial data that we have these are the phase three Tri outs from maps and lyos pharmaceuticals it shows between 2/3 and 3/4 of people who go through either two or three sessions of MDMA assistant Psychotherapy for PTSD come out the other side without a PTSD diagnosis wow and for almost 100% of people they see some eduction in their symptoms so almost 100% of people are getting better couple of people don't respond at all couple of people have kind of negative consequences like they get slightly worse most people almost everybody gets slightly better and 2/3 to three4 don't even qualify for pts to get and that doesn't matter whether you're a veteran with PTSD due to military combat whether you're a sexual assault Survivor who was assaulted two years ago a sexual assault Survivor who was assaulted as a kid uh doesn't matter if your house was hit by a hurricane it doesn't matter if you're a firefighter with trauma from cleaning up bodies at at an accident scene um it doesn't matter the cause of the PTSD hey that's a really powerful thing is that PTSD is this mechanism by which our Consciousness tries to shut it away and the symptoms are the result of pushing it away and shoving it away um once comes up and it's talked about and it's real suddenly PTSD isn't who you are it's something that happened to you right and that perspective shift is enough to get people off of their existing PTSD medications to get out therapy um thinking again now because we're talking about it about my early LSD experience I wasn't MDMA I don't know if it was PTSD or Comm but um it was it was similar it was that yeah I've got issues but it's not who I am it's something that it Afflicted me right but therefore I can have some control of yeah I mean the veteran part speaks to me because my grandfather who was he was a huge role model for me growing up um but suffered from PTSD from uh some pretty gnarly stuff that he experienced in World War II and and never could escape the symptoms of that for uh rest of his life from that point forward and he never drank in front of me um but I do know when I wasn't around uh booze was like his self-medication for that and and it was not it was not a good useful helpful uh treatment and and when I got older um I really wanted to look I wanted to understand where he had come from and what he had experienced and and it was it was all I mean PTSD was kind of a new a new term uh at this at this point um certainly wasn't a diagnosis when when he was a young man and uh and I did ask him about it a little bit then and I know he would have been in the first one to just say whoa there's a treatment that could help more than 90% of people who try whatever whatever this treatment is uh I mean he would have been open to anything that could have just caused a little bit of improvement um because it did have such a negative impact on his life and and it wasn't through any fault of his own and then if we take that idea and expand it I mean we know how prevalent trauma is in society through it's not just the effects of of War I mean like you said it's it's firefighters it's policemen it's people who suffered from sexual assault and and that has this Echo effect in the way that they interact uh with everybody in their lives and so trauma affects all of us whatever personal thoughts anybody has about about drug use for recreation purposes I feel like we we should all be able to get behind the idea that any substance that can help people live better Fuller lives by treating their trauma um deserves at the very least that we look into it and explore it and and see if it'll work for them you're absolutely right and that is what the polls are showing without question is that the support for Research into psychedelic compounds for the treatment of mental illness uh it cuts across party lines right across cultural divisions across age groups um that's new even just 20 years ago uh people would say oh no that's just that's just a bunch of mumbo jumbo these things are actually really dangerous that's all the hippies talking about their drugs will fix everything yeah it's a bunch of hippies talking about oh this is not a countercultural movement anymore it's a cultural M it's not about you know tune in turn on and drop out anymore that's the Timothy Larry right thing it's about tune in turn on and get more engaged get healed do better in work improve your relationships um it's a very different perspective now and gosh we we we really need uh we really need movements we need something to Galvanize us as a society right now that cuts across party lines more than anything I just feel like there's so much division there's so much fear and uncertainty about what's going to happen in this presidential election what's happening with the wars in Europe right now um the environment it's like it's hard to look at the news these states um and the Psychedelic movement is like good good news a lot just the simple Act of me sending out a press release from like PR agency um about a new study no matter how small it is you know or about you know a new educational event happening or no matter you know how small or Niche it might be but it it feels like good news it feels like I'm getting good news out there and journalists are responding they say yeah finally I can write about something that's improving lives right well and that and that might swing us back to some of the negative things that are happening and and one of my personal favorite topics uh the ills of social media um which is where a lot of that division comes from that you're talking about in in my opinion and certainly we see since the Advent of social or the mass adoption of social media especially by young people anxiety depression suicide are massively On The Rise um and and let's go let's bring it back to what you were talking about with seeing uh ketamine ketamine being pushed on Instagram and Tik Tok yeah what's happening with that I mean who who are these companies that are selling it and pushing it and just talking about all the upside and none of the risks let's let's learn more about that as soon as people smell money yeah um everything changes and I think that's that's the case with any industry ever uh you know we can uh look at the Cannabis industry as as one of these examples it's kind of like a mom and pop thing an underground thing and a boutique and then as soon as as soon as you can go IPO I don't know you know people com in off the street with no experience um knowing nothing about the product this is how capitalism Works uh is as soon as there's money to be made you don't have to know anything about ketamine to start a company that distributes ketamine through an app you don't have to know a thing about it you don't go to medical school you just start the LLC and you go from there um ketamine has been used legally as a prescription for many decades um by anesthesiologists ketamine is a powerful anesthetic when used in in high doses uh when used in low doses it's more of a psychedelic can be you know still be cogent and alert and uh doing Psychotherapy with it um in high doses they can take your leg off you wouldn't know it's great for surgery it's just one of the greatest you know it similar to to like um opiates uh tremendously dangerous um when used uh in large quantities highly addictive but I don't I I don't know if you've ever been prescribed opth but I was when I had my wisdom teeth out and boy am I grateful right right they're magic they're I wouldn't have it any other way U but when when used irresponsibly very very very dangerous petamine similarly it's been used in anesthesia for a very long time so a lot of the new practitioners who were coming in realizing that you can charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars uh um or $1,000 for a ketamine visit you have anesthesiologists who were doing were sending ketamine who are prescribing the keny an anesthesiologist is not a psychiatrist doesn't necessarily have any psychological training I wouldn't trust an anesthesiologist to give me therapy I would to knock me out for surgery but not for therapy so you have anesthesiologist coming in with no knowledge of Psychiatry or Psychotherapy saying oh here we go I can make bunch of money um sending out ketam there's also people flocking in like I was saying from other Industries like anybody can start one of these companies so you have people who are rich from Cannabis or from crypto or from oil or from retail or for anything just kind of salking in realizing that there's going to be a market and so you have all these companies spinning up um and then many of them also collapsing um just like also with any new industry and and they're competing with the really legitimate ones the Psychotherapy clinics experienced psychiatrists or counselors therapists who are like finally there's a substance that I can use to assist my therapy for my clients and when used in this contained space with preparation before integration after cheerful humanistic approach to the client it can be very powerful very effective and extremely safe and these poor folks are having to compete with these guys who are raising tens of millions of dollars so they can start an atome ketaman delivery Empire right and they're just sending it and they just send it maybe if you're lucky you get a zoom call yeah so there's a bunch of push back happening on that right now I think not not enough push back um but people are in need of different treatments different approaches to healing and um are likely are likely to bite on the first Tik Tok ad that they see um it's been a couple Mar to high-profile Kine deaths in the news we said wait um I loved Matthew Perry um I loved friends and I thought that he was a comedic genius and I and many millions of others were so sad uh to learn it his death drowning alone in his hot tub um he had been going through ketaman therapy at the time but had also had seems um been using a lot of ketamine on his own as well likely in combination with benzo's benzo diip anti- anxiety drugs and who knows what else um the message there being not ketamine is dangerous and causes death the message there being don't use massive quantities alone in water right and that's the harm reduction in information that we need to get out there is that when we see these high profile deaths and suffering um it's you know related to these substances that we have to look at the context of of use we have to inform treatment providers and patients policy makers all across the board of not just the benefits but also what the risk s I'm not advocating for harsher drug policies or criminalization um even though I think we need to be very careful with them because the harsh drug policies the criminalization the DAR style um you know philosophy um it doesn't work if anything like we've been talking about it makes it worse it makes people seek them out even more and mistrust system even more so we need adequate education and harm reduction support out there we need services like Fireside project which is uh nonprofit peer support line which you can go to Fireside project.org and you can have a phone number a free phone number you can call and you can talk to somebody um if you've taken too many psychedelics or um you think you might have or um you had a difficult psychedelic experience yesterday or 20 years ago you can call this hotline and they can talk to you um and help you understand it help you make sense of it and process it so we need these kinds of nonprofit Community paid for services that can help reduce the risks of these drugs as they become more accessible yeah and it sounds like maybe some sort of Licensing for groups to start selling these things oh definitely def Ely certifications and training and Licensing um just like for any other kind of medical practice or therapeutic practice there needs to be accountability if you're prescribing it um and you do it wrong you should get your license taken away if you continue to do it or you do it really poorly you should go to jail we have to create those systems of accountability we have to create those professional organizations that people are working to do this right now in dropes um but that's where we're at right now where we have impending medical uses of psychedelics across the board and we have not enough therapists trained yet and it's kind of unclear how when weather insurance is going to be paying for it so if it's not going to be limited just to the privileged few who can pay out of pocket then how are we going to make these more accessible these are the kinds of questions that the industry is uh working out right now and it's kind of urgent because MDMA is probably going to be approved this year and K's already available so without any sort of Regulation MDMA could end up on the same footing as say ketamine where anybody can just whip up a shop and start pumping it out if it's not handled properly by various lawmakers yeah it needs to be handled properly how does big Pharma play a role in this have they been pushing back against these new treatments are they trying to capture them and sell them themselves where are they in the whole landscape of all of this great question um there has been no organized opposition from the pharmaceutical industry or from anywhere else um at no opposition to moving these drugs through the regulatory process and doing the research that's needed so I'll say that um there has not been the flood of billions of dollars of big Pharma investment from like CL with Smith Klein or with st Myers or you know any of these big big players that you might expect there's a lot of hypothesized reasons for that one being these are not drugs that you would ever take every day so you're not just getting people on like for example ssris there you go now you're taking this and you're paying for it every day for the next months years decades rest of your life right instead these are treatments that you go in and you do once twice three times once a year even at once a year there's not like this giant profit margin there so the economics don't work out and when combined with Psychotherapy the profits go down even even further with MDMA assistant Psychotherapy or ketamine Psychotherapy the big expense isn't the drug the big expense is a bunch of hours of your therapists time right and at100 $200 plus an hour that's that's that's what adds up so there's the economic kind of lack of incentive these would be mostly generics the psychedelics that we know about that have been around for decades and decades LSD MDMA Academy they they're they're already generic they've been around for so long you can't patent it you can patent varieties of them or patent different ways of producing them um but you can't patent the drugs so not just one company can ever just own the patent um on any of these um at least not for very long so the generic issue that's another element Psychotherapy economics um this may change um and there are a bunch of companies some of whom have investment from quote unquote big Pharma I'll just say wealthy pharmaceutical companies that's probably a better way to put it yeah yeah it's like where's the line you know there's there's middle Pharma and there's small Pharma there's there's lots of small far in in involvement um and there's some big companies that have invested um in some of these patented new psychedelics or different y systems for a psychedelic you know nasal spray subcutaneous injection capsules dissolv in wenes there's like a different a lot of different ways that you could patent a lot of these and there's also a lot of naturally occurring ones iasa and iaame are examples it' be like somebody trying to patent a marijuana plant it's it'd be like somebody trying to patent sunflowers you can't legally do right also how are they going to get reimbursed um in insurance companies are not on board yet um National Health Care Systems Kaiser they're all looking um and if you look at the economics long term it's a great economic argue because even if