#440: Rick Doblin — The Psychedelic Domino That Tips All Others

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Rick. Doblin, PHD, is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS. This is an organization that I've gotten to know over the last handful of years and have supported. He received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his master's thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana versus the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. Rick was also one of the early students under the legendary Dr. Stanislav Grof. Rick also, more than perhaps anyone else, Has a

thirty thousand foot view of almost all of the players, all of the opportunities, all of the in the world of psychedelics. He knows just about everyone and also has an international Scope.

of understanding. So he is To me at least, endlessly fascinating. to speak with and kind of the tip of the spear in many respects. The website.

is maps.org and related is maps.org. Slash. Capstone. We'll talk more about that. Please listen all the way to the end. There is a big surprise that involves ten million dollars and much more. So Be sure to stick around.

To the very, very end. And without further ado, please enjoy. My conversation with Rick Doblin. Yeah.

Rick, welcome to the show. Tim, it's great to be doing this with you today. We've spent quite a bit of time together. We've traded a lot of emails. We've burned up a lot of minutes via cell phone and I'm thrilled to finally be having A public conversation with you and I thought we could start

with the origin story of maps. How did maps? come to be. Well, let's start with um maps was started in nineteen eighty six. And it was actually the second nonprofit that I started. The first one I started in nineteen eighty four. With uh two women.

Elise Hagar and Debbie Harlow and it was Earth metabolic design lab. It had been affiliated with Buckminster Fuller and a friend of mine had started it and wasn't using it. And so that non profit was started in order to gather support from the psychedelic therapy community. In anticipation of the DEA

moving to criminalize MDMA, which at the time they only knew about ecstasy. And so from Um Early uh eighty four Uh up until eighty six, we're working with Earth Metabolic Design Lab and our main focus was once

In the summer of eighty four, once DEA moved to criminalize MDMA. There's a thirty day public comment period and I went to D C and walked into the DEA offices on day twenty eight or twenty nine. And demanded a DEA administrative law judge hearing.

M DMA should Stay available as a therapeutic drug. And we ended up getting administrative law judge hearings. And we actually ended up winning that hearing. And what that means is that the judge says

A recommendation to the Head of the agency. So it was the DEA administrator and the judge said that MDMA should be schedule three, meaning that it should be able to be Used as a medicine, a prescription medicine for

psychotherapy for a whole range of different things. And the administrator of the DEA rejected that recommendation. So it was very clear. That There was no way that we were gonna be able to use the law

to keep the therapeutic use of MDMA legal, which had been used since the middle seventies to the early eighties about half a million doses had been used. by psychiatrists and psychotherapists and some of those people uh that had experienced it. Decided that

more people should have it that they could make a bunch of money. They turned it into ecstasy. And so once this Effort. That we had attempted with Multiple years, multiple people to try to protect it through the law.

Then I recognized that the only way to really bring MDMA back as a legal substance was through the FDA, was through science, through medicine, through working with people that are suffering and showing that there was value there. And so that's really when MAPS was created, in order to try to be a non profit pharma to move

MDMA and other psychedelics in marijuana through the FTA. Okay. So we we time stamp That several decades ago. you along with uh a number of other friends like Roland Griffiths have been fighting the good fight.

And pushing the ball forward. With Great resistance at points for a very long time. And First I wanna thank you for that, but let me just mention

some of what we're seeing now and then I wanna go back in time to closer to the founding Of maps. Yeah. MDMA. Uh I want to speak to some of the effects of MDMA, then we can talk about what exactly MDMA is and maybe contrast it with other things. Uh that Could also be be of interest. So uh I'm reading here from a recent uh bulletin from Maps. So in Maps completed phase two trials with a hundred and seven participants.

This is uh MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, so uh post traumatic stress disorder. Uh Fifty six percent no longer qualified for PTSD after treatment with MDMA assisted psychotherapy measure two months following treatment. At the twelve month follow up, sixty-eight percent no longer had PTSD. Most subjects received just two to three sessions of MDMA assisted psychotherapy. So I want to underscore that part first. It's not three times a week indefinitely. This is

two to three sessions of MD Mac psychotherapy. And uh then The the next piece I think is is worth Letting people take in. All participants had chronic Treatment resistant PTSD. That means it's failed other interventions. before or other interventions have failed, I should say, and had suffer from PTSD for an average of seventeen point eight years.

So that That's seems to defy almost any conventional psychiatric Explanation. that one would have of

uh mental illness. And possible treatment. But let's go back in time. So that that's just a a preview of things to come, but let's go back in time.

MDMA. I guess it's methylene dioxide methamphetamine. What? is MDMA. Where did it come from? And how did how did it find its way into the therapeutic context?

Okay. Is a synthetic molecule. So it did not come from nature. There are drugs that are in sassafras, safril oil that are used as precursors To make MDMA, but it does not itself

appear in nature. And it was actually invented in nineteen twelve by Merck pharmaceutical company. And they were not looking to create MTMA. They were looking to evade a competitor's patent on a synthetic route to a get to a different drug.

And so they found a new pathway and they patented every drug along the way. MDMA happened to be one of those drugs. And as far as we know from the records of They did nothing with it. For fifteen years, until their patent was about to expire.

And they did some studies in animals and found nothing interesting. This is nineteen twenty seven. The next we know of it, and this will help explain what it is, um was in Ninfi three, where the US Army Chemical Warfare Service We're looking for mind control drugs.

And they tested a series of drugs For toxicity in animals. And M DMA was one of those Drugs. The other

Drugs went. From Methamphetamine on one side to mesculin on the other. So M D M A is basically halfway more or less chemically between

Methamphetamine and masculine. So of all the classic psychedelics, M D MA is the most like Masculine from pay O D. So it's got the Energizing properties of methamphetamine.

But it doesn't make you jittery. You can sit quiet. People have taken half doses and it's facilitated meditation. And it's like The Sort of B.

psychedelic uh properties of bringing to awareness inner material that masculine has, but it doesn't do it in the same kind of ego dissolution way. The ego generally stays intact. And so That research was actually

classified and wasn't released until the early seventies. So people didn't really know about that. And in the sixties there was a drug called M D A. Which is methylene dioxyamphetamine. And it was used a little bit in therapy, and it was also used As um

sort of a uh therapeutic recreational personal growth outside of medical context And When all of those drugs got criminalized in nineteen seventy with the controlled substances act, and even before A chemist named Sasha Shilgan had been looking

his uh at various psychedelics and trying to understand structure activity relationships and He had had his first Psychedelic experience with masculine. And felt that that was extraordinarily profound. So he was tinkering with Um the masculine molecule with

With other drugs he was aware of M D A And Yeah. sort of independently resynthesized it. And the way Sasha and his wife Anne worked is that they would take the drugs that they

created themselves. First Sasha would do it. in very low doses, he would work the doses up. If he thought it was something important, he would share it with Anne and they would do it together. And then if they thought it was important, they had a group of twelve people that they would share it with. And the this would be a team that was very experienced testing out all sorts of new psychedelics.

That Sasha had Invented. And then once they got this whole range of perspectives from this group of twelve people, if they still thought it had value, then The next step was a fellow named Leo Zeph.

And Leo Was the leader of the underground psychedelic psychotherapy movement. Secret Chief. And yeah, so we've published uh the book The Secret Chief, and then after a few years when his family got comfortable, we published The Secret Chief Revealed. So it's okay for us to mention his name.

And so s um Leo was about to retire. He'd been mostly working with LSD and other classic psychedelics. And he was going to retire and when he tried MDMA He felt that it had such incredible potential that he decided not to retire. And so From the middle seventies he started training psychiatrists and psychotherapists and others in the use of this new drug.

And it was really there that its terpuc potential was Both uh I would say discovered, expanded on And it revitalized a lot of the the psychedelic community because now once the psychedelic research was shut down. Um near the end of the sixties, early seventy's.

A lot of the psychedelic researchers went on to other things to study meditation or mindfulness or Um other different things. And some small group still continued to work underground. But they had tools that were

basically illegal. And so now they had this tool M DMA that was legal And it was kept quiet for fear that if it was Something that entered the public consciousness, the DEA would criminalize it. And that's actually what eventually did happen. But

What a lot of people don't realize is that MDMA was a therapy drug before it became A party drug under the name Ecstasy. And it was really in Dallas. At the Stark Club. Where

M DMA really sort of flourish as ecstasy and became quite well known and That's what really attracted the attention of the the DEA. And so then in the summer of eighty four they moved to criminalize it. But what it Does It's remarkable.

In that it's very subtle. Sh it's a subtle shift from normal perception. You could say that the classic psychedelics are Uh anything but suddenly. But this you do know you've taken MDMA, but it's it's um Your th thinking is clarified, your feelings are a little bit clearer.

There's a reduction of activity in the amygdala. There's reduction of fear response. There's a lot of oxytocin release, which is The hormone of love and nursing mothers and Um so people feel

more self compassion, self love, self acceptance, the Self critical part of the mind is kind of quieted. And people become um more able to express their feelings better listeners. It was used quite a lot in couples therapy.

And so it's got an enormous wide range of applications. And it can be used for post traumatic stress disorder, which we chose for strategic reasons, and it's also excellent for PTSD. Uh, but it but it has a whole wide range of other uses. And so I think it will become one of the most um widely used psychedelics once we make it into a medicine.

So let's Let's pause for a second. I wanna highlight a few things that you said. Number one Uh it's been said that two beings are mostly responsible for creating psychedelics, God and Sasha Shulgan. And it and if if people want to learn more about Sasha, he co authored with his wife two books, Pecal, I think it's a chemical love story or something like that as a subtitle, which is Phenethyl A means I've known and loved. It's uh incredible

Encyclopedia Of Drugs slash psychedelics. And if you've ever heard of mescaline. I'm not sure if they'd be referred to as derivatives or analogs, but uh

Two C B, two C E the two C X. class, uh then you you're familiar with Sasha Shulgan's work. And then there's T call, which is tryptomines I've known and loved, which is a similar compendium, different class of drug. uh mescaline would be an example of a phenethylamine, whereas something like DMT. would be uh an example of a a tryptamine for those people who

No those acronyms. But Sasha Shulgren, fascinating. character and prolific. I want to say Certainly hundreds, maybe thousands of different compounds. Um That where they were created. Yeah.

Yeah, and and also I learned a lot from him about his uh political strategy of say staying free. And that one of the things that Sasha did was he shared his information with everybody. Could I pause for one second just to say also he was a a renowned chemist, not just Among Underground. Therapists but also

He was a known quantity to for profit uh sort of contracted chemists working with large companies. I just want to mention that as well. Oh yeah. He he worked for Dow Chemical and it invented um I think it's like a biodegradable insecticide or something. And Um he was rewarded by Down.

And they said, You can have a lab and do whatever you want. You're so creative, just we'll give you a lab and do whatever you want. And he started focusing more and more on psychedelics. And this was as the sixties was going on. And he eventually uh Came to part ways with thou. and went independent and taught chemistry at the U C Berkeley and

Yeah, he he was very Well renowned chemistry. Well, and you were saying his strategy for maintaining freedom Is that what you said? Yeah. Yeah, so

Yeah. Yeah, for sure staying free. He he actually had a DEA Um official that Um Officiated at his wedding with Anne Chilgen.

That's incredible. He would develop these friendships with people and it would be by sharing information. And He had his um Connections.

through uh the whole breadth of society so that there was uh you he would share it Publicly. with uh chemists who would then learn what he did and build on that, or he would share it with the DEA. He he just had this view That If he ends up

learning something, it's his obligation to share it with the world. And that that's the way to stay safe. That that he had um personal trusting relationships with people in the DEA, even though he was fundamentally Against the drug war. But he could

Meet people for who they were. as individuals, not necessarily as representatives or embodying all of the values of the organizations that the That they work. It was just very impressive. At

at uh maintaining some degree of Swiss neutrality, I would say. And I mean that as a compliment from a diplomatic standpoint, because even within the psychedelic communities, you've got the kind of drum and feather crowd who might hate the scientist crowd and then the scientist crowd who doesn't like the neo-shamanic fill in the blank crowd and then the ayahuasca people don't like the LSD people. Like there there is a a surprising amount of caddy bitchiness within the sort of factions uh uh of the psychedelic community that uh are in some cases working together very well, but you've been extremely strategic, use that word before, and uh we'll talk we'll talk more about strategy. I want to

Just define a few things real quickly. You said post traumatic stress disorder. This is something that maybe at some point in the future I will discuss from a personal perspective, but I'm not gonna get into that this Episodes, suffice to say it's something I'm quite familiar with. And for those people who don't know, so PTSD, I'm just gonna read here. PTSD, this is actually from a

uh psychedelic science funders collaborative document that you have you have seen. Uh we won't read the whole thing, but um and we'll certainly talk more about Yeah. So P T S D post traumatic stress disorder is a serious and prevalent psychiatric condition that is the cause of

significant morbidity and immortality. That's a pretty Uh sterile, boring way to put it, but Uh it affects People you might expect, like military veterans, and it could go by a different name, like shell shocked. Right, people who have have difficulty reintegrating and functioning in civilian

society but PTSD is also extremely common. uh in the civilian population. people who have been exposed to war zones people who have been physic or sexually abused. There are many different types of traumatic experiences and it causes subjective distress, can lead to alcohol or drug abuse and parasicidal family relationships. Uh certainly people with severe symptoms may not be able to hold jobs, may

draw their blinds and stay indoors in really bad cases. And it also increases the risk of other conditions like depression, uh and suicide and so on, which is higher in PTSD patients than the general population. So I wanted to just give that as a basic, but let's make that Concrete. And I'm gonna use a

More recent example and then we're gonna go back in time. uh to I think nineteen eighty four with you. But Could you tell us who

John Lubecky is. And why He came Into your So far.

Into your life. For lack of a better way to put it. Yeah. So John is a veteran. From Iraq. And he had

um been blown up. Um was not um So physic hurt, but he was physically hurt some, but he was more psychologically Damaged and when he came back From the war.

He was um So decompensating that he ended up attempting suicide on multiple occasions. Including one time where he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. And luckily

the round didn't work. He called it a squib load. And so he came very close to death, and out of desperation He decided that he would Volunteer for this MDMA study. And he was one of the

very successful cases. Um I didn't know about him for a while because As the sponsor of research I'm not supposed to know Who the subjects are, their privacy is protected. I only know

When they reach out to me or they are willing to reach out to their therapist, they and they Say that they wanna either speak in public about what happened to them, about how much benefit they got or

Or whatever. So it was a couple years after John's Treatment that was successful that Um we got in touch. And What I felt immediately was that his story was so compelling

And He had been completely disabled with PTSD. And after our treatment he was able to go back to work and he was actually the liaison to the veterans for Senator Rand Paul.

For his two thousand and sixteen presidential nomination campaign for the Republican nomination. And so when I Matt John he was doing much better, but he also had political Connections. And so I felt that that's really what we need to

uh broaden the support for what we're doing. To have a veteran who's got connections with a lot of uh Republicans. Who is uh willing to speak about the benefits of of MDMA. And so actually John has met with Vice President Pence. With Um

Steven Miller with uh All sorts of um republicans that he was able to speak with And have in a way the first impressions that they get about

uh MDMA and the potential of MDMA to help Prevent suicides among veterans to help veterans come back and lead more healthy lives. They would hear about it from John. So now he's Working as a consultant for MAPS to try to broaden our political support. And

I I I highly recommend everybody search online for a video. You can find it easily on YouTube. uh from The Economist, which is actually a seven minute, I would call it profile of John uh Lubecky L U B E C K Y and it's uh if you just search MDMA

Treatment PTSD The Economist, the video should pop up and it's it's worth seeing because A few stats to keep in mind. There are twenty plus veterans per day who commit suicide on average in the United States. That's one. Uh and the recovery that we're talking about, at least as it was described in Time magazine is not unusual.

given the cohort, right? What I mean by that is on I guess it was May first of two thousand sixteen, perhaps. You could probably correct me, but uh the the uh Lancet Psychiatry published a paper about the study that that John was involved with and Roughly I wanna say two thirds of the twenty six veterans, firefighters, and police officers treated

with MDMA assistant psychotherapy no longer qualified for the diagnosis of PTSD one month after their second MDMA session. I just wanna again just underscore How odd that is, how unusual that That ratio of number of doses to uh disappearance of symptoms is in the world

Of psychiatry. And that that's where I want to go next. So part of what fascinates me about MDMA Is as you said How uh in some respects how manageable it is compared to classic psychedelics like L S D or

Yeah. Silosope mushrooms, otherwise known as magic mushrooms. And In that respect, it is it is much easier to adapt to a therapeutic context. People can speak intelligibly. Uh and I find MDMA

deeply fascinating for many reasons. One is that you see Cross species. Affects. So y one word that is often used To

refer to uh or I should say uh a term that is used to describe MDMA and some other compounds is empathogen, right? Or in tactogen. Let's say empathogen. So a Compound that creates empathy. And You s effect.

In For instance, octopi. Who exhibit pro social behavior. With this. the sort of down regulation of fear response and and uh that's

Interesting because their nervous system is completely different than say uh many mammals that have otherwise been studied. But in humans, as you mentioned earlier. You have the turning down a volume on the amygdala and what appears to please correct me if I'm wrong, but based on my very novice understanding what appears to happen in these therapeutic sessions. And people can see video of some of these sessions in a

film called Trip of Compassion, which I I actually Released. I mean I I volunteered to help get it released in the United States. Uh You just go to Tim.blog forward slash trip and you can find it. I don't make a penny from it, but it's it shows footage of of sessions with people who have experienced PTSD.

And What strikes me Is that these people are able to revisit traumatic experiences. Which would otherwise be

excruciating or impossible to revisit without re traumatizing themselves. But with fear. somewhat removed or toned downed, they can sort of uh metabolize it and make sense of it. As an observer of their own experience. I and I would just love to hear you comment on that and also like how how do you explain how two sessions

with something can have enduring effects over months or Years after Other interventions have failed. for an average of seventeen years. That just doesn't make any sense to most people who Take psychiatric medications.

Yeah, or to a lot of the people at the VA who are therapists who've had PTSD patients for thirty years. Right. Yeah. Are still st struggling with PTST. So let me just say that the Lancet article was uh published May one, two thousand and eighteen. Eighteen. There we go. And

And and so we paid for having it to be free to download. So if anybody goes to Lancet dot com slash psychiatry and just study MDMA PTSD, you can get to the article. And you can download it for free. Um, I think the Reasons why it's something that

Can make a Permanent. Change in people. that there's two factors. The first factor is the actual experience while they're under the influence of

the substance while they're doing psychotherapy. The second factor is the integration work and the work that that's what's really necessary for making it permanent. But so you have like a breakthrough during the session. And then you work afterwards in non drug psychotherapy to integrate it. But what we find is that You are actually rewiring your brain. So the same neuroscientist Gold Dolan, who did this study with octopuses.

And showed that octopuses who are a social Unless it's mating season, which is almost which is very rare, but under the influence of MDMA they'll be more pro social. It's it's a remarkable finding. And so it goes So deep in our evolutionary history. We separated from octopuses are like five hundred and fifty million years ago.

Um, but Gull also did studies in mice. that were published in Nature, which is considered to be, if not the one of the top scientific journals in the world. And this Study. Showed that Mice under the influence of MDMA release

a hormone, oxytocin, which is this hormone, as I mentioned, of love and nursing mothers, but the oxytocin Actually New neural connections. In pro social areas of the brain. And there's also a phenomena called fear extinction and memory reconsolidation.

And so the thought about memory is that Many people used to think about it as you take a We we've got sort of a hardwired memory and you remember it and then Um you go on to something else. But actually when you remember something, you

Have to reconsolidate the memory. So that that's how memories change over time. And so what we're able to do though with MDMA is that there's a memory for the incident, episodic memory. And there's an emotional memory that's attached To that.

Incident memory, but stored in different parts of the brain. And that they that comes together. And so when you're feeling safe And you can Bring up painful memories. And you are not reacting in your normal way of of fear and re and a sense of being overwhelmed and it's it's too much.

When you're able to process the feelings, and I'd say a lot of the people in our studies have said, um, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. And and you'll Yes, you know, you'll see that by looking at the trip of compassion. video too. Some of the sessions are very difficult. People are shaking. They're crying. They're They're letting out stuff that's been Stored within for a very long time.

But When they reconsolidate the memory. They are swapping out the emotion that was attached when the trauma happened of fear of terror. And then they're swapping it out with a sense of

It's in the past. It's something that you have approached peacefully. You you're you're feeling safe when you're thinking about it. You can recognize it's not still happening. So the next time that you remember the incident You remember the incident with a different emotional tone.

And that that that can be encoded in new neural pathways in your brain. And what we find is that Under the influence of MDMA People's memory for the trauma is increased. And you might think that that's a bad thing. Now they can recall A lot more details about the trauma and

whole sections. We had a firefighter that was in our study and he and uh a bunch of his uh fellows were in a fire that the roof cave did and killed about eight or ten people. He survived. And under the influence of MDMA, he remembered whole story segments of what happened that he had

He thought he had the the memory stitched together in the way it happened. But under the influence of MDMA, he remembered more of it. And so when you have these memories that are attached to fear when they're unconscious and suppressed. They're influencing you. The world is not a safe place. You've got to be suspicious of this or that. This could always happen again. So the fact that MDMA permits memory to come to the surface.

Where it can then be processed with this fear extinction and memory consolidation and then It permits new neural pathways. So that you can actually Change the way you react in one session. Now this is also true for psilocybin. Silocybin has been shown to Increase new neural connections as well. Yep.

And other psychedelics too. So there's um a kind of a rewiring that helps explain how you can have a fundamental change after just one session. But There still needs to be the reinforcement of that. And that's where the psychotherapy and the integration process comes in.

You could say that a lot of people that take MDMA at Raves uh and a and and take ecstasy at at raves and parties, they can also have some pretty powerful experiences But if they don't do the integration work afterwards Then a lot of times the things will fade. And so that's why what we talk about our treatment is not really MDMA.

It's psychotherapy facilitated by MDMA. Right. Which is Also why you don't have to Every smoker who uses psilocybin quitting nicotine, but if you have the structure and format like uh Dr. Matt Johnson at Hopkins did looking at

uh nicotine addiction and recruiting subjects explicitly who want to quit, you have these just never before seen results with Abstinence six months later. Uh but it it's it's the Therapeutic. Vessel.

and vehicle that is that is so important. I'll I'll mention a few things related to that. Uh, number one, uh Michael and Annie Mithofer are simply fantastic to e exceptional therapists who've helped a lot with the maps protocol for therapy. One of the tools in the toolkit that we don't have to get into right now, but that I I do find useful and can be useful to people even outside of

The psychedelic context. is IFS. I think that's internal family systems. Yeah. And parts work, I think is r is surprisingly profound and powerful when when used well. Let's talk about another patient. And that is

Uh From nineteen eighty four. I promised we would get to nineteen eighty four. And uh just just as a side note also because you mentioned it, but we didn't get into it, and I know we're bouncing all over the place. Well actually first MDMA is, and this is true with Other psychedelics.

But it produces a hypernesia. The opposite of amnesia, this This supercharged memory that is Quite. Incredible. I mean you will remember the texture of

the couch, the exact pattern and fabric and color. three years old, that could come up. Something like that. Or words in a language you studied for one semester. twenty five years ago. Uh it's it's it brings up a lot of questions about the brain and the mind. Um, and you mentioned that it can produce these

s not just functional changes in the brain, but structural beneficial changes. Yeah. Which is Astonishing on some level to think about. And then The the other

Acronym that I just want to take a second to describe for people because uh I I think more people listening to this will have heard of MDMA than MDA. Uh Yeah. What are just in in very brief terms, what are the biggest differences between MDA and MDMA? I tend to think of MDA as somewhere between M D M A and L S D and having a much longer duration of effect, but how would you

in uh in brief. Contrast MDA versus MDMA. Pretty much the way you just did. I I think it is more in this kind of um L S D, M D M A Combination, meaning that There is more of uh ego dissolution. It's still got the body warmth, it's still got the reduction of fear.

So it's it's um different than LSD or psilocybin. Um You can still Um converse During most portions of it, but the peak is more nonverbal.

In different ways. It's more um instinctual. And it was used in therapy as well. And one interesting point was that once MDMA became illegal you know, we could have thought that in the middle seventies to early eighties when the use of M DMA was so widespread in therapy settings that That was because it was legal. And the other drugs were not, and so once M D M A was illegal, then

The question would be, will these underground therapists, now that all the tools are illegal, will they go back to MDA? Which was more popular before MDMA, and m to most parts they have not. Um, but it does have a lot of therapeutic potential. It it is a pretty um incredible drug. And It just is a little bit more

What we did say psychedelic than MDMA. And I think that's why um The gentleness of MD May, the profoundness and the way that it's such a subtle shift makes it easier to integrate in the long run. Yeah, not not as squirrely. Yeah. Yeah, and the MDA has more effect on the heart.

The military when they were using it the CIA mind control, they actually killed somebody with MDA. By giving uh too high of a dose and having heart problems. So it's got a little bit more of that uh activation of the the blood pressure. Got it. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and then we're right back to the show.

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Uh I believe this is the first the first ever therapy session that you did with a PTSD patient. Can you tell this story, please? Yeah, um let me say that it was the first ever therapy session that I ever did With anybody. Important. I I I would sit with people uh so so since nineteen seventy two when I was eighteen and when I decided to

Um go through psychedelic therapy myself, become a psychedelic therapist, try to bring back psychedelic research, I would um sit for my friends. and uh various other people, but these would be people looking for personal growth. And they were more or less healthy people. And of course, all of us who are more or less healthy have a lot of problems. A lot of challenges. Right.

And everything and everything else. So so I would deal with difficult cases, but The first time I ever dealt with a patient. was um in nineteen eighty four and so as part of my training To become a therapist I had studied

with Stan Groff. Um and Christina it asked in the summer of uh September Uh, eighty two is when I first studied at Eslin with them for a month long workshop. That's where I learned about MDMA. And then I went back in eighty four for a month long workshop that they had called the Spiritual Emergence Network. And the basis of that was that

There's a lot of people that are struggling with what their purpose in life is, what's their meaning, what are they really care about how do they approach uh death and and various and that sometimes people have these breakdowns. And they can be catalyzed by psychedelics, they could be

Just a normal breakdown and that All too often these are breakdowns that could lead to breakthroughs. That these are dysfunctional patterns and that they They need something more um healthy, but they break down and often that gets pathologized and they get

Medicated and hospitalized and tranquilