← Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
Extend Podcast with Darshan Shah, MD
154. Dr. Rick Doblin - Part 2: Psychedelics, MDMA Therapy, and the Future of Mental Health
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- [00:03]
A
Welcome to xtend with me, Dr. Darshan Shah. A podcast dedicated to cutting edge science research tools and protocols designed to help you extend your health span. Having become one of the youngest doctors in the country at the age of 21 and trained and board certified at the Mayo Clinic, I've accumulated three decades of practice as a board certified surgeon and longevity expert. Over that time, I've discovered that a mere 20% of health knowledge yields 80% of the results. When it comes to your health span, we are living in a new era where we are creating a new healthcare system no longer focused on disease management, but achieving optimal health and vitality. Join me as I interview world renowned experts offering you a step by step guide to proactively avoid disease and most importantly, extend your health span. In part one of this conversation with Rick Doblin, we explored the history, science and clinical development of psychedelic therapy. Now in part two, we're going to go deeper into how these compounds actually work and how they're being used in real world context. Rick Doblin walks us through the therapeutic uses of lsd, Psilocybin, DMT and Ayahuasca and how these substances may influence perception, emotional processing and the sense of self. We also discussed the importance of integration, how insights from these experiences can translate into lasting change and what responsible use looks like in both clinical and traditional settings. If you're serious about optimizing your health performance and long term brain function, understanding how these therapies interact with your mind is absolutely essential. This is part two of my incredible conversation with Rick Doblin. I hope you enjoy this one as much as you did the last. You know, we're in la, I live in la and there's a lot of people coming to LA from all over the country that provide these options. People are going to Mexico to try different options as well in the plant medicine space in South America. Yeah, but I also think that, you know, barring safety concerns and all these other things that we can talk about later, people have need to have a clearer understanding of what the options are and what they're useful for. So I'd love to just kind of go through that list with you if you're.
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B
Yeah, if you're up for it. I think it's really good to do
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A
that, be very helpful for my audience. So let's start with lsd because I think LSD is probably one of the most powerful psychedelics out there. What do you see as potential uses for LSD and how we should be thinking about it?
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B
Well, there's Stanislav Grof, who is the 95, the world's most experienced and respected LSD researcher, He had a book, LSD Psychotherapy. So what is LSD good for in psychotherapy? What is psychotherapy good for? I think LSD can enhance psychotherapy for a wide range of different things. But the essence of this LSD experience is the dissolving of the sense of self. And in modern neuroscience terms, we talk about it as the default mode network, which is our sort of resting state that's sort of looking at what this body, what this individual life, what we need, what are our priorities. And we filter information according to what's important to us. So LSD weakens that filtration system. So you're kind of flooded by information and you're no longer oriented according to the sense of self. So that's where people talk about difficult trips or scary trips because you're losing your normal sense of orientation. But when you are supported in a safe way and you can let that go, then you can feel connected. It's almost like certain parts of our brain of consciousness that have developed over billions of years, you knock them out and then you're connected to these deeper ways of thinking and ways of being and different. So LSD in the 60s, the two main uses of it were for alcohol use disorder and for people that were facing terminal illness and were frightened about dying, and that you can get a different sense about the continuity of, of energy or, or so, and you can just see death as kind of like a natural part of life. So. But the FDA has just, has recently declared LSD as a breakthrough therapy for generalized anxiety disorder. So this is in relatively lower doses with some support, but not a whole lot. You know, I've talked a lot about, you know, MDMA for post traumatic Stress disorder. The very first work ever of a psychedelic for PTSD was in 1961, and it was by a Dutch psychiatrist, Dr. Jan Bastianz, and it was for LSD for Concentration camp syndrome. Oh. So people that had been in the concentration camps, and some of them had been Dutch resistance fighters and then they were part of the Dutch government. So Bastians was the last person in the world that still had legal permission to use LSD up until the 80s. And there's an incredible book if people are interested. It's called Shaviti S H I V I T T I Shaviti of Vision, and it's by an Israeli Holocaust survivor who went to the Netherlands for LSD therapy. And he talks about what four of his LSD Sessions were like, wow, it's an incredible book.
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A
That sounds incredible. Yeah.
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B
And one of the more profound parts of it is where this concentration camp survivor was able to see out of the eyes of one of the Nazi perpetrators.
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A
Wow.
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B
And he could see, and this was the kind of disturbing thing, but that he could see that any of us could end up in that position, either victim or perpetrator, if the social. Not everybody, but if the social pressures are enough and you're threatened yourself with torture or murder or whatever, you know, unless you do these things. So that was this big breakthrough that it wasn't that there's these completely evil people that are doing this, it's that they're acting in evil ways, but they've had their core humanity kind of drained out of them by the social systems. So the thing about LSD for PTSD is that it doesn't reduce the fear the way that MDMA does. But LSD can be quite helpful for ptsd. It can be helpful for, in some cases, a whole range of different things. So there's treatment resistant depression, depression when people have obsessive compulsive disorder. Stan Grof has talked about how they're so controlling that they can even control lsd. So he said, he talked about one person that he gave a thousand micrograms, which is an enormous dose, to somebody with severe ocd, and he was able to play chess.
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A
Wow.
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B
While on lsd. Because it's such a rigid control, because they're so scared of losing control. But if you can help people feel comfortable losing control like that, then you can get at the urges that drive them to do the ocd. So I'd say LSD has a wide range of uses, but because it dissolves the sense of self, it's really good for people with terminal illness or for existential distress. It can be helpful for ptsd. Like when people have depression. It's a lot of rumination, the same kind of patterns. And LSD can break you out of those patterns in some ways, but you need a very skilled support system because there is that fear of losing your sense of orientation.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the other part of this, of course, is just to touch on this real quick, is the neuroplasticity effects of lsd. You know, I know so many stories like, you know, Steve Jobs, for example. Right. Like he, he used LSD and he famously said that, you know, this is what opened up his mind to be creative.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And even form companies like Apple and Pixar and all the things he did and so there's tremendous benefit there as well. But then how do you find someone to activate that side of your brain? You're not using it for treatment of a disorder. You're using it for the creativity aspects of it. Is there people that can help you through that as well, that process?
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B
Well, I think that there was work in the 60s by a fellow, Jim Fadiman and Willis Harmon and others, and this was using both mescaline and LSD for creativity.
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A
Okay.
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B
And they would take scientists and people in different industries that had kind of a problem to solve, and they would bring them into small groups and they would do relatively lower doses of lsd, but enough so that you would be thinking creatively. So there is a lot of good examples of LSD and mescaline for problem solving. The issue is that if you use high enough doses, you may go beyond this problem solving into your own issues that you can't just abstractly thinking about a problem. So you have to be prepared to both do therapy and in those moments that people are not wrapped up with kind of an issue, have them think about whatever it is. And that's where the lower doses could be helpful in that way. There's a particular study that was with psilocybin. So psilocybin is similar to LSD, but more embodied, more grounded. But it was called semantic priming. And what that means is that it's like you prime somebody with a word. So I say day, you say night, I say sun, you say moon. You know, we have all these kind of patterned reactions to certain kind of words. And when people are under the influence of psilocybin, when you give them a word, they have a wider range of associations to that word. They're not stuck in this simple pattern which suggests that you're more creative, you're able to access wider range of associations with particular ideas, and maybe then you can see new solutions to problems that you had previously been unable to solve.
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A
Right, right. So psilocybin might be another good alternative for people that are looking for those creative moments or creative solves.
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B
Yeah, yeah, very much so. So psilocybin is. LSD is like 10, 12 hours, right? Something like that. Or, you know, eight to 12 hours. Psilocybin is more like six hours. And it has just similar kind of ego dissolution, but not quite to the extent of lsd. And because it's so embodied and grounded that, you know, it's. Your LSD is a little bit more ethereal.
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Right.
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But psilocybin can be very helpful for creativity for thinking in new ways.
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Yes, yes. And I've done some of these.
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B
I was about to say that when
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you say, yes, I've never done nsd, but I will say with psilocybin definitely invokes a lot of creativity. A lot of thinking outside the box can be also a lot of fun, but also can be very negative if done in the wrong environment, which I've also experienced myself. So that's why I just warn my patients, just be careful about the environment. Who you're doing your.
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B
Could you say a bit, what did you mean by wrong environment?
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So I was using it at a party. It was a party that I didn't know anybody and it was kind of a. The people there were like, not my kind of people. They were darker and more negative. And so I kind of got stuck in there and I couldn't leave and I did not feel good. Yeah, I felt very stuck and it felt like time just stopped and I couldn't get out and it was a little bit traumatic and so I didn't do it again for a very long time.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So that's not that uncommon because you're vulnerable, you're feeling uncertain and the key is feeling safe to go into these difficult spaces. And if you don't feel safe, then you just block it and then you can end up worse off.
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A
Yeah, yeah. You know, going back to what you said about the fear of death, another. Another one that I've tried is dmt and it was a very positive experience for me because I did do it with someone who was very skilled in it. The whole experience only lasted about an hour, so it didn't feel like it was this prolonged period I was in the experience. But I think a lot of people describe it as a near death experience, but in a very positive way to where you're open to moving on to the next thing, whatever it might be. And just even today, like this was five years ago, I feel like I'm not as fearful of death as I was prior to this, you know, and
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B
can you say how did that. What made it so that that experience impacted your perception of death?
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A
The entire experience was me being surrounded by the people I love the most in the most loving and caring way while I was kind of leaving my body. Right. And it was so beautiful because I thought about the people around me, the people that are closest to me, but also what was I leaving behind, like my children, my work in my field. And it just made me much more comfortable with the thought of death as not being kind of the end, but also a very. Maybe a new beginning. Wow.
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B
Sangroff has talked about how when he started working with LLSD in the 1950s, 55, I think it was that they were. He was in training to be a psychiatrist and they were working with people. I think you had to work with a few of them before you could have your own LSD experience. And he saw people that confused this ego dissolution with physical death. So it can be very scary for some people as they see that they're letting go. And then he talked about it when it came his turn to take lsd, even though he'd seen the same process before, for a period of time, he convinced himself that when he was young he had a special illness and that changed his body chemistry. And so even though nobody else was dying, he actually was dying because of this allergy that he developed to LSD because of this thing. And then over a while he worked his way through it. I think with dmt, it's usually. There's different ways, but it's often smoked. And one of the incredible innovations that we have now going on is vape pens.
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Yes.
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B
So now there are DMT, vape pens. And people may have also heard of 5 Meo DMT. So there's different kinds of DMT, but DMT is the only psychedelic that's endogenous to our body.
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A
I did not know that.
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B
Yeah. It's not exactly clear what it does in the brain, but there is some amounts of DMT in the brain. Some people have speculated that it's released when you die or it's in your pineal gland or. I don't think this has really confirmed any of that, but it kind of really more rapidly, you could say, than LCD or psilocybin, just dissolves your sense of self. And then when you smoke it, it can be 15 or 30 minutes, and then it takes a while to kind of come back, as you said, like an hour. The 5 Meo DMT people may have heard about the Sonoran Desert toad.
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A
Sure.
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B
It's a venom that comes from this toad that has this. That's even more powerful than dmt. And that's where I've experimented. I've done it a long time ago, but I also been a little bit a couple years ago, started looking at the vape pens. And you can use low, medium and high doses as you're adjusting to this ego dissolution. Dmt, dimethyltryptamine is the main active ingredient in Ayahuasca. So people have probably heard about drinking ayahuasca but the reason that ayahuasca works is DMT is inactivated by enzymes in your stomach.
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A
Okay.
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But there's an MAOI inhibitor in the ayahuasca that makes the DMT orally active.
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Oh, okay.
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And then it lasts for several hours, too.
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A
Right.
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B
So dmt, the form of which you take a drug matters a lot. You know, what's your. The route of administration? What are the routes of administration? So.
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Yeah, because when I smoked it, it was different than doing an ayahuasca experience. Yeah, but it's the same drug.
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You're. It's the same drug.
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Oh, okay.
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Interesting. Yeah. Because the MEOI inhibitor or the MAOI itself, just really makes it so that the DMT isn't dissolved and is active. Yeah. So it can last longer. And generally, the longer you're in a psychedelic state, the more chance you have to turn it into a story and learn about it and connect it to your life. The DMT and the 5 Meo DMT are just completely out of your story. And I felt the first time I spoke to the dmt, I was like, this was actually the first time I smoked 5 Meo DMT. I felt like I was blasted to the middle of the sun.
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Yes.
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And it was just fantastic because it was this sense of this constant energy being produced, and what it left me with from that one experience was this sense that I'm never fully trapped, that there's always this ability to bring something new, you know, from this kind of. This, like the big bang or something. Something out of nothing. There's always this chance for something new to enter the system.
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Right.
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And so, at least for me, my 5 Meo trip was really encouraging in a way. It was inspiring.
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Right.
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But it's. It's. It's not part of, oh, this happened when I was 3 or 4 or 10 or 12. It's just like, oh, now I'm in the middle of the sun.
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Yeah.
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It's unusual.
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Yeah, it really. It's a very special experience. A lot of people are doing ayahuasca now, too.
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Yes. Yes.
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And so I'd love for you to talk about, like, what are the potential uses for ayahuasca?
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Okay. Well, again, the way that ayahuasca has been kind of traditionally used in Brazil and Peru, where it really came from, is these combinations of spirituality and medicine.
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Yeah.
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You know, we tend to divide. This is spiritual, this is medicine, but it can be used for addiction, for dependence on different substances. It can be used for depression. It's often used just for the normal Conflicts of life. Because these churches, these ayahuasca churches, people will often participate in church services once a month or so. So it's become something that they do a lot. But I would say that. And the different churches have different approaches to how they contain or explore this ayahuasca space. But it's often used for people to deal with somebody they loved has died, or that they're sick themselves, or just you have these different conflicts. And ayahuasca can help you see them from a different perspective. So to be forgiving, or to forgive yourself or to forgive others. So I would say that this is kind of an unusual outcome. But for me, the first time I ever did ayahuasca, it was in unyao da vigital context. And people are sitting down, and at different points, people will. They call it the ikaros, sort of the songs that the shamans sing. But this would be different. People would be singing a song, their prayer. They would sort of say it, but sing it kind of. And I thought, how beautiful that people can express themselves in song. And I always felt like I was a terrible singer. And this was 25 years ago, and I had young kids, not quite 25 years ago, but like 10 years ago or 15. Sorry, 15 years ago. And I felt, wow, how wonderful it is that people can express themselves. So I went off and took singing lessons.
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A
That's great.
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B
That was how I integrated my first ayahuasca experience. The second one was a little bit more troublesome. And I'll say that again, this points to the context as being much more important. So this was the second experience in the Unyade Vichal. This was before they won the Supreme Court case. And they were preparing to do that. And they said, just to make sure we're making it so that people can come twice, but then you have to become a member of the church, so we could say that. And so the second time I went, they were telling the story of the church. And the story was that King Solomon left Jerusalem and went to Brazil and told them how to put these plants together and then hightail it back to Jerusalem. And I'm like, okay, I understand metaphor. Somebody smart. You guys are brilliant. You figured this out. And they're like, no, no, that's not a metaphor. That's what happened. And I'm like, you gotta be joking. I mean, so you can encase in this kind of wide open spiritual experience, you can wrap it into certain kind of dogmas and kind of contexts. And in order for the ayahuasca Churches to survive. They're called syncretic churches.