you're paying $10,000 up front for a series of say MDMA assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD that seems like a lot of money it's like oh that's way more expensive than than drugs but it's not more expensive than drugs every day for the rest of your life so maybe there's a possibility there with big insurance companies if it could reduce their costs over the long run right that's interesting I'm a firer believer that it can and there's couple of published papers around this right now there's a lot of people working hard to have those meetings and talk to the right people and to show them those economic calculations because long term uh psychedelic assisted therapy is an excellent investment well Kaiser says they're all about wellness and preventative treatment uh come on Kaiser let's get let's get going on this one says a lot of things yeah yeah explain a little in a little bit more detail about set setting an integration like Define those terms and what that means in order to have a good experience uh or a more productive experience yeah well if um any of your listeners are considering psychedelic therapy and these are important things to look out for if you're looking at psychedelic therapy and the provider doesn't know what integration is walk away right um set and setting is also a Timothy Larry term so you know say what you might about Timothy Larry's ere exuberance um irrational enthusiasm and pushiness around psychedelics he did have some insights um one of those being that it's about the set and the setting it's about your attitude going in and it's about where you're experiencing the Psychedelic um making sure that you're adequately prepared and that you are in a safe supported setting and that there's time energy um set aside for integration um the integration U I think even more important than the experience itself and that's how you make sense of the experience that you had and how you adjust your life or adjust your habits to um take the most advantage of the Insight that you had so an example of that would be like okay I just in psilocybin therapy for smoking addiction or a nicotine addiction lot of great evidence on psilocybin system therapy specifically for nicotine addiction I struggle with smoking tobacco since my high school days for 20 plus years it's a hard one um right up there with coffee but I haven't had as many problemss with coffee as I with with with nicotine but like let's take that as an example um during your psilocybin experience uh you you have an insight into you could kind of you can visualize your lungs changing and you can see the effects that your addiction is having on your relationships and how you're using it as a crutch and not actually improving much as a person instead you're filling all of that self-improvement time with either smoking or worry about your smoking these are taken from my own psychedelic therapy experiences from years ago now that's all perfectly create Insight but if you take that and you just kind of go back to your dayto day you don't do anything with that that just kind of sits in there that perspective that Vision kind of sits in there and it just kind of guse at you then you go out for your cigarette and or your bait you smoke it and that you know you just have this little little devil on your shoulder saying you're doing bad things to yourself and you know um that's not good for your mental health right and that Insight kind of Fades away over time it does and it does fade away over time you kind of forget about it or you push it away and um if instead you have an hour a day for the next week set aside to find other ways to get that dopamine that you need find other ways to take a breath get some fresh oxygen if you don't change your habits and spend some time and some energy maybe some additional time with your therapist figuring out what those habits are and setting up those habits I have you know some nice little fidget things like by my desk so with that nervous energy I can just kind of pick up pick up this thing and play with it um that took time to develop I had to go find these tools that's the integration part um and it's fundamentally important you know I called my PR agency integration Communications because I think that's where we're at with psychedelics right now right um we're not at the point of introducing psychedelics to our society if you just look at the news do a quick search go on Tik Tok talk to your neighbors you'll you'll hear about them and most people know now that psychedelics are being looked at for therapeutic purposes for Neuroscience for learning about the brain they say okay that that makes sense what they don't know yet it's how to access them how to stay safe when ussing them uh where to look how to evaluate uh providers they don't know you know what are the counter indications um that might make then not a good candidate um so I think we're at this point of integration integrating these tools with our society it's again I think not not a countercultural thing we're not bringing psychedelics into these legal and scientific and Medical Systems in order to upend everything and to tear down govern or anything like that but rather to improve our lives shift our perspectives um in a way that's beneficial for ourselves and our communities for our families for the environment if somebody is interested in using or I don't want to say using I want to say going through this therapeutic process if they need to treat some sort of trauma what is the method for doing so today in the best safe possible way thanks for asking that um it' be really easy after listening to our conversation to HP on Google and say where can I find psychedelic therapy near me companies throw a lot of money it ads to get high up in those in those listings it doesn't necessarily reflect on the quality as far as MDMA assisted Psychotherapy goes we're not quite there yet and it's one of the hardest things about communicating about about this work is that if you're struggling uh a lot right now um telling you that you might be able to access some MDMA assisted Psychotherapy six months or a year it's too long it's just too long but there are other options um so psilocybin therapy is legal to some places um or decriminalized in others Oregon for example um people are going to Oregon and finding cocum facilitators um Oregon has the best system so far and there's a bunch of problems with it um the best system right now for vetting and training the practi iers who are administering the substance for making sure that the producers of the psilocybin are properly certified and vetted and making sure where you're going treated is appropriate now you don't have to be an Oregon resident you can just go up Oregon you can find a soloc facilitator if you can afford to travel there if you don't most many can't that's one of the places and that's only legal under state law not under federal law um and it might all be changing soon unfortunately Ely there's a a worsening epidemic Sentinel which was sometimes added intentionally sometimes unintentionally to opioids that are found on the street so there's been a bunch of cob Doses and so right now actually Oregon is at risk of losing its uh decriminalization psychedelics and its s asignment facilitation because of an unrelated drug overdose epidemic around opioids I got prob Consulting all of these drugs and lumping them all into the same basket imagine people dying with fanol overdoses on the street um and then therefore people not being able to get safe facilita Sil cybin Journeys for depression like it's like these are totally different uh what Colorado is implementing some legislation soon to allow that California is considering decriminalization um so we're seeing more and more places in the states emerging for that there are international places you can go um Retreat centers which is a great option if you can find a way to get out of the country a lot of people can't afford that either Jamaica Solin Peru and Mexico for iasa 5meodmt is another one Iain um is is a great option in Mexico there are some websites um that um are pretty are pretty well beted psychedelic do support is is an excellent one the third wave is is another great website um that houss vetting and reviews also Maps the organization that I worked for for uh 10 10 plus years um is a great resource signing up for their newsletter also on their website they have some links out to Reliable thirdparty websites and such that can show you um where these Retreat centers are you know again be be very careful um ask all the hard questions be very skeptical I like if this is like necessary for their you know listener safety necessarily but you know you mentioned your grandfather the veteran uh L vet just wanted to a shout out to those veterans who may be listening where those folks who have families in law enforcement veterans right now are carrying this this torch so effectively um that um yeah we have major bipartisan court or access to psychedelic therapies or psychedelic therapy research for veterans and active duty more bipartisan support for this then and ever in history and that's uh largely because of the activism they've organized an efficient activism um of military veterans um so just a shout out to to those groups they're by far not the only people who are suffering from the consequences of postraumatic stress disorder but uh have the advantage of some being a value demographic segment in this country so we're seeing a lot of progress due to the veterans book and then if people want to learn more about your firm and all the stuff you're doing where's the best place to look you up find you and and learn more about uh about all that agencies website integration Communications offer public relations Communications support only what I see to be the most ethically driven uh companies in the space integration communications.com um I love being added on LinkedIn so if anybody wants to find me there Rand Purge and it's been really great to connect um I hope it's just the beginning of our conversation me too I mean this was excellent I really enjoyed it I'm going to put all the links to integrated Communications and maps in the show notes uh I hope we get an update in a in a year's time on everything that's new in this field of inquiry oh there's there's going to be a lot he's going to be a lot in the next year 2024 is going to be a big one for psychedelics if you enjoyed today's episode please pay us the biggest compliment of sharing this episode with a friend and hitting that subscribe button okay everybody until next time ask questions don't accept the status quo and be curious [Music] a [Music]