Rick Doblin | Legalizing Psychedelic Therapy

Rick Doblin, Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), shares his experience growing up in the 60's and how that shaped his interest in reintegrating an appreciation of altered states of consciousness and advocating for a reevaluation of psychedelics based on science and human rights.

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.

[00:00] Our keynote speaker Dr Rick doblin will talk about the work of maps and legalizing psychedelic [Applause] [Music] therapy there thank you Lex and all the organizers for this event and it's really a pleasure to be here I find it very moving to be speaking right after Jack and what he talked about becoming an undercover policeman in 1970 at the beginning of the war on drugs is around the same time that I devoted myself to be Fighting the War on Drugs but for drugs and I I'd like to describe a little bit about how I came to a different perspective and how Jack and I have now come to in a sense where we're aligned

[01:00] And I'd like to also explain why I think now we're at a tremendous opportunity in our culture to try to reintegrate the appreciation for Altered States Of Consciousness and also reint grate those people that had the ideas that were challenging the status quo that were really behind the War on Drugs that Nixon talked about ly as being the Public Enemy Number One and it wasn't because of the psychedelics but it was because people were motivated by psychedelics in order to try to change the status quo to work against the Vietnam War to work towards U civil rights women's rights environmental movement and so as I was growing up in the 60s there was this recognition for me initially that that our conscious

[02:01] And how we defined ourselves was really causing a lot of problems that we would identify ourselves as part of our country or part of our religion or our race or our gender or socio economic status or sexual orientation and other people who weren't sharing these particular sources of identity were different and were other and then we could demonize them and that's how a lot of politicians really built their careers on the fear of the other and it seemed to me like growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust you know with the arms race with the Soviet Union and then having to decide what to do about Vietnam and I was in the last year of the lottery that something about the Psychedelic experience where it promotes a sense of connection it dissolves our ego it opens us up to the sense that we are really part of this larger system that goes beyond our all

[03:02] These other ways that we might identify ourselves and means that we're part of the human family we're part of the web of life on Earth and that there's something core in our identity that's similar the most the people that are the most difficult different than us are still more similar to us than different and that if we had that fundamental sense of connection Rita Marley talks about one of her albums was who feels it knows it so it's a lot different to say these things and to know them intellectually than it is to feel them and so it started to feel to me like having these experiences would have a whole Cascade of political implications and that in the 60s these political implications were so challenging to the status quo that there was this self-identification on the part of L as the counterculture and others

[04:02] And it promoted this split in the society now it's almost 50 years past that and we are now at this place where the challenges are so great that we're all facing and there is this opportunity to bring us all together again as one culture and so I think that that's really up to all of us in this room when it comes to drugs and the Consciousness that drugs can really promote for people that those of us who have either an interest in this or personal experiences I mean Lex talked a lot about talking to your grandparents and talking to your relatives and I think how we conduct Our Lives how we use these substances to benefit ourselves how we acknowledge the risks and how we do harm reduction that we need to deal with this enormous reservoir of fear that has been built up

[05:03] In the culture over all of these Decades of misinformation and exaggerated risk estimates and if we can somehow show that these substances and these experiences can promote a healthier culture and that we are not necessarily part of a counterculture anymore but we are part of enlarging the culture that we're part of and expanding its potentials and that you know just for an example we now know apple is the largest corporation in the world in terms of its value and Steve Jobs talked about the importance to him of LSD and how that helped him be more creative to think differently but he channeled it in a way that was socially productive so I think whereas Lex also started talking about how talk about the benefits and talk about psychedelics scares the government and I think that that's no longer completely true at all it used to be more true but now it's not and now when we think about the government we need to recognize that

[06:04] It's not this monolithic organization but that it's different groups within it and so what we've been able to work with at Maps is the FDA has sort of separated themselves out from the drug war and they're focused on science over politics when it comes to helping people deal with clinical conditions and that's the opening wedge into the culture now since today was a marijuana rally and so I want to say that from the polling that's been done about why somebody might be in favor of marijuana legalization you would think that the most likely U prior condition is that somebody smokes marijuana if they're a user they want it to be legal but it turns out that that's not actually the case the most important predictor of somebody's View use towards marijuana legalization is whether they know a medical marijuana patient now what that means is that

[07:06] People are flooded with all of this information they don't know what to believe but if somebody that they know directly shares with them the fact that marijuana has benefited them that for them the balance of risks and benefits fall off on the side of more benefits than risk then people are able to say it's not this demon drug it's not like one dose permanent brain damage and before you know it you're a heroin addict that it's actually something that people have been able to manage and get more benefits and that causes changes in people's minds and thinking and then that causes them to question why do we need prohibition why do we need to throw people in jail for these things so for me at a age 18 when in 1971 when I was first starting to try LSD and having grown up thinking that LSD made me made everybody who took it somehow deeply permanently crazy I believed the propaganda but when I tried it I was

[08:08] Willing at least to try it primarily because of Ken key wrote One Floor Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I was very much into literature and so I read this one Flor of the Cuckoo's Nest and a friend of mine said part of this book was written under the influence of LSD and I was like that's totally not possible yeah nobody could write like this but it was possible and that really caused me to think so starting to identify myself as this U countercultural person I was deciding to be a draft resistor and planning to go to jail for Vietnam and I didn't register for the draft and fortunately about 60,000 other people decided not to register for the draft and this was Prior a lot of computers and the NSA and all of that and so nothing actually happened so it was kind of you know in front of the marsh Chapel at Boston University there's a statute to Martin Luther King and it one of the

[09:08] Quotes is about people who feel that there is an unjust law and decide to break the law and are willing to suffer the consequences in order to show other people that it's unjust actually have the highest regard for the law and I had read that from him and read other U experts on non-violent resistance and felt that that was the way to go and the more I pursued my experiences with LSD and the more that I started understanding that it had tremendous value I looked around and I saw not only did the War on Drugs dramatically criminalize all sorts of people as Jack was saying even for one dose of lstd you could go to jail for quite a long time but it also wiped out the scientific research all over the world as this massive overreaction and so I think that in the60s the culture was really not ready for this psychedelic experience when it goes right we think about the Crackdown as

[10:11] Having been a reaction to psychedelics gone wrong or to the drug culture gone wrong and a lot of that was true a lot of people did have difficult experiences they had psychotic breaks they did a few people did either commit suicide or get involved in fatal accidents but I think primarily what the reaction to the counterculture was it was when psychedelics go right it's when people get motivated by this sense of connection and then it changes who they think they are and then it changes what they're willing to act on in the world and the change that they want to see so in the 60s globalization wasn't such a big issue now we're all interconnected and we're aware of it because of just the internet and global warming and mass communications and travel at the time when people started talking about meditation that was really a strange thing and it was a foreign thing and it came from you know India and these are

[11:11] People that just meditated on mountain tops while people were starving to death you know yoga was something really weird and it was scary people we really didn't talk about death much people who were dying with cancer you didn't even talk about the fact that they had cancer U birth was medicalized women were tranquilized men weren't allowed into the delivery rooms so I think all of those things have changed dramatically over the last 50 years you know we have hospice now the first hospice was 1974 we have birthing centers where women are not tranquilized but men are in the delivery rooms we have yoga and meditation all over the place and it's accepted we have we talk about mindfulness the military is working with mindfulness to help people with post-traumatic stress disorder so we are at this moment of incredible opportunity to try to reintegrate drugs and prohibition but also the states of Consciousness that drugs can produce and so when I decided to commit myself in 1972 to being a

[12:15] Soldier in the war on drugs for drugs it was about the drug Consciousness it was about trying to bring this Consciousness forward and it was because I felt that we as human beings needed this Albert Einstein said that the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe what shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking now what is that new mode of thinking and I think that's this idea this mystical Consciousness that we are all together we see around the world still this Retreat to fundamentalism but I think it's a reaction against this growing appreciation for how we are all more similar than different and no particular religion can really successfully claim that there's only one right way and that they've got it I think those kind of claims people are making them but they're really fragile and that's why they're enforcing them so

[13:16] Much so that that became my sense that I was going to go to jail for being a draft resistor I couldn't have a normal job and that working towards U reating reintegrating psychedelics into our culture was a political move that would be my life's Mission and I turned 60 last year and I'm just so grateful that this idea that I had when I was 18 still makes sense now when I'm 60 and not only that but you know psychedelics have played a role throughout my life as U touchstones at different points so I think that these drugs these experiences more importantly are something that makes sense throughout the course of the lifespan we have different challenges at different ages and that substances can help us in these different ways many many different ways so I'm going to tell you a little bit of reasons for Hope and reasons why I think that we do have this incredible

[14:18] Opportunity and for those of you who are now in school or young people who are thinking about careers Now is really a time where if you wanted to become a psychedelic therapist or if you wanted to become a neuroscientist that could look at psychedelics or you want to become in any way involved with more active harm reduction for those people that do these things I just came from burning man and we have one of the one of our most important projects actually is this we call it the Zeno project it's a psychedelic harm reduction and so what we're trying to do is Envision a post-prohibition world and in a post- Prohibition World prob problems with drugs don't go away people will still have problems with drugs but how do we handle them can we handle them without arresting and tranquilizing people and so what we're trying to demonstrate at Burning Man and elsewhere is that we can through Compassionate Care through people that are trained and working with people with non-ordinary States Of Consciousness

[15:19] That we can turn difficult trips into productive trips that people can learn lessons and stick with it so one of the most important things that just happened last Thursday in terms of marijuana now the irony here is that when it comes to doing research with the FDA all over the world that it's easier to do research with LSD with MDMA with psilocybin than it is with marijuana and you would think marijuana would be more gentle it's a softer drug that it would be a lot easier to do research with marijuana but for historical reasons the federal government has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana that can be used in research and we have our own supplies of MDMA of LSD of cybin of all these other drugs but when it comes to marijuana research even though the FDA will give opportunity will give permission for protocols we still have to go to the National Institute on drug abuse to get the marijuana we were engaged in a 12-year

[16:22] Litigation against the DEA to try to break the naida Monopoly and we won the DEA administrative law judge hearing the DEA administrator rejected the recommendation and then we lost in the appeals court April of 2013 and the reason we lost was because supposedly naida had an adequate Supply the Jud the judges believed that that was sufficient criteria so a lot of the work that we've been doing our primary work at Maps is with psychedelic psychotherapy but the reason that I've been focusing an awful lot of my attention and our staff's attention on marijuana is because that's really where the politics is blocking the science right now so I see it as in a sense a defensive maneuver to try to fight the blocking of scientific research with marijuana in a way protects the gains that we're making with psychedelics so it's like moving the front lines while we're engaging on

[17:24] Trying to win scientific freedom for marijuana research the Psychedelic search is moving forward at an incredible steady dramatic progress so we were able again politically it's really important to show that these drugs the healing potential of these drugs are for people that are like the mainstream there're for not for the other because many people still do have that sense about the other that these drugs are for the mainstream and so we've chosen with marijuana to focus our work on Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and we know that there's a national crisis now about veterans with PTSD we've also focused a lot of our work with MDMA on Veterans with PTSD so with marijuana we were finally able to obtain FDA approval it's been a five four and a half year process so far so we have FDA approval for a marijuana PTSD study in veterans it's

[18:26] With Dr Sue Sisley at the University of Arizona we have Public Health Service approval for marijuana not only is there a Government monopoly but there's another review process that protocols have to go through privately funded protocols have to be approved by the Public Health Service which is run by the assistant Secretary of health and naida so those parts of the government that are focused on what's wrong with marijuana have the Monopoly on the supply and also have a review of protocols looking at benefits even when there government is not paying for it so we were rejected initially years later we finally figured out how to structure the protocol so that it would be very difficult for them to say no to plus we have two medical mariju two marijuana legalization states around 23 medical marijuana states the public attitudes are changing and so we were able to get permission for this

[19:27] Study for marijuana for people PTSD then sisly got fired we have over 100,000 people on a petition trying to get her rehired but the important point is that I was contacted about two months ago by the leading researchers for the VA and the National Institute on drug abuse on the use of marijuana by veterans and others with PTSD and there's this growing disenchantment with the suppression of marijuana research and an interest in how these drugs can be studied in a more objective way and so these naida VA researchers contacted me and said we want to work with you and see if we can collaborate on this marijuana PTSD protocol but we have all these different ideas about science and we want to make sure that we can come to agreement on the protocol so for the last two months we've been negotiating and finally on Thursday we reached agreement so now we're talking about a study with multiple sites one site is going to be

[20:28] In Phoenix with Sue sisly the other will be at UC Denver in Colorado and then the third site is now going to be at Johns Hopkins with these KN of va researchers collaborating with maps so that has never ever happened before but that shows how deep we are getting into the system and actually someone who's a close friend of one of my oldest college friends is having dinner on U Monday night with the head of naida and it's sort of going to talk to her about how she can defend this obstruction of research that KN is putting on so I think we see with marijuana that we're about to reach this breakthrough where even those researchers funded by people looking at risks of marijuana are willing to work and look at the benefits with us now it's going to take us a long time to start this study naida doesn't have the marijuana that we need in 1998 GW

[21:29] Pharmaceuticals started with satac for those of you that don't know it's an extract of marijuana and it's a spray under the tongue it's 50% THC and 50% CBD so right now Nida is growing a crop of marijuana with CBD in it since 1998 it's been obvious that CBD is something really important to study it has anti-anxiety properties anti-spasticity properties all of this but naida doesn't have marijuana with CBD in it and so once we were approved in April of this year for our study naida then said that even though they had said in writing to the court that they had the marijuana we needed now that we have approval for the protocol they said they don't have the marijuana we need they have to grow it and they won't have it till January of 2015 and this is marijuana that's still not anywhere near as good a quality as people are growing in multiple states around the country but that product is grown

[22:30] Without DEA license and we can't use it so we're about to then resubmit an application to DEA with the Israeli medical marijuana producers who have legal permission in their country and we're going to try to break them monoply again we've just had 30 members of Congress write a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services saying end the Public Health Service review actually that was in June and we've not had a response yet from secretary Burwell we're starting to work in the Senate as well and the idea that marijuana has medical benefits is something that a vast majority of Americans now believe and are more and more are supportive of research and yet the political system the Obama Administration is still not ready to end the night of Monopoly and end the Public Health Service review but they're unable to defend it they're just not willing to take positive action so we're trying to stimulate that and the research with

[23:30] Veterans will help that the other part now is with psychedelics and so again where we're trying to do the research there's three basic areas we heard about you know Bill W using you know LSD and thinking that it had a role to play in the treatment of alcoholism now in the 60s there was a lot of research with LSD for alcoholism and herin addiction and it showed that it was prom prising that all got stopped there's an incredible amount of work now that's being done with iasa for the treatment of addiction the Native American Church uses peyote for the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions there's studies going on resumed again with psilocybin for alcoholism but addicts are the other in our culture they're still the others so it's not something that's going to be widely embraced by the mainstream but there's two main areas of research with

[24:31] Psychedelics that I think have had the potential demonstrated to really get mainstream acceptance one of them is work with people who are dying who are anxious about dying that's all of us we're all going to die it's a something we don't know what's going to happen it's you know makes us kind of nervous to think about so if we can show people are more scared of dying than they are of drugs and so if we can show that drugs psychedelics used appropriately can help people with a bigger fear then we have the attention of everybody and so that research is going forward LSD the quintessential U symbol of the 60s the symbol of rebellion the main demonized psychedelic we were able to start research with LSD after 45 years of no studies and it was with LSD for the treatment of end of life and we started the study in Switzerland we published our results last year and it was a small study with 12 people

[25:32] And what we're most proud of is that 11 out of those 12 had never done LSD before so it's not that this is for aging hippies who are now dying it's for everybody and the work that's been done with siloc cybin sponsored by hefter at UCLA at NYU and at Johns Hopkins is further changing people's attitudes then the other main area is post-traumatic stress disorder and so I felt like of all the psychedelics MDMA is the most gentle it's the most inherently therapeutic on its own and when we talk about reintroducing psychedelics into mainstream Psychiatry and Psychotherapy one of the things that we've said is that therapists are more effective treating patients if they've done the drug themselves if they know what it's like in our MDMA sessions roughly 50% of the time people's eyes are closed

[26:32] They're listening to music they're internal and 50% or so is dialogue with the LSD work or the siloc cybin work it's more like 80% of the time people are internal and 20% of the time there's dialogue so how as a therapist are you going to really understand and notice the body language notice what's going on when people who are mostly silent listening to music if you've never had that experience yourself so where I felt that cybin and LSD have a lot to contribute in terms of public education in terms of psychiatrists and psychotherapists MDMA is more likely to make it through the system because therapists and psychiatrists are more likely to be willing to try that than they are to the main classic psychedelics because they're more of a challenge for dissolving the ego whereas MDMA kind of strengthens your sense of who you are and it's more gentle it reduces your fear it stimulates oxytocin and prolactin hormones of bonding and love and nurturing and so we've chosen

[27:34] Politically MDMA and then we've chosen post-traumatic stress disorder because women survivors of and Men survivors of childhood sexual abuse adult rape and assault people have sympathy for these people and also veterans people with accidents we're all potentially vulnerable to natural disasters to accidents to being victim IED and so working with what's considered now to be a sort of a national crisis of all these veterans coming back with PTSD that's what we've selected and so some of the breakthroughs that we've had more recently have been in part because of Dr Richard Rockefeller who was chairman of the board of advisers of Doctors Without Borders and as such he saw whole populations traumatized and he started looking around for how he could help these large groups of people there's not enough therapists there's not enough psychiatrists and he started noticing

[28:36] That MDMA had this potential to reduce trauma and a lot of times it could do a lot of good on its own and so he started contacting us and he took on as his mission to help us with the Department of Defense and the VA because for the last 25 years we've been trying to build alliances with the VA and with the Department of Defense and all of them had been rebuffed we've had multiple therapists around the country at vas who were willing to do research those people that are closest of the patients are looking for Solutions but then we would run into these political obstacles and so Richard and his cousin Senator J Rockefeller who's on the Senate vendors Affairs committee started helping out and the VA out of desperation and you know it's a big Scandal now about what the VA is doing and people on these waiting lists and they're not getting treatment so the VA has finally said yes as long as so Maps is actually giving a grant to the

[29:37] Federal government to the military so we've devoted $800,000 so for this is a fundraise so some of the money that's going to come from this event will go back to the federal government to the military to help treat soldiers veterans with PTSD so so that's the way we have to start things and hopefully it will generate more support but we've now have four different studies that we're working to develop in association with the Veterans Administration and then we've been told that if we get promising results we can submit Grant applications to the Department of Defense one of these now again we have our method for MDMA we're one year away a little bit less but probably one year away from finishing all of our Phase 2 studies our pilot studies we'll have about 90 subjects who have taken MDMA for chronic treatment resistant post-traumatic stress disorder in the United States

[30:39] Switzerland Israel Canada and multiple locations in the US in Boulder and Charleston and we're going to go to FDA and say here's our data we want to start the phase three studies those are the large scale studies that really count to prove safety and efficacy The Phase 2 studies are done for scientific reasons to help you figure out how to design the phase three studies these four different studies with the VA are not with our method we have a non-directive approach developed in large part by Dr stanislov gra the world's leading LSD researcher and therapist and so the idea is that there's an inner healer that each of us has the same way that if we scratch our body that as Peter Edie talked about how much we're our bodies so your body knows how to heal itself we don't consciously know how to heal itself but you get a scratch your body you get a wound your body will heal itself and so we have a similar view about the psyche

[31:41] That there is sort of a self-healing mechanism in the psyche but there's a lot of obstructions to that and under psychedelics more and more we're now learning from fmri studies with psilocybin and LSD and also some from MDMA that there's filtering systems they're called the default mode Network there's systems of our brain that filter all the information that we're receiving on an unconscious level we're receiving enormous amounts of information from our body from the environment but we only pay attention to a small amount of it and so the parts of our brain that control the filtering system the classic psychedelics weak in those parts of the brain there's less activity in those parts of the brain and so we have this flood of material that we're not normally consciously aware of that just comes to our awareness and there's a certain kind of an emotional logic to it it's not a linear logic but there's an emotional logic and if we can open up to

[32:43] That in a supportive context where people have been prepared ahead of time and where they know that they'll be supported afterwards the different kind of things that people have suppressed will come to the surface as part of this natural healing process and then if we can work to help people integrate that to acknowledge it have catharsis to let the emotions in to integrate that that then you can make fundamental change in relatively short amounts of time so that's basically our therapeutic method it's an eight- hour session it's a male female co-therapist team the patients spend the night in the treatment center so that they're removed from their normal settings they have time to think it over there's multiple hours of therapy the next day then they go home we call them every day for a week for 5 to 15 minutes or so just checking in sometimes longer if they're really struggling and then they have weekly non-drug Psychotherapy for the next three to five weeks and then they have another MDMA session or another

[33:44] LSD session and we repeat that two or three times so one of the concerns about the 60s was psychedelics one dose miracle cure that was The Advocates we had on the part of the opponents one permanent brain damage and unfortunately when you fight something a lot of times you end up just being a mirror opposite to what you're fighting you're still trapped in the same system so I think liry and others were sort of going into one does miracle cure you're enlightened and you know now we're all ready to take over the world and run it ourselves so I think we're we've moved beyond that this these are sometimes one session can be all that people need to reorder their lives and that's absolutely miraculous and astonishing and it does happen but more often people need multiple sessions and a lot of support so with these studies with the Veterans Administration we've decided that we're not going to insist that they use our method we're going to pay the VA therapists and pay for the studies to

[34:46] Blend MDMA with the different approaches that the VA has developed for non-drug Psychotherapy and the main ones are called prolonged exposure and cognitive proc processing therapy so we're going to be working with some of the leading experts in cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure and seeing how they can blend MDMA with their approaches there's over 6,000 therapists at the VA trained in these approaches so if we can facilitate with one MDMA session or somehow or other a blending so people are better able to respond to the non-drug psychotherapies this is the way to really implement it throughout the military because they a lot of their therapists they're overworked they don't have time the idea of an eight hour session with male female team it just doesn't fit their model so we're willing to pay to just learn how these therapists want to work with MDMA the VA had this idea though the first study and the one that's going to happen

[35:48] First they thought about MDMA as the love drug and the hug drug and so one of the VA therapists has developed an approach to treating PTSD that's with the couples so one of the couple is a vet with PTSD the other is their significant other and PTSD affects the family system so they've developed what's called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy and it's a way where they do therapy on the couple and so now we have been working with the developers of this and their interest is to not only blend MDMA with their therapeutic approach but give it not just to the vet with PTSD but to the other part of the couple so what we're seeing is how we anticipate psychedelics will really roll out into the culture so now this is about a 20 30e plan so the first thing is we will eventually get MDMA our

[36:50] Current plan is MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder approved in 2021 there's a lot of things that have to happen we have to raise about $ 15 more million which I think we can do it's over a 7-year period it's not that far beyond what we're already raising I think hefter is probably going to have cocy and approve for end of life around that same time and what's likely is going to be the model the way methodone was approved methadone considered to be a drug with its own abuse potential but the Congress actually decided that methadone could only be administered in methadone clinics by people who had special training and how to use it and the FDA has all these special policies on how to handle drugs that have unique risks so most likely what's going to happen is that only those psychiatrists or psychotherapists that have been through the sponsor meaning Maps or hefter been through our training program to teach them how to do therapy with these drugs only people that we have

[37:50] Trained will be able to prescribe these drugs and likely only administered in certain kind of Clin that are set up for the overnight stay for the videotaping for two therapists that are set up in a way that safety is more likely safety is more assured so we anticipate that psychedelics will be approved initially as adjuncts to psychotherapy used by specially trained people in these clinics and once we start setting up these clinics all over the country then it will start moving out from just the patients how it is the that the VA is talking about for this cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy and then eventually I think it'll be where these centers are where places people can go for initiation now we also are going to have U like driver ed I think that that's one of the models to think about is that if you want to drive and I've got three kids and there two of

[38:51] Them have got their licenses one of my youngest daughter is working on it right now but you know they have to show that they can drive with somebody in the car watching them so I think that we may move to a system where people can go and take a psychedelic drug in one of these clinics under supervision and if they don't have any major negative reaction then they would have a license to go off and do it on their own in whatever context they want so what I've just described I think is a 20 30e process of how we integrate psychedelics into our culture and at the same time there's all this work being done with iasa in particular also peyote and Other Drugs on religious freedom now the problem with our political system in a sense with religious freedom is that it requires religion you can't say I personally feel like psychedelics have helped me deepen my connection to the universe and that they're my you know I've had some of my

[39:54] I personally have had my deepest religious experience on mdms of all the different drugs but that's not part of a group religion where the Psychedelic is the center part that's how the Native American church was able to get religious freedom but you have to be part of the Native American church and do it in their ritualized context the same is true for iasa that you have that the Supreme Court said unanimously that the UN de vegital the udv had the religious freedom to use iasa but it's these narrow religions so I think the move towards religion I freedom is very important again to educate people to change their ideas about how these drugs are used but I think religious freedom personal individual freedom is too much like legalization to anticipate that that's the vehicle by which our culture will actually Implement policy change I think religious freedom is important it's essential but it's probably going to follow medicalization so I think that we have

[40:54] This enormous opportunity and I think the world really needs it that that we are really in Dire Straits in a lot of different ways and a lot of it is this kind of willingness of people U not to see certain things how do we let the gravity of our circumstance is really in and then what do we do to adjust our lives and drugs are not absolutely essential it's just for many people for myself and many others they have been the vehicle that's really opened the door whereas tradition religion and traditional cognitive education hasn't really done it so I do see for my work that the work of integrating psychedelics into the culture is part of U cultural survival human survival and I think it goes back to what Albert Einstein was saying you know that there's a new mode of thinking the UNESCO Charter said since Wars begin in the minds of men it is in the minds of men that the defenses of Peace must be

[41:56] Constructed so that's I think what motivated me back when Jack was you know seeing this expansion of the War on Drugs I think some of us also saw the counter and actually there's an unusual circumstance relating to psychedelics and nuclear energy so that Albert Hoffman developed LSD in 38 but he didn't really understand its potential till 43 and he felt that there was this connection between the splitting of the atom which is you know unleashing enormous amounts of energy in the physical world and the role of LSD in sort of unleashing incredible amounts of mental energy and recently I've been spending a fair amount of time with Nick sand and he was the fellow that manufactured about a quarter of a billion doses of orange sunshine and other kinds of LSD it turns out his

[42:57] Father worked on the Manhattan Project and what motivated him was that he also felt that these tools of Consciousness are in some ways have come to us at the same time of these tools of mass destruction potential mass destruction so I feel like this erosion that we're all seeing now in support for prohibition that's been so entrenched but now more and more people are recognizing that it's really U not in our best interests that we have this obligation those of us who are from the Psychedelic Community to demonstrate that not only can we use these drugs appropriately but that then we make positive contributions to society that it's not something that will undermine society and so I think the timing you know also the Aging of the Baby Boomers is so important because now people when they get older they tend to think more about death think more about what they want to do with their

[43:58] Remaining time and these are a lot of people who use psychedelics at early parts of their lives gave them up to raise families to have jobs they were exposed to drug testing now they're retiring a lot of them have made positive contributions so this is like the grandparents that Lex is talking about the Psychedelic retirement there's an awful lot of you know grandparents of people that are the Aging Baby Boomers that are pro open-minded about psychedelics and have credibility in our society so we are now foreseeing a gradual erosion of marijuana prohibition marijuana legalization will be on the ballot in Massachusetts in 2016 the polling shows that it's likely to pass it's going to take again a bunch of money but more and more people are stepping up to donate that it'll also be on the ballot in California and Nevada and Maine in multiple other states possibly depending on res sources so I think it's incumbent upon us to act

[45:00] Responsibly to act optimistically to reach out to those people that are the most frightened and try to address their fears that's where I thought the harm reduction focus wasn't really a downer I think it's essential that we acknowledge that it's not all you know roses and butterflies and you know rainbows that there's a lot of problems and that we need to manage them wisely while recognizing the enormous potential that we have with psychedelics so with all of your support we have an Indiegogo campaign right now going on to raise money for the work with veterans and the MDMA PTSD we work with other people we set a goal of $50,000 just yesterday we reached $101,000 we have over 1,200 donors so people that give $15 $20 $50 anything it really adds up when we can all act

[46:01] Together at the same time you know we're finding more and more of the very wealthy people who are overcoming their concerns about the stigma from supporting this and are willing to step up so I think we have a realistic plan and that it really depends on us and how we educate people and how we act responsibly and how we work with those people that that are still scared and reach out to them about what it might mean to society so one of the main and I'll leave you with this one of the main concerns people have about legalizing marijuana is that what happens if American capitalism Gets behind marijuana the same way that it's behind alcohol and tobacco and we see that alcohol and tobacco marketed to kids marketed to heavy users that's where they make their most problem so those a lot of people are sympathetic with ending the prohibition on marijuana but they're

[47:02] Very nervous about capitalism getting a hold of it and so we've been trying to develop a slightly different model at Maps so we're recognizing that what happens if MDMA becomes a prescription medicine we can take nonprofit donations and support the research but once we have FDA approval for MDMA and we start marketing it as a medicine that's a business that's no longer a nonprofit function and so we can't keep that inside Maps we've had lawyers and accountants have told us that we cannot keep the business of selling MDMA as a prescription medicine inside the nonprofit that it's something that we need to pay taxes on and in fact we want to pay taxes on the same way a lot of the marijuana people want to pay taxes but that there has to be this other approach for marketing and so now we're about to establish a benefit Corporation to Market MDMA we're going to establish it now and what that means simply is that profit maximization is

[48:02] Not the top goal of this benefit Corporation it's going to maximize social benefits not maximize income and we're not going to take donors we're only going to take investors this benefit Corporation will be wholly owned by maps and I think that's a way forward now we see that most of the marijuana legalization efforts I think it will be for profit maximizing corporations that are doing this but at least if we can create with psychedelics a different kind of model in people's minds this benefit Corporation I think that will ease the concerns of regulators and the public so that's why we're going to do this create this now rather than wait till it's a prescription medicine I think with all of these kind of sensitivities we will really be able to mainstream psychedelics and marijuana mainstream that Consciousness and build a safer and more joyful world so thank

[49:10] [Applause] you hello was working this time all right thank you so much