RFK Jr. was skeptical of psychedelics until his son had a transformative ayahuasca experience in Patagonia that produced lasting emotional changes. After 40 years in recovery and his wife's 2012 suicide, he now sees potential in therapeutic use while warning against pharmaceutical companies co-opting the field.
Questions this video answers
2012.
40 years.
Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in 2015 in Mexico.
24 years old.
In Patagonia (during a stay before a whitewater kayaking trip).
Chapters
I don't think that in most cases that we can fix things that are wrong inside of us with things that are outside of us, with, you know, all the things that we reach for when we feel discomfort, whether it's drugs or alcohol or sex or reckless behavior. And we're particularly people who are prone to addiction are always looking for things outside of them to fix this, you know, to fill this empty hole that they have inside of them. We're really. I'm in a crisis now, so I'm gonna.
I asked the audience to submit some questions and I can't ask all of them, but one of them was about psychedelics. And let me preface this by saying, you know that I've been in recovery, you've been in recovery for 40 years. And I'm the first person in the world to have before and after brain scans, doing ibogaine and 5 Meo DMT, which I did in 2015 in Mexico. And we took a film crew and we filmed it and then we did interview the doctor that did the before and after brain scans and whatnot. And I've seen miraculous things happen. But I'm also worried about the pharmaceutical industries like they're doing with everything, co oping it. So what are your thoughts on psychedelics? Because my viewpoint on it is in the field of recovery, depression, mental illness, things like that.
Yeah, I mean, my initial bias about psychedelic drugs is again colored by my experience of being in recovery for 40 years and having gone to, I go to like nine meetings a week, 12 step meetings. I've heard a lot of bad stories about people involvement with drugs and alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs. My bias is that I don't think that in most cases that we can fix things that are wrong inside of us with things that are outside of us, with all the things that we reach for when we feel discomfort, whether it's drugs or alcohol or sex or reckless behavior. Particularly people who are prone to addiction are always looking for things outside of them to fix, to fill this empty hole that they have inside of them. Having said that, I have seven kids and my wife in 2012 took her own life and left me with six children. And so all of those kids were at risk at time and they all ended up doing really wonderful things with their lives and they're in good relationships and they're outside now of what I would call a risk bubble. One of them was worrying to me because he never processed his mom's death in a way that I could observe. He seemed like a happy kid. He was always smiling he did get in a lot of fist fights and he was a. He became a boxer and he won a lot of tournaments and then he became a hockey player. But everything he did was a little bit of violence, so. And it made me worried about him. And he went to a couple about five years ago. He was very self contained. He never talked about what was going on inside of him. And he went to Patagonia to run a white, to kayak a whitewater river that I kayaked for many, many years, every year called the Fu de La Fox. And he went down there to do it with a friend. And he had a five day wait between the time that his kayak trip was going to start and the time that he arrived there. And I had a friend who I knew a little bit, just an acquaintance down there who had some land property down there. And I asked this guy to put my son up for a couple of days while he was waiting for his trip to start. And that guy, the night my son arrived there, he had that guy said to him, I'm doing an ayahuasca trip tonight. And he said, God sent you boys to me because he was doing it with 20.8 Indians. And he said, I was praying to God that he would send me a gringo to do this with. And my kid ended up doing this. And he had this experience where after he drank the ayahuasca, they gave them all a bucket and they gave him a sleeping bag, and it was kind of in an outdoor place with a fire. And after he drank it, he felt himself sinking through all the geological strata of the Earth. And he could look at all of, he told me he could look at all the folds of stone and geology, and he had a total understanding of all of the processes that had laid them out for the eons. He ended up being propelled out of the other side of the Earth and then floating through space for what he experienced as hundreds of years. He would focus on a distant planet and be transported there. On each planet, he would have an adventure. At the end of the adventure, there would be a lesson, a moral lesson that he would learn that he was supposed to remember the last place, the last planet he visited. His mother was there, and she started passing through him, in and out of him again and again. And every time she did that, he felt all these experiences of forgiveness, of love, of understanding, of comprehension, of empathy and compassion. And when he came back from that trip, he was completely changed.
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He was very open about talking about his feelings. He was on a real spiritual quest. He was very, very openly just happy all the time. And the reason I really know that it changed him is he started taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. And he's done the dishes constantly without ever being asked since then. He's a 24 year old kid, so, you know, that's a miracle.
So.
That opened my mind to the possibility that there may be something that I didn't understand or that was outside of my kind of bubble of prejudices. And I have a friend who's a Navy SEAL who had severe ptsd and he went to Costa Rica and had the same kind of experience. And I had a couple of other friends who are in the NFL and they also had severe brain injuries and depression. Terrible, terrible depression. And the same thing happened. And then I looked at Michael Pollan's documentary, which I think is on Netflix, and there's one particularly poignant story. He goes through each of the psychedelics, a show for each one. And I think the third show is on psilocybin. And there's a kid on that show who has severe ocd. He literally could not go out of his house. He had to do all of these rituals. He had to constantly clean his hands. He had to walk through the door 10 times or 20 times or 60 times. He had to do all these very repetitive rituals and it absolutely paralyzed him and destroyed his life. And he did one psilocybin trip and it was completely gone. So my mind is open to the idea that there may be things that I don't know about and that people ought to have the freedom and the liberty to experiment with these things. I like what you said at the outset, which is we know the capacity of the pharmaceutical industry to come and capture this if they see that there's money in it and to turn it into something very, very bad and to promote it in ways that it shouldn't be promoted. So my inclination, and I haven't thought this through that much, but 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 of it.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean.
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