The Fight to Legalize MDMA Therapy by 2026 (FDA vs RFK Jr.)

I think your work with MDMA has taken it out of the ecstasy party scene into something that is scientifically really beautiful.

Psychedelic drugs, which I do not think should be criminalized. I would legalize psychedelic drugs. The reality is these are medicines which when used in a medical setting have virtually no harm. We see in the entire field right now of psychedelic pharmaceutical companies is that they want to separate the drug from the therapy and to try to just be drug companies.

What are your thoughts on psychedelics?

My initial bias about psychedelics drugs is again colored by my experience of being in recovery for 40 years. My inclination would be to make this available at least in therapeutic settings and maybe more generally, but in ways that would discourage the corporate control exploitation. The real innovation was not MDMA research, it was MDMA combined with therapy. And that all the research shows pharmacology combined with psychotherapy works better than either alone.

Psychedelics have been used for medicinal purposes for millennia.

I'm speaking to Veter who have experienced.

Psychedelic assisted therapy and it's been a life saving experience with the medication they've received. Here in Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration is currently considering whether to change the classification of MDMA and magic mushrooms from prohibited drugs to control drugs. The latest rage is injectable mdma. It is so much better from a user experience perspective than snorting it because you don't get the jaw tension, you don't feel like a zombie the next day. Are there risks with injectable mdma?

We are los the war on drugs.

We need help desperately. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Rick. It's been 11 years since we last talked on the show and I apologize for not talking to you more frequently than that because you are doing such magical stuff in the world. But the, the world's a little bit different now. The FDA is under a new regime, one that I've been pretty vocal about supporting. So how close is mdma? How close is Maps to approval and what's the fallout either way?

Well, first off, it's no longer Maps, so it's Lycos, the pharma company which Maps is a small minority shareholder and has really no control over Lycos. So it's been. I say one of the more heartbreaking things for me is that in 2014 when we first spoke, we were entirely powered by donations. And it was in December of 2014 that we started the public benefit for profit pharmaceutical company, the Maps Public Benefit Corp. That was 100% owned by the nonprofit. So that was the original vision for Me was the initial idea of doing this through nonprofit donations entirely for public benefit. But what happened two years after we spoke November 29, 2016 is we got permission to go to phase three. We could completed around 16 years of phase two pilot studies to figure out how to design phase three. Wow. And we demonstrated that there was going to be a way to work through the regulatory system that the FDA was open to psychedelic research and that helped catalyze this incredible bloom of for profit psychedelic companies. People started thinking that there was a way through that these psychedelics had tremendous therapeutic potential, that they could be administered safely. And so in a way, we became the victim of our own success. And something happened that when we spoke before, I never would have anticipated, which was the rise of these four profit psychedelic pharmaceutical companies. And it was the typical kind of boom and initial boom where people just had unrealistic expectations.

And all you're talking about mostly mushroom ones like Beckley or.

Well, this was Compass was the first big one. Beckley was non profit, but now they also have their for profit arm.

Yeah, I invested in them.

Yeah, yeah. And they're now doing 5 Meo DMT work and they've been partially acquired by Tyler. And so it became more difficult for us to raise donations. People were saying, look at all these people that were investing and the stocks are going way up. And there was this idea is if you could raise that non that some people had this idea that I think is has proven wrong. But the idea was that if you're a nonprofit and you can raise money in other ways than donations, then you should do that. And my concern was that, yeah, if you do raise money in other ways than donations, then that might change everything that you're doing. So we did take in a bunch of investors because we were unable to get the rapid amount of donations that we needed in the time that we were told by commercialization experts. And so that that became this split between maps, the nonprofit, and the for profit public benefit pharmaceutical company with different management, different incentives. And that I think changed everything. It was no longer about public benefit, it was now about how to balance public benefit with return to shareholders. And we saw this kind of gradual drift towards where the public benefit became less of a priority and return to shareholders in more traditional ways became more of the priority. And that's really heartbreaking. And I. And I'd say the ultimate expression of that which we see in the entire field right now of psychedelic pharmaceutical companies is that they want to separate the drug from the therapy and to try to just be Drug companies. And the example that they point to is Bravado by Johnson and Johnson, which is approved without therapy. This is esketamine. And now they're selling over a billion dollars a year. So it's really, from the pharmaceutical perspective, it's a big success. But from the patient perspective, it's very well known that when you combine psychedelics with therapy, they do better than psychedelics alone. And this is true with any kind of pharmacology like SSRIs or any drugs for psychiatric indications. When you just think of themselves as medicines by themselves, they have some physiological effect and they can help, but the results tend to fade. You don't integrate it as much. But when you combine it with psychotherapy, the results are better, last longer. But none of the money that goes to the therapy goes to the pharma company.

About two years ago or so, maybe a year and a half, 40 years since then, which is my neurofeedback company, launched the world's first psychedelic assisted neurofeedback. And yes, ketamine's not really a psychedelic, even I know that. But it's close enough. And we will work with other psychedelics when they're legal. Keep, keep doing what you're doing. We need more of them to be legal. But the idea of measuring the brain, using the medicine and then changing the brain more effectively with the medicine, it's the same thing we're doing with therapy, right?

Yeah. It's terrific. Tom Insel, who used to be the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, wrote this article in the journal and stat. And this was in the months between the FDA advisory committee saying no to approving MDMA and the two months later the actual FDA decision. And Tom wrote that the real innovation of MAPS was not MDMA research, it was MDMA combined with therapy. And that that was the innovation and that all the research shows pharmacology combined with psychotherapy works better than either alone. And so that's where you're saying with, with. What you're talking about is enhancing the neurofeedback with psychedelics can make them both more effective.

You, you nailed it. And the results have been pretty stunning. About able to access states much more quickly. And people are not high off most of the time. They're not in those super altered states. But it's like a lubricant. And so I find it offensive. And I just wrote a book about how to not be triggered, but it's still triggering that. Like, how does any government think they have a right to Tell us what we can and can't do with our own bodies.

Well, it's never been about drug abuse. The drug war has never really been about drug abuse. It's been about suppression of minorities for other reasons. I mean, the work that began with the opium laws were against Chinese laborers who had come over, help build the railroads and they smoked opium. So the first laws against drugs in America were against opium.

Is opium a performance enhancing substance?

I wouldn't say so. It's more of a relaxing kind of a situation after a hard day's work. But it's dreamy. You know, people have talked about it as enhancing poetry or literature in some ways, I think everything. I think one of the things that the drug war has, has done, which is really a fundamental part of its mistake, has been to imbue drugs or things with properties like this is a good drug, this is a bad drug. And what they miss is it's the relationship between the person and the drug and the state of consciousness. That's what really matters. And so we focus on the thing and we miss the whole point of the relationship. You know, the very best example of that from the FDA point of view is thalidomide. So thalidomide was the drug that was given for in Europe. It was approved for women for morning sickness. And it produced a terrible birth defects which took a while to figure out were related to the drug. And then there was a woman at the FDA, Frances Kelsey, this is in the 60s, early 60s, and she was delaying it becoming approved in the United States because she was approved, was worried about these side effects. And so eventually thalidomide was, was rejected from the United States. And it was the quintessential bad drug. It was producing all of these terrible.

Terrible birth like flippers instead of arms kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly. And then they developed years later, it turned out that thalidomide could be helpful for treating certain cancers and certain leprosy, things like that. And so the FDA developed this whole set of ability to control how a drug is used in the sense that they could provide education requirements for the pharmacists, a patient registry for the patients. And they tried to make it so that thalidomide would never end up in another pregnant woman. And they pretty much succeeded. So these are the special kind of what are today called rems, Risk evaluation and mitigation strategies. So what began as this terrible, terrible drug became life saving in certain situations because of the different relationship with it, the different regulations around it, the different people it was used and Then Frances Kelsey won the Presidential Medal of Honor. She's the only person at the FDA in the history of the FDA that ever won the Medal of Honor because she found a different way to relate. Well, she thought this drug should not be made into a medicine. And she was right in that way for morning sickness, which exposed it to pregnant women. So anyway, it's about the relationship that really matters. And I think it's a fundamental violation of human rights to have a drug war.

We so agree on that. The war on drugs is. It's just dumb in every way you can think of.

It's.

They're just things.

Well, what I worried about is with Doge, why didn't Doge go after the dea? Of all the things that they were going after, you didn't hear of anybody at the DEA being let go or.

Yeah, I wonder. It's probably because they have guns.

I mean, who knows? But it's certainly of all the government agencies that are extremely counterproductive. I mean, just look at all the states that are now making all this tax money on marijuana that has now been legalized either for medical or for non medical adult use. And instead it's going, you know, it just is. This legalization effort has not produced a wave of problems. Childhood youth use of cannabis has not gone up in marijuana legalization states. And so it's been pretty successful. And yet, you know, we still have the drug war where other drugs are still illegal.

Let me ask you something. I live in Austin. I don't remember the last time I went to a party where there was alcohol. But the majority of the parties might have a little bit of MDMA or some mushrooms floating around. So is that a better swap?

Well, again, I don't want to say for sure. I think it's a lot better for a party. Yeah. Because.

Okay, fine.

One of the people that. One of the things that was really clear is when ecstasy sort of went into England in the late 80s, early 90s in the rave culture in England, the soccer violence went down. That alcohol really promotes a certain kind of violence. It's not in. In any way like what happens when large numbers of people at parties use mdma. And so not only did the soccer violence go down, but the raves became the only place where Catholic and Protestant kids could get together without violence. So I think that the social impact of MDMA was demonstrated in this large social experiment when Ecstasy really moved into England and replaced alcohol in a lot of different ways.

I was worried in the 90s when ecstasy came out about burning out my serotonin receptors. So I was hesitant to try MDMA until I had a clean source and all that. And I've had some beautiful experiences, some that I write about in the book that actually hits the shelves today as we're recording this, heavily meditated it's called and great. So should people worry about their serotonin receptors if they're using mdma? That was one of the big fear things.

Well, I'd say if you are using mdma, you know, three or four times a week or something, yeah, you should worry about it if you're using it every other week. Probably not. What we the, the research that is talked about functional consequences, supposedly functional consequences of heavy ecstasy use centered around memory, executive function, different things like that. But that was very difficult to figure out from a scientific point of view because the people that were using ecstasy were using cocaine, were using alcohol, we're using tobacco, we're using marijuana, other things. So this was a tremendous situation where we got a. One of our MAPS members, this is over 10 years ago, contacted us and said that he found a way to solve this methodological problem to figure out what ecstasy does if you use it a lot through your executive function. He said there's a group of people that have only done ecstasy and they haven't done any other drugs. And we're like, how is that possible? He said well I'm writing you from Salt Lake City. So we gave a 10 maps, gave a $10,000 grant to Harvard's McLean Hospital, experts there in neurocognitive consequences from cannabis. They had done also peyote. And so they, they went out and found, yeah, this group of people, we called it the fallen Mormon study. So they interesting.

They don't drink but they do mdma.

Yeah. This was before the Mormon church put MDMA on the bad list. Okay. So there was a whole bunch of people. So then they found this was really true. And then they turned our ten thousand dollar grant into a 1.8 million dollar grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. And they did this big study of these heavy ecstasy users from Salt Lake City and it was very exonerating, you could say they didn't really find hardly anything. And so I believe that the doses that we're talking about in therapy, which are like 120 milligrams, followed two hours later by 60 milligrams. We do that every month for three months surrounded by twelve 90 minute non drug psychotherapy sessions.

That's unlikely to mess with your brain.

Yeah, not at all. We've done neurocognitive studies before and after and show people actually improve a little bit.

Wow. Okay, so that gets rid of that.

Yeah. I would say one thing though, which is that the way we use MDMA therapy is we think about it as a two day experience. The first day to do it and the second day to rest and reflect and more therapy, more integrative therapy. So really it's an emphasis on therapy and the day of rest, the next day. I think a lot of times people take MDMA and then they drink it with alcohol. Sometimes they do other things. They don't get a lot of sleep and then they go to work or they do things the next day and then you're. You do need to rest, I think, or not need to, but it's valuable. The other thing I just wanted to say about your heavily meditated book, which is there's an incredible documentary that people, I don't know if you've seen it, but it's called Descending the Mountain. So it's tremendous. And so what it is is that Zen Buddhism has been traditionally against psychedelics in many ways they call it intoxication. But there's been a growing movement in the Zen community that no, you can balance, it's not intoxication and you can do psychedelics and it can deepen your meditation practice. And then you do a lot of meditation afterwards. It's not like you do the drug all the time, you're meditating. So Descending the Mountain is about an incredible experiment done in Switzerland with lifelong Zen meditators. And they go to the University of Zurich for brain scans. Then they go to a meditation retreat, a place called Fel center in Lucerne, Switzerland, up on the mountain, this gorgeous spot. And during the, this silent meditation retreat, during the middle of it, they all get a pill and it's either psilocybin, mushrooms or a placebo. And they're told to meditate through that. And it's hilarious because some of the people are not really able to meditate through it as they're starting to experience the effects of the psilocybin. Then afterwards they go back for brain scans, they do long term follow ups. And it's a beautiful, beautiful documentary of sort of science, psychedelics and meditation. And it turns out that these people find that they reach states of mind under the psilocybin that they're able to more easily go towards in their meditation practice afterwards. So it's like psychotherapy and integration. It's like the psilocybin experience and the meditation so it's a beautiful, beautiful documentary.

Thank you. I'm going to be watching it and I've often said these medicines can show you the door so that you know how to find it and open it. But I'm a little scared for some of the influencers out there. Like, dude, I've had ayahuasca 87 times. Like, when are you going to notice it's not working, man?

Well, exactly. You know, I. I actually have a friend who is working as a ketamine therapist and she was new into a practice and she said she was taking over some other people's patients and she had one that had ketamine 200 times, you know, so it. But. But it works and it fades. It works and it fades and when you don't combine it with therapy, it fades faster. But that's what's good for the pharma company. So that's what I'm worried about. The whole field is sort of saying, let the therapy figure. Other people figure it out. We're just going to make the drug there. And that's not what's best for patients 100%.

I met one really successful friend in one of those companies that tells you to take ketamine every single day. It got him in there and he was about to go up to his second week of daily ketamine. Ketamine is addictive. If you take ketamine every single day for month, you're not going to stop taking ketamine.

It's a reliable escape. It. Of all of the psychedelics, ketamine is the most addictive. It has the most addictive potential. At the same time, it can be very helpful for depression, for suicidality. But again, it has to be combined ideally in a therapeutic process. You know, these things do have physiological effects and they open up. What's neuroscientist Gould Dolan? I don't know if you've come across her, but she was at Hopkins, now she's at Gould G U L D O L A N. And she's done incredible work. Yeah, she would be great. She's. Because she talks about psychedelics opening up what she calls critical periods of the brain where it's more neuroplastic, where you are more easily able to rewire your brain.

Oh, my gosh. She probably read part of heavily meditated, maybe I referred to some of her work more likely. But that's the whole point of them is like neuroplasticity plus meditation. Meditation equals permanent deep change. And if you don't have neuroplasticity and you meditate, then it doesn't work very well. And it takes 20 years in a cave. And I don't have 20 years.

Right, exactly. People. It gets back to what we. I've talked about lately is this incredible quote from Martin Luther King that Obama adopted the fierce urgency of now. So people are suffering now. I mean, meditation is, is really a lifelong practice, but if you punctuate it by these deep experiences with psychedelics, then you can enhance your meditation experience. And so it's this combination approach really that makes the most sense. And I think a lot of it is this intoxication fear that psychedelics can, if approached in a, in a reckless or heedless kind of way, can, can make you confused. It's. They're not automatically inherently therapeutic either.

This is totally true. I got another question. The latest rage is injectable mdma. And it is so much better from a user experience perspective than snorting it because you don't get the jaw tension, you don't feel like a zombie the next day. Are there risks with injectable mdma? Do we know much about it?

Yeah, I've actually tried it also.

Yeah, I would imagine it's shocking that.

One, my job, I enjoyed it. It was, it comes on quicker, you're not as tired the next day. I don't think it's better for therapy. I think it can be better for socializing, for, for party settings or, you know, where you want to go deeper emotionally. So I think it's good in that way. I think anytime you inject something, you have to be very careful about doing it in a sterile way. But I don't think that there's any greater impact on the serotonin system or, you know, on your brain. And it seemed it was very enjoyable. It lasts a little bit shorter of a time that way as well. So there's all different ways. But in therapy, the way we've done it the entire time has been in a capsule, oral and it takes, it's a standard way. Yeah. And it takes about an hour to come on. But what we do in the therapy is in that hour the therapists and the patients are having kind of a conversation. It's like when you. We have eight hour MDMA sessions. So when people think about therapy, they normally think about it as a one hour therapy session. You go to therapist and then it takes you a few minutes to settle in once you get there and then you start talking and then you start. Is working as your issues and then before you know it you kind of have to button it all up so that you walk out the door again. And then. So it's a pretty short amount of time. And I think one of the reasons our therapy is so effective even without mdma, the control groups that got therapy with no MDMA did incredibly well compared to other non drug psychotherapies with a much lower dropout rate. But we have an eight hour session. People can come to a their issues whenever they, they want. We support what's emerging. And so when we use it in this capsule way in the first hour, it's just a very gentle kind of a way to dip into this therapy space. And then you start. Yeah, and then you start feeling the mdma. So we'll be having all sorts of people talking about various ways to use all different psychedelics, including with meditation and other things. At the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference that we've got coming up in Denver, June 16th to the 20th.

I am, I am trying to work it so that I get to come to that conference for at least a day. And it's, it'll be adding it on to a trip to two other cities. But I really, really want to do it because the science here is really solid. And there's this weird line between pharma, which isn't necessarily science, it's marketing plus science. And then you have science, which is curiosity and fact based. And then you also have the user experience side of things, which can also include science. If you're questioning things and writing them down and looking for effects, that's what science is. So based on that, I came up with a hierarchy of psychedelics for new users. That's a part of heavily meditated. And it's funny, I'm saying, well, I'm not endorsing any of these as the only path because there's lots of breath, work and other stuff you could do. But cannabis is relatively safe and legal in most places, so you might start there, even though it's not that fantastic.

Let me just interrupt that. There are people that do cannabis assisted therapy. Yeah, and cannabis assisted meditation. One of my favorites was in college we did stoned yoga.

Oh, that would be fun.

It's just really good.

And that said, even cannabis can cause psychotic breaks in some people. It happened to a good friend of mine when he was in college. You reminded me of it. They actually wrote a book about him and he, he was just really stoned and he had found himself having, you know, a spiritual awakening and not knowing what it was and doing weird kundalini Yoga in a park in New York and getting put in the blue wagon. And, you know, it really affected his life. And he's a really cool guy.

My friend Josh, these are powerful technologies and powerful tools that we sort of trivialize at our own peril.

Very well said. I go from cannabis, then I say ketamine because it's legal for the most part. And if MDMA was legal, it would be ahead of ketamine because of the addictive thing. But. And those are the first three. And then the list goes on and on. And at the very bottom of the list is ayahuascas. And like, you probably don't want to go there unless you're in the jungle. And all the other stuff hasn't worked.

Well. I would sort of say that the cultural context is like what we talk about in terms of therapy. And so when you go to the jungle, which I've done to do ayahuasca, you're doing it in a different cultural context than we're normally used to. And I've done it in religious context, the Uniao de Vegetal and the Santo Daimy. But the context that meant the most to me, that I felt the most harmonious, was more in a therapeutic context, was taking ayahuasca, but going inward, not necessarily being part of a religious ceremony. And whatever gets brought up, then you work with. So that just to emphasize this point about the cultural context, one of the groups in the jungle, Unho de Vegetal, is a Brazilian church, and it was the first one that actually made it to the US Supreme Court and established religious freedom for using ayahuasca in the Unha de Vegital. Yeah, it was a great decision. And then it led to the Santo Daimy up in the 9th Circuit. And now we have. Just to mention this, we have so many psychedelic churches in America, which is amazing. There's no prohibition. One of them, the most amazing is in some ways the Church of Ambrosia in the San Francisco Bay area. They have125,000 members.

Holy crap. That's amazing. Yeah.

And they're staying safe in some ways because they don't mail order it. People have to go to the church to pick up. Okay, mushrooms.

That makes sense. Well, you're.

Yeah. So there's incredible churches. So ayahuasca can be used in a different way. But the Unia de Vegetal, which is a Brazilian based church, some of the leaders ended up endorsing Bolsonaro, who was doing a lot of work to destroy the Amazon.

Oh, God.

So it's the cultural context that influences even powerful psychedelic experiences. And that church, they call it syncretic religions. They had to really survive by merging with the. The church. And so they're homophobic, patriarchal, hierarchical, and connected to power more.

Wow.

In certain ways. So even the. The psychedelic experience from Ayahuasca is very heavily dependent on the cultural context or the therapeutic context.

My experience with IO, I didn't think we'd talk about this. Aya has a militant, masculine side that really wants out of the jungle and will gladly install malware in you if you let it like that. That's what shamans are for. They're firewalls. And a good shaman's like, here, you know, mother Aya, come on in. And you know, masculine Ayah, I'm going to hold you down. And if you don't have that, I think it's a pretty dangerous drug. I've seen more problems with people, and these are not pharmacology problems. These are spiritual problems. And it's a scary thing. I've done it twice in my life. First time was 1999 down in Peru, before it was the tourist industry. And I just feel like there's a lot of spiritual danger and a lot of power. And some people, including probably me younger, would be like, I want that one. But I'm like, do them in the right order, and when you get to that one, you'll be able to handle it. That was one of the reasons I wrote heavily meditated, was to just talk about the psychedelic journey as someone who's not doing it for a living like you are. But I have a. A very long standing, very multilineage practice. And you got to talk about these things in a way that, okay, if you're new to this and you're scared and, you know, maybe you've heard all the rumors, you're 50 or 60. It's different than if you're 20. Right. And just knowing how to not get stuck. And I think your work with MDMA has taken it out of the ecstasy party scene into something that is. Is scientifically really beautiful. And I will, I want to know, what do you think RFK's psychedelic stance is going to do for federal policy around our drugs?

Well, it's hard to predict. I think that there is a much more favorable attitude now throughout. Jim o' Neill is number two under rfk. He's very supportive. He understands the science that's been going on for decades. Marty Makari, the new head of the fda, was just On Interview where he's saying that they really need to take a serious look at psychedelics and prioritize them because they have a lot of healing potential. So I think the question is going to be there was when FDA in August of last year rejected approval for MDMA assisted therapy for ptsd, they didn't say no. They said, we want more information. And so the question that is going to be presented to the FDA pretty soon is do they really need another phase three study, which is these large scale studies to prove safety and efficacy, or do they have questions that could be addressed in what's called phase four? So phase four studies are, after the drug is approved, you have to gather a certain amount of information for additional questions that the FDA may want to have answered, maybe to influence the label. There will be a patient registry, most likely for every patient that gets mdma. So I see the two different paths right now. One will be potentially within the next six months when Lycos is the pharma company that's mafs launched but is now off on its own, is bringing in new investors. They have, I think, a smarter attitude than the, the older management. And so they're going to try to negotiate with FDA about a phase four study. And so either it gets approved potentially within the next six months with phase four requirements, or the FDA might say, well, we want another phase three study, in which case it'll be approval, I think, delayed three and a half years or something like that. And so it's unclear to me what will happen. But I think a lot will depend upon whether FDA considers the data that we already gathered to be credible, which I think it very much was. And so we're hopeful, I don't know exactly how it'll turn out, but quite hopeful. There's also an incredible unmet medical need. There are so many people that are attempting suicide or succeeding in suicide for post traumatic stress disorder, both veterans and others. And I believe that it can be administered with, under the supervision of trained therapists. Again, it's about the training of the therapists. And so we hope, I hope that the FDA will say yes. We believe that the data that's been gathered is sufficiently rigorous. And that's what gets back to this. One of the main critiques was about a double blind, this functional unblinding. So I'll just say that in 2017 because, well, 2001, I finished my dissertation at the Kennedy School of government, got my PhD and a big part of it was on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics. And marijuana. And it focused on the double blind study. How do you do double blind studies with a drug that if it's a high enough dose, you know, you've taken it? And, you know, I think that there, the solution that I had was therapy with low dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. And when we did 16 years of studies, we looked at therapy with no MDMA therapy. Oh, well, it's been now 39 years of MAPs since I started in 1986. So.

Rick, thanks. Thanks, man. Few people have the. Have the perseverance and the resilience to spend four decades making something good happen.

Yeah, well, it's been rewarding the whole way. I mean, it's been frustrating lots of times, but I've seen the benefits. And every day, practically when I travel, people are coming up to me and I hear these psychedelic stories. You probably hear them too, these stories of people that say, this helped me, nothing else helped me, this helped me in this way. So it's been continually inspiring. The other part of it that's really kept me going is this hope that, you know, humanity as a whole. This is one of the reasons why I think meditation can be so important, is that our minds are brilliant. The fact that we can talk to each other at a distance in real time, recorded, and people can see it all over the world. I mean, the mind is brilliant. And our hearts, our emotions, and our spirituality are lagging way behind. And we are not really able to handle the technology that we have with global warming, with all sorts of things. So that it's. E.O. wilson was a professor at Harvard, an entomologist. He had a great quote. He said, the real problem with humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions with medieval institutions, with godlike technologies.

Ooh, what a great quote. Yeah.

And so for me, psychedelics have been a way to try to address this imbalance that we really need to elevate our emotions and our spirituality and feel interconnected. I mean, this is. You know, I grew up during the 60s when the whole John F. Kennedy going to the moon was happening. And you see some of the astronauts saying the same thing, that when they see the earth from space, they see the. It's one thing you don't see the religions, you don't see the countries, you don't see the races. You see this one living, you know, tiny blue dot in the middle of this, you know, space. And it makes them feel connected. My daughter Ellie was. Went to school with the granddaughter of Michael Collins, who was the astronaut that was in the didn't he start ions?

Was that Michael who started in Soup for Noetic Sciences?

Willis Harmon and Edgar Mitchell.

God. They're a sister organization down the street from the longevity group that I used to run in Palo Alto. And it's like anyone who gets on the biohacking path, you will want to live a very long time and you will want to be more conscious. They have to go together, right?

Yeah. And what Michael Collins said, what I heard indirectly from my daughter, was that when she heard this from him, is that after they came back from the moon, they did these travels all over the world. And what he said was, the mood was, we did it. But the we was not Americans. The we was humanity. Humanity made it to the moon, we did it. And so psychedelics can give you that sense of the we ness of all of us together. And that has political implications if you really. It's harder to demonize people or to say, oh, these immigrants are terrible people, or it's harder to say these people with a different religion, you know, I need to kill them, or whatever, when you have this deeply felt sense of the we ness. And I think one of the things that will be discussed at Psychedelic Science Conference is a lot of this spiritual mystical experience. Psychedelics with meditation. What is this experience of beyond ego? And from a neuroscience point of view, Robin Carter Harris has done some. Who will be at the conference, has done some incredible work on what he calls the default mode network. So the default mode network is the part of our brain that is sort of identified with the self. You know, it's, it's. It's our resting state, default. You sort of go into this state like, okay, and then you. You review incoming information according to what your needs are, according to this body, from life to death. But you knock out this default mode network with LSD with other classic psychedelics, and then you don't filter information the same way. We have all this information below our level of awareness that comes in when you're doing psychedelics. And it's these beyond ego states, the ego dissolution, the sort of unit of mystical experience that can be explained a lot by neuroscience, but it has incredible therapeutic potential. And so research has shown with psilocybin with LSD from the 60s, that the depth of this, what they call the ego dissolution, the beyond ego states, the depth of this mystical experience, this unit of connective experience is correlated with therapeutic outcome from fear of death, from cancer, from addiction, from depression, from ptsd. However, I will contrast that with mdma, where we use the same Mystical Experience questionnaire, people score pretty high, not quite as high as they would on the measures with the classic psychedelics. But we find with MDMA assisted therapy that there is no correlation between the mystical experience and reduction of PTSD symptoms. So that.

Yeah, I think they're very separate from a felt sense because you can learn to consciously reduce the activity of the default mode network. It's so cool that we're talking about this. There's a chapter in the psychedelic chapter in the book.

Oh, great.

I talk about default mode network. Like, here's what this one does to the default mode. Here's why you would care. Is your goal connectedness, or is it turning off trauma permanently? Because they're different goals and you just gave me science for that, Rick. I. I didn't even have that. Ah, that's so cool. All right. We're still aligned.

Oh, good. Yeah. Well, I do suggest you talk to Ghoul as well, because she can give you the science behind this idea of neuroplasticity and the critical periods and the importance of therapy after the drug during this period. So it turns out there's also another thing that we should briefly talk about, which is the epigenetics. So that Rachel Yehuda is a researcher at the Bronx VA of Mount Sinai, and she's done studies with Holocaust survivors and their children, and she's identified mechanisms by which we think multi generational trauma is passed along.

Yes, it's genetic. I've come across her work and she's. You know, I. I haven't interviewed her, though. I don't believe. But AJ's gonna fix that, right, AJ?

She's terrific. Because it's not genetic in the way we normally think of DNA as evolutionary, because that takes, you know, many, many, many generations, thousands, millions of years.

But it's a chromophore thing, right?

Yeah, but it's the. What epigenetics is above the genes. It's what turns the genes on and off. And when you are traumatized in your life, you have epigenetic changes that either the mother or the father can transfer to the children through the sperm and the egg. And what is looking like it's happening. And there's preliminary evidence to suggest that if you do successful therapy, and it doesn't have to be with psychedelics, that you can change these epigenetic markers, we can interrupt multigenerational trauma. And I think that that's the promise of humanity over the next multiple generations, that if we can really widespread psychedelic healing and other sorts of accessible therapies and meditation, holotropic breath work that doesn't require drugs but, but in a way it's a drug change.

Because you're Stan Groff has been on the show, right?

Yeah, yeah. He's, you know, in incredible. 93 years old, still alive. He and I and Brigitte, his wife are talking about going to Dubai next year in April.

Oh my gosh. That' cool.

He's still. Yeah, he was my mentor and my.

Spiritual, you know, for listeners. Stan Grof is one of the fathers of psychedelic therapy because in the 50s he treated patients legally with LSD when it was became illegal. He became the first modern breath work guy. And is, is I, I call him the father of transpersonal psychology.

But yeah, he is. And he actually ran away from Czechoslovakia after the Russians came in and killed 68, came to the United States and was head of the research at Johns Hopkins. Was one of the main people there. And then I actually got to meet him in 1972.

Wow.

So lucky. And I took a workshop with him. He was briefly married to Joan Halifax. Roshi Joan now. And he's the one that inspired me when I was. Wow.

I did not know that connection. Oh.

When I was 18 years old, I went to this college, New College, which sadly by the way has been destroyed in many ways by Desantis because it was the most woke gay friendly, trans friendly school in Florida. When I went to it, it was a private school and there was a tradition of all night dance parties with psychedelics and a tradition of people exploring psychedelics personally for deep work. And I did that. Then I got really confused. I didn't understand about integration. I went to the guidance counselor at college and I said my tripping is becoming more important than my studies and I'm having all these emotional issues. I'm really not fully able to let go. It's difficult. Help me. And the guidance counselor took me seriously and he said, here's a book I'd like you to read. And it was Realms of the Human Observations from LSD Research by Stan Grof.

Wow.

But the book wasn't published till 1975. My guidance counselor got it directly from Stan as a manuscript copy. I was so lucky. It couldn't have been any, you know, it was like fate. And I read this book and I thought this is what really inspired me. This is after the backlash after psychedelics were shut down after Nixon had the Controlled substance Act of 1970. John Ehrlichman. To get back to our earlier discussions of drug policy, John Ehrlichman was the domestic policy advisor for Nixon. And in the late 70s, he did an interview, and he said that the enemies, the real enemies of the Nixon White House were the civil rights movement and the hippies. And he said, we couldn't stop their protests, but we could criminalize the drugs that they were using, and we could use that to break up their meetings, arrest their leaders. Did we know we were exaggerating the risks of drugs? Of course we did. So it just reinforces this idea that the drug war at its core is not really about drug abuse. It's really about other things, and it's kept alive by all the underground groups that are making enormous amounts of profits.

Yeah, the war on drugs has got to end. I think we're at the final.

Well, since you're in Austin, I would just say for the Doge people, go after the dea if you really want to do some.

Well, I mean, Elon's here, and we're doing a maha event the night before for the conference, my big conference for 4,000 people in the biohacking space. Biohackingconference.com. guys, everyone listening already knows that, but that'll be a really big thing. So we're doing some fundraising right before that just to do this. And part of MAHA is let's reduce regulatory burden. But going after the DA is a great thing. So I will plant a bug in the right people's ears. And all the.

That is great. That is great.

And all the people, the dea, there's plenty of law enforcement work to be done. So I don't think that even has to be, like, that's not a layoff situation. That's a. Let's point your. Your skills, which are really necessary towards other things. We need, I don't know, like maybe borders or something.

Well, violent crime. I mean.

Yeah.

We need to make this whole country even safer. And I'd say there's a lot of unsolved murders, unsolved rapes, unsolved burglaries. I think. Yeah, I think you're totally right that it's not letting people go, it's just redirecting them to make America safer.

Yeah. And we can. We can certainly do that. This is. This is incredible. I'm gonna do a few. A few quick take questions with you.

Okay.

What's the most dangerous path the psychedelic movement could go down right now?

Oh, my God. That's so Interesting question. Most dangerous path is the one we're going on, which is separating the drug from the therapy. I think that then you have more and More people who may have experiences that they're not prepared for, they're not supported. I think to make the psychedelic path just about money and just about the drug is the most dangerous path.

Okay, I love that. Okay. What country would you predict will legalize psychedelic therapy next and why?

I can't say for sure, but I believe that it'll be America.

You think it'll be America? I love it.

I think so. I mean, we have more research here. You know, there's been over 10,000 people that have got psilocybin in Oregon on the state legal programs. New Mexico just approved it. Psilocybin. Colorado is about to go into implementing psilocybin, the natural plant initiative that it passed. It depends, I would say, on the actions of the FDA over the next six months. I think that there's a real good chance that it could be America.

I think after America, or maybe probably not before, but I have a sneaking sense that it could be uae.

Well, I just came back from Lebanon just two days ago. I'm going to Dubai, as I said, with Stan Grof in April, but I've been there before. I'm going again in October to Dubai. The. The sense I got is that we. We were in Abu Dhabi a year and a half ago for a big conference, and we met a bunch of people who were interested in it, but I got the impression they were waiting for FDA approval.

Oh, maybe they'll be waiting.

And that didn't happen. So it very well could be uae, But Lebanon is now in a different situation. They've got a new government. They've got a government which is unusual, and there's a enormous amount of trauma. So this idea is you go where the suffering is, and if you have a solution for suffering, people are willing to pay attention. So. But to legalize for research is one thing. I think you were asking for something even further legalized in a more widespread way, potentially. Australia is already got lots of compassionate use for psychedelics, that they've led the way in that Canada has compassionate use for psychedelics. That's expanding. Israel has compassionate use. I just came back from Ukraine. Here's another situation is that, you know, MAPS did a training for 55 Ukrainian therapists and psychiatrists, but Ukraine is stuck with these terrible laws from Russia where you cannot even do research with Schedule 1 drugs.

Oh, wow.

And so the Ukrainian government is faced with enormous amount of trauma and their draft legislation to change the law. And Ukraine is not part of the European Medicines Agency. It's not part of the fda. They could proceed to move forward.

Oh, they could move really quickly on it.

They could.

It's weird. Historically, going back thousands of years, war veterans always got ptsd. You know, some of them did anyway. And the way they would heal them if they didn't have psychedelics, which they probably did use historically. I mean, you and I have both come across that they would also take them into these cults. But women have the ability to heal men, and sometimes they have to be naked. Right. And it's called tantra in the modern forms. So I put a chapter in tantra in my book too. Like, this is a way to access altered states. So if a guy's rattled, he might just need to be held more than that, but it's really important.

Well, there was an incredible book. I don't know if you've come across it. It was in the 70s. It was called Women who Slept With Men to Take the War out of Them.

Holy crap. Like, I wish I would have read that. I'm gonna find this book. Women who Slept.

Slept With Men to Take the War out of Them.

Wow.

Yeah, I. I think it's hard for processing emotion. Well, this. This relates to another point which is one of the very most important areas of research that MAPS is going to do as a nonprofit is MDMA for couples therapy. And so there's an incredible project that actually I'm working with people in Austin to work on to do this MDMA for couples therapy. And there's a therapy that's approved inside the VA as an evidence based therapy called Cognitive Behavioral conjoint therapy. Conjoint means couples or dyads. And what happens is they bring in the veteran with PTSD and they bring their. That was just Stan Groff calling me, but I'll talk to him later.

No way. Tomas said hi. That's so good.

Amazing. Well, I'll talk to him later. But it was cognitive behavior conjoint therapy. They must have. Must have heard me talking about them. But it brings in the veteran with PTSD and their partner, and they both get therapy. And. And we've done experiments where both of them get mdma, and the results were better than anything they ever got, both in reduction of PTSD and in strength of the relationship. So there's a great project also at a place called Sunstone in Rockville, Maryland, that's done research with all different psychedelics for all different companies, but they work with cancer patients and bring the cancer patients with anxiety about dying and their partner, and they both get mdma. So I think we need to look at both the designated patient, you could say, but it impacts the families. And the more you bring the families into the treatment. And that brings another point, which is group therapy. Group therapy is one of the bigger areas of research that's just beginning. FDA wants everything studied by individuals first. And I do think therapists should be trained on individuals. And then because I think group therapy can be more difficult than individual therapy from the therapist point of view.

Oh, it's much more work. We, we do groups of four at 40 years of Zen. And it, it's, it's much more impactful because the witnessing aspect is an independent variable and it's important. Your ego won't allow you to forget something if it knows that somebody saw it. And if it's just you and another person, he goes like, no, I didn't say that. Like, so, yeah, I'm all over that. And what's this place called?

Well, Sunstone. Sunstone is a treatment and research center. Mostly doing research, but also doing a lot of work with. With 5 Meo DMT with. With all different kind of psychedelics for different clinical conditions.

That is so incredible.

Yeah, I'd like to say PsychedelicScience.org is the website for our conference coming up, and we anticipate. The last psychedelic science conference, 2023, was 12,400 people. We have over 1500 people applied for talks. We have about 500 talks. We have the executive director of the American Psychiatric association, senior person of American Psychological Association, national association of Soccer Workers. We have people from various politicians, Rick Perry.

I'll probably be there.

Morgan. Morgan Luttrell, Jack Bergman. So we have politicians from across the political spectrum, people from mainstream institutions, and the world's leading psychedelic researchers.

It is the top psychedelic conference on Earth and globally famous. So I'm, I'm grateful that you're doing that and that we have enough freedom to even be able to get together and talk about it. So I absolutely appreciate you. See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.