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Okay.
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Because of the conquistadors and all that, they had to merge with the Christian church in different ways. So they have all these, you know, they talk about Jesus a lot and stuff, even though they came from these indigenous cultures in the jungles. But they've adopted some of the worst parts. So they're homophobic, hierarchical, patriarchal. So you would think that this freeing psychedelic experience, a good example of it, is just to think about lava coming out of a volcano. And then it hardens in certain ways and that's when it becomes an institution. You have this like explosion of spiritual material, but then often it hardens. So I think the experiences that I had the best with ayahuasca were actually in Brazil at a retreat where I was speaking. But it was done in a therapeutic way. So it was a bunch of people in a group lying down at night through an all night ceremony. But each of us had our own experience. Although we had common music, we'd raise our hands if we needed help to go to the bathroom. But that felt to me more useful than trying to be part of a kind of a group service with certain kind of beliefs sort of baked in.
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A
Yeah, that's what you're saying. Like when you have these baked in beliefs that you have to like kind of listen to or subscribe to, you go down that rabbit hole and it become a negative experience versus a positive. Because now you're just focused on that.
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B
Yeah, particularly if you like. I can't believe that.
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A
Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah. And the people that have had very positive experiences with ayahuasca, that I know is very similar to what you were saying, they would go to Brazil or somewhere in Mexico and there's a group therapy. Everyone has their own experience. And. Yeah, and it's generally very positive. I will say there's a few people that I've seen in the last five, six years that tend to do this. I think too often, like they're going back once a month, once every other month, because they just love it so much. And then they come back after the third or fourth time and now they're seeing things or they're just not themselves anymore. So is there kind of like an optimal number of times to do this?
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B
Well, I wouldn't say optimal number of times, but I would say that from my perspective, again, more from the kind of therapeutic than a spiritual perspective is the key thing is to integrate what happened in the psychedelic experience into your daily life. And sometimes that can take weeks or Months or more, some new insight or something, and you need to integrate it. If you continue to do the psychedelic experience over and over without doing the integration in a way, that can be a running away from doing the integration. And you're just dredging up more and more material, but you're not really trying to make it change your baseline. So you can imagine that when it's like a community church service, it's more about doing it together than it is about what you bring back.
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A
Got it.
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B
So from a therapy point of view, it's about what you bring back, what you integrate it so that you don't need to keep doing the drug. You learn a lesson, and then you try to incorporate it in. In your daily life.
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Right, Right.
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So I. I think that there are no clear limits, like, oh, if you do it X number of times, like, like I said, I learned that if you did when I was young, if you did LSD five or six times, you were certifiably insane. You know, there's. There's nothing like that. I would say that's really just what
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you do with the information you've gained afterwards. That really is.
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B
And I learned this in a painful way. When I first started taking LSD. I was 17 and then 18, and I had the wrong idea. I had this idea that the more you take, the faster you evolve. And I completely misunderstood the importance of the integration. So I would get increasingly lost. It was the opposite of what I was doing it for. I would get into these conflicts. I couldn't really resolve them. And then when I would come down, it would have been a difficult trip. And they say, oh, I got to go back there as quickly as I can. And eventually I realized that this is not working. And I think it's because my concept is that it's not about what happens during the experience only. It's about what you bring back and how you change your daily life. And I think that's. That's where it's grounded and more beneficial.
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A
Yeah. That's such great advice. This episode was brought to you by NextHealth, a health optimization and longevity clinic located in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and soon to be opening in Montecito, Nashville, Miami, and many other cities in the United states and Canada. NextHealth is the apple store of wellness, where you can optimize your health span and lifespan using cutting edge technology. I actually founded NextHealth eight years ago to give my patients a place to go, get extensive biomarker testing done, and provide them with all the tools that I used to get my health in order. The longevity circuit in NextHealth using hyperbaric oxygen, sauna, cryotherapy and LED light is a game changer. In addition, the doctors at NextHealth measure thousands of biomarkers and put into place a longevity optimization plan using advanced tools like ozone plasma exchange and peptides. Go to www.next.health to check it out. I'd love to just touch real quick on. You know, we talked a lot about MDMA already. I mean, I think everyone should do MDMA at least once. It's a love drug. It is. Definitely opens you up to more social connection, whether it be with your spouse or your loved one or just with anybody. It's just I've never had a negative experience with mdma, but I do say that with the caveat that I've only done it two or three times and it's always been in a positive context with people I love, people I know.
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B
Well, yeah. So what we try to say or what we do say is that difficult is not the same as bad.
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Yes.
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B
And a lot of people confuse that. If it's starting to get difficult, then it means bad, and then they gotta shut down. So MDMA can, because of the reduction of fear in the amygdala, that you're able to have memories of different traumas in the past or just difficult things come to you, or even just think, oh, my God, you know, global warming is happening and people are dying here and there. It doesn't even have to be your own traumas. You just identify with that. But that you can have difficult experiences that if you open up to them, they can be some of the most beneficial. And so I think that's for people to understand. You take mdma. Let's say you've been traumatized for something. It's not like, oh, everything's fine. It's that you can finally process that emotions. Because a lot of times, I mean, we can understand it, particularly when people are being attacked or being raped or any kind of physical violence, that you need to focus on survival and you shut down your emotions. But those difficult emotions don't just go away. They can really impact you. And you need to bring them more to the surface, process them. And then this memory reconsolidation where they're not always about to happen, they become part of the past, as I said, part of the background. So mdma, particularly when we work with people who are traumatized from one thing or another, it can be difficult, but if it's in a safe way, it's not bad.
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A
Yeah. Yeah. And I do know a lot of people that are doing guided therapy sessions using a combination with MDMA and psilocybin to resolve unresolved traumas from the past.
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B
Yeah. I want to say that we're starting. We're working with some researchers at Columbia University, Jay Sebelius and others, and we're interviewing underground MDMA therapists who are doing MDMA couples therapy to find out how they're doing it and then as preparation for preparing a study. And the most incredible one that I found is that we haven't talked about epigenetics.
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A
No.
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B
But there are ways in which things that happen in our life can change our bodies in such a way so that what turns on epigenetics is above the genetics. So there's certain things that turn genes on and off. And so Rachel Yehuda, who's at Mount Sinai in the Bronx, va, has done work on the epigenetics of multigenerational trauma, and she's identified certain kind of biological markers. And what it looks like is that when you do. So let's say you're traumatized or you just have inherited multi generational trauma from however many generations back, but from your mother or your father, you've got this sort of set point for fear, anxiety, things like that, that when you go through successful therapy, those epigenetic markers can change. So this one couple, it's a husband and wife, they specialize. These are underground MDMA therapists. They specialize in working with couples before they conceive a child to try to work through their traumas and change these epigenetic markers so they don't pass on multigenerational trauma to their kids.
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A
Yeah, it's so. It's so incredible. I mean, the more I learn about epigenetics, it's just so powerful. It's such powerful knowledge to have, because even, you know, we all know that if the mother eats a bunch of junk food, then the baby might not be as healthy as if the mother is eating healthy. Right. Or not smoking, for example. But the same is also true for the father, and the same is also true for traumas. It's just the on and off switches get passed from the mother and father to the. To the baby. And so these are. This is the time to get all of that off kind of cleaned up. Right.
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B
I mean, it's a brilliant, beautiful way to think about it, that I need to clean my own epigenetics before I conceive a child.
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A
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I do want to talk about ketamine as well because I think it's very important because ketamine, out of everything we've talked about is actually legal.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And there are ketamine clinics everywhere where therapists are working with people for treatment resistant depression and even for suicidal ideation.
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B
Yeah.
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And I think it's, it's extremely successful and extremely powerful.
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B
Well, but, but I would say what you just said was where ketamine has worked with therapists.
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Right.
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Most of the ketamine clinics do not provide therapy. They're just doing it as a drug and consequently it doesn't work as long. It doesn't. It's not as durable and you keep needing more of it, the better. If, if anybody is thinking of going to a ketamine clinic, I would only go to a ketamine clinic that combined it with therapy.
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A
Yes, 100%.
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B
If they're just like a mill to just sell you the drug over and over, I wouldn't do it. But.
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A
Or you might be creating addiction, you
- [32:44]
B
can be creating a dependence and this whole. There's liver problems things can happen if you do too much. But ketamine is remarkable. The group that we're working with in San Diego is called Annamarie to do the MDMA couples therapy project. Annamarie Enamoury. But they currently do ketamine assisted couples therapy. So again, it all depends on the dose. So the anesthetic dose where you can be completely operated on. The reason ketamine is so useful in operating rooms is because it doesn't interfere with your breathing, but the psychedelic dose is like one tenth the anesthetic dose. And you end up this moving kind of out of your body, out of your sense of self. They call this in operation, they call it the emergent phenomena. It's where most anesthesiologists don't prepare people for this. But when the anesthetic dose wears off, you pass through a psychedelic phase. And when you're not prepared for that, now all of a sudden you're tripping and you've just. It's scary. But children tend not to get scared. So ketamine is used a lot in anesthesia in children because their minds are just more fluid in a ways. But this breaking the pattern of thought, getting out of this self referential point. Ketamine can be extremely helpful for a wide range of different conditions. Particularly spravato was for treatment resistant depression and psilocybin is being used now for treatment resistant depression, major depression disorder. Ketamine in the late 1990s, the only place in the world that there was any psychedelic being used for any clinical condition was in Russia in St. Petersburg, and it was ketamine assisted therapy. And it was for alcohol use disorder and addiction to heroin. And it was by a Dr. Yevgeny Krupitsky, who was part of a big government hospital. But then ketamine started being used as a party drug in Russia and they shut down the research. And so ketamine is now not being used as therapy. But it does have a lot of potential. And I would just again, caution people to think about it as a tool for therapy rather than a tool in and of itself. And when you do that work, it can be used for a wide range of different conditions. But because it does kind of take a little out of yourself, it's easy to find. There's ketamine clinics all over the place. Finding ones that combine it with therapy is more of a challenge.
- [35:16]
A
Yeah, but I agree with you. You have to have someone there as a therapist to help you achieve the outcome you want. Otherwise you could go backwards or you could get addicted, or you can cause liver damage, lots of other problems. Yeah. And then, you know, the other one I wanted to ask you about too was certain groups of people that are addicted to alcohol or addicted to even gambling or addicted to maybe narcotics, they're going to do ibogaine treatments as well. And so this is something I'm hearing a lot more about now. What are your feelings about ibogaine?
- [35:48]
B
One of the most important experiences I ever had of my whole life was Ibogaine LSD combination back in 1985. So Ibogaine is a remarkable drug. It's a root from Western Africa from the iboga plant. So it's really remarkable. Ibogaine does something that no other psychedelic does that we know of in that it helps people who are addicted to opiates go through the withdrawal in just days so that you can take people who are addicted to opiates, and the normal withdrawal is life threatening. Sometimes it's really horrible. But when you take an ibogaine experience, it resets your receptors in a way that LSD or others don't do. So ibogaine was widely used in clinics for opiate dependence. It's illegal in the United States, but it's legal in Mexico, in Canada and much of the world. It's not a drug of abuse. If there's any drug that doesn't deserve to be in schedule one, it's ibogaine.
- [36:49]
A
Right.
- [36:50]
B
And now it's being Used. And we talked earlier about neuroplasticity. It's being used for traumatic brain injury. So now there's a project that's out of Stanford that took Navy SEALs and others who went to Mexico to an ibogaine clinic. And it did scans before and after, and it showed that there is this neuroplasticity that can restore certain kind of functions and help people get over traumatic brain injury. But it's also really good for just personal growth, for the fear of death, for addiction. There's the Bwiti religion is the one that has really used ibogaine in Gabon, where it's from. So again, it was this combination religion medicine in low doses in Gabon. They talk about it as the hunters use it to give them better night vision and more energy and they can stand still while they wait for a prey to come by. So so much depends on the doses of it. But we've talked about bipartisan support. So what's happened is that a lot of Navy seals who are trained in San Diego, sure. In there and not that far from Mexico and realized that the treatment they were getting from the VA wasn't sufficient for a lot of them. And they would go down to Mexico for an ibogaine experience, and that would be helpful to them in really major ways. And so that has now been several thousands and thousands of special operators from the US Military have gone down to Mexico for ibogaine. And that's what persuaded Rick Perry, who was the former Republican governor of Texas, who was in Trump's first cabinet, to get really involved with ibogaine because he cared about the veterans. And Rick now has done his own ibogaine experience that he's talked about on Joe Rogan with Brian Hubbard. And he managed to get $50 million from the state of Texas to fund ibogaine research. And other states are trying to do the same. So ibogaine is. What do I say? It's more guttural, it's more instinctual. It is like lsd. It's like a classic psychedelic, but it is very embodied. It's very much long lasting. It's the longest lasting. It can be like 24 hours or something. It knocks out your sleep usually. And what Guldoland, who I mentioned before about the neuroplasticity, she's talked about critical periods where psychedelics, your brain is more fluid and flexible. And what she's shown is that with ibogaine, because the ibogaine experience lasts the longest, the critical period lasts several months. So this is during the period of time that you can do the integration work where it's particularly successful because your brain is more fluid. So we originally thought of ibogaine just as a treatment for opiate addiction, but it's got a large number of other uses for ptsd, for depression, for traumatic brain injury. When I did it, Leo Zeph was the person we called the secret chief.
- [39:48]
A
Okay.
- [39:49]
B
He was the one that Sasha Shulgin, who was the chemist who sort of brought back mdma, would develop all these new drugs and then once he thought they had therapeutic potential, he'd give it to Leo. And so Leo was about to retire. This is in middle 70s, he's about to retire. He's done LSD work, he's done ibogaine work, he's done all this. And then he tried mdma and he said, I'm not going to retire. I got to tell more people about this. But 1984 is when I started a nonprofit before MAPS, to try to keep therapeutic use of MDMA legal. In 1985, Leo said, you're starting to battle the FDA and the DEA and all of this. Would you like ibogaine experience to help you work on your own issues so you'll be more effective advocates? And I said, sure. And so when I went to do that, though, what I hadn't really fully understood is that he administered LSD with ibogaine. I took it. I didn't take ibogaine. I took iboga. And the root takes longer to take an effect than when you take the synthesized extract ibogaine. And he didn't want to wait around a lot. So the LSD would get stuff happening while he's waiting. So it was one of the most. It was like 12 hours of vomiting. One of the most difficult experiences of my life. But it was also one of the very most useful because it was about this, I would say, not an addictive to a substance pattern, but it was more like a self critical addiction. You know, this constant, like, you didn't do this, right? You didn't do that.
- [41:19]
A
Right, I see, I see.
- [41:20]
B
And so I felt like if I can just let go and have this experience, I'll be a more effective advocate. But I'm not able to do that because I'm too scared. And then I would get down on myself for being weak and then I would vomit and it would just go over. And I felt like for being Jewish, the imagery I had is that I was being crucified on the cross of self perfectionism. And then I realized this. 12 hours of just vomiting And I couldn't break through. But I then called it transcendence through exhaustion. I just completely exhausted myself. And then I just stopped struggling. And then I realized that there's this connection that perfectionism is, at least in me, was connected to a fear of death. If I'm perfect, then I'm not human, then I'm not going to die. The other part was, oh, I should be this pedestal. And so what I realized during this period, once I stopped the fighting, was that the self critical part of the mind is absolutely essential. That's the key to quality, that's the key to science, constantly. But if I can separate the self criticism from the self hatred, then I would have more access to the self criticism and more access to grow and learn. And then I realized that I could praise myself for starting something new because, okay, I did something new. I've never done it before. I didn't do it perfectly. Now I learned something. So instead of being down on myself for not doing it perfectly, I could be praising myself for starting something new. And so that reoriented in my brain this whole constant self criticism. And I felt that I had more space in my brain after it. I mean, it was 24 hours, more than 24 hours. It was like the second. It wasn't until the second night that I could sleep.
- [43:14]
A
Wow.
- [43:14]
B
It wasn't until the third day that somebody could pick me up and move me. It wasn't until the fourth day where I felt I could safely drive. But ibogaine has incredible potential. And now there is going to be a fair amount of research into it. And both traumatic brain injury and also substance abuse.
- [43:36]
A
Yeah.
- [43:37]
B
Yeah.
- [43:38]
A
Yeah. I mean, that's amazing that that much money got approved for ibokin research. I mean, that's gonna really move the needle.
- [43:44]
B
Yeah. Yeah.
- [43:45]
A
Very excited.
- [43:46]
B
Yeah. I. I will say one cautionary thing, which is I had hoped that the $50 million from Texas would be matched by philanthropy, and therefore it will be done in a public benefit way and turn into a generic. Instead, all the Texas universities, they all have incentives, so it's going to be matched by investor money. So it's going to be private money accelerating drug development, public money accelerating private drug development. So it's not quite the way I'd hoped, but it's still good. It will still make an important psychedelic available to more people.
- [44:23]
A
You taught me so much about the politics of this, and I really applaud you for trying to get this not just in front of people's consciousness and know that it's a treatment that's available to them. But also the way you've gotten yourself involved in the politics of this and the fundraising of this to get this to more people quickly, specifically not making it a drug, more of a public benefit. So it goes straight to generic. And I just really applaud you for being so involved in this. I mean, you've moved the needle so much for psychedelic treatments. I just Wonder. You said 18 years old when you decided that you would dedicate your life to this. I just wonder what happened to get you to do this, because now this is really. You've committed your life to this.
- [45:10]
B
Yeah. Well, now I'm 72, and I'm so lucky that an idea that I had was when I was 18 still makes sense now and has made sense the entire time. But what happened was a confluence of factors. And I would say that I had. So I was born in 1953, and I had very loving parents, a really good support system. But I was raised on stories of the Holocaust. I was like, okay, all these people want to kill me. You know, luckily it didn't happen. But it was just thinking about humanity as a whole. It was just terrifying that there's people that would want to wipe out a whole bunch of people from this one religion or this. But then, as I'm trying to wrestle with that, then what happened was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And now I'm thinking, oh, my God, you know, the Russians and the Americans, we could blow up the whole world. And these Russian horrible people are, you know, hate us, and they want to kill me. My parents sent me to Russia after my junior year of high school. I studied Russian in high school.
- [46:16]
A
Really?
- [46:16]
B
My great grandparents came over from Russia, and my great great grandparents, in 1880, they came from Russia to Chicago. So my parents sent me to Russia in 1970 at the height of the Cold War, with around 60 US high school students to study Russian in Russia. And I remember we were at this resort hotel where we were to learn where our school was. And there was this Russian girl that was like a waitress and stuff. And so she and I went for a walk and we could talk a little bit. But that was this recognition that she didn't hate me, she didn't want to kill me. This was our government's doing this. But it made me worry that this world is on a knife's edge as far as survival. Then after I get back then it's now my own country with Vietnam. And so I had had the good fortune of my parents telling me that they would support me Whatever I wanted to do. And that was, you know, really, really wonderful. And so I realized that I don't have to worry about food and shelter. They'll, they'll take care of that. Basic survival, they'll take care of that. And so I thought, what do I need to do? There's all these people that want to kill me or kill, you know, and that's kind of this psychological. How do you dehumanize others? How do you make it so that you can project evil onto other people or they're no longer human? So it felt like the challenge was more psychological than like studying medicine. My dad was a doctor, my brother was a doctor. But it was this idea that. But then the thing with Vietnam was, what do I do? I think this is wrong. I don't think we should be doing this. And so I studied Gandhi and I studied nonviolent resistance. And so I decided that I would be a non violent resister and I would go to jail. I would serve my country by going to jail for not registering for the draft. So, you know, we get lulled into cooperation in ways we don't even really understand. So the first thing you do as a young boy, you have to send in a postcard to register for the draft. Now at that time I had a passport, a driver's license, a Social Security number, I was paying taxes, I was in high school. I was on every possible list I could be on. So I figured if I don't send in this postcard, they're going to arrest me and put me in jail and that's okay. And that's how I'm going to cost the system money. And my parents were like, okay, but you're never going to be able to be a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that because you're going to be a felon for this. And I'm like, okay, I'll just have to figure out something else to do. Well, first off, I'll just say I overestimated the thoroughness of the government.
- [49:03]
A
They didn't even notice, right? I didn't send this postcard.
- [49:07]
B
So many people are going to Vietnam, getting killed, getting blown up. You just don't send in the postcard. At least for me, they didn't even notice. Later I found Jimmy Carter on his first day in office. Pardoned all the draft resisters. But at age 18, I identified myself as a counterculture, drug using criminal. And when I first started doing lsd, I was thinking, wow, this is balancing, this is bringing me into balance, this is opening me up to my emotions, to spirituality. And it's helping me feel connected. And I thought that is the antidote to dehumanizing others. If I feel we're all connected, how can I. You're me. How can I trash the environment? How can I do that? So my first thought on my first LSD trip was, I can be an underground psychedelic therapist, and you don't need a license for that. So that's all what led into me at 18, out of desperation for the world, the way in which we're killing each other. One of the things that Carl Jung said that I thought was many things he said was really profound. But what he said was that one of the most important spiritual, therapeutic and cultural things we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others. So those parts of us that we can't accept, now it's other people, it's out there instead of in here. It's out there. So I felt that this inner work now is what's critical. And Also during the 60s, what was happening was in America, we were sending people to the moon, and we're getting this more cosmic sense of things. And I felt it's kind of like the Copernican Galileo period of time where they realized that the Earth is not the center of the universe, but that's in conflict with the Church. So Galileo again dies under house arrest, and he has to recant and all of this. And so I felt that this kind of transformation of us going to the moon, of seeing things in a more cosmic way, there's a consciousness shift that humanity needs to make that's similar from. And I think it's realizing that our ego is not the center of the universe, that we are more interconnected in these ways. And if we can make that transition as a spirit species, then we will survive. And if we can't, we will destroy ourselves with the technology. So here we are again in Cambridge. EO Wilson, who was entomologist, world expert on ants at Harvard, he said something the real problem with humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions with medieval institutions, with godlike technologies.
- [51:45]
A
That is so true. Right?
- [51:47]
B
Yeah. So what does that. So ever since, it's felt like how these psychedelic tools that can help us evolve our emotions and our spirituality are what we really need, because we have the technologies to have food for everybody. I mean, particularly with AI and stuff, but we don't have income equality at all. We have income inequality. We have enormous unrest, but we could have enough food and shelter for everybody. I mean, just think of the trillions of dollars that are going into weaponry, all of this stuff. So anyway, when I was 18, that's what all this thought is. Psychedelics. What also attracted me to working on psychedelics was this was now 1972, when I first read Stan Grof's book, Realms of the Human Unconscious, Observations from LSD Research. What attracted me to it was that it had been just shut down by Nixon. So the fact that he wanted to shut it down, it made me think, why is Nixon so scared of this? And maybe there's something good about this. And so I will work on that. And so that was 1972. Now we're 2026.
- [52:52]
A
Here we are. We're still not there yet.
- [52:54]
B
We've still got.
- [52:55]
A
But you've made tremendous progress.
- [52:56]
B
Yeah, we have.
- [52:57]
A
Well, I seriously want to thank you for doing this with me. I know you don't do probably a lot of podcasts. You're a busy man, and this is a huge honor to have you. And I really appreciate you being here. And. And I think our audience is going to learn so much from this. Not just about the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, but also just the history and just about ourselves and our ego and why we need psychedelics and the thoughts around everything.
- [53:23]
B
Yeah, I would encourage them if they want to learn more. Maps.org maps.org Is that correct? And then we are looking for donations, of course. And then it's a little bit early, but I'll say that in May of 2027, we're going to have Psychedelic Science 2027, this big conference. And in 2023, we had 12,400 people. 2025, we had 8,000 people. So this will be in Denver. And so when I invite people to come to the gathering of the psychedelic community from around the world.
- [53:51]
A
Yeah, I know so many people that went and they just said it was the most incredible thing, and I will definitely be there. 2028.
- [53:59]
B
2027.
- [53:59]
A
2027. Okay. I will definitely be there. Thank you so much for doing this.
- [54:03]
B
Terrific, Darsha.
- [55:04]
A
Thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Please remember to subscribe if you like this episode and give us a good review and share a link with your friends. It really helps to support all of our efforts. I also want to remind you that the information shared on this podcast is for educators educational purposes only and is not intended to replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult with your healthcare provider or physician before making any decisions or taking any action based on what you hear today, especially if you have any underlying health conditions or on any medications. Your doctor knows your personal health situation the best, and it's always important to seek their guidance. Sam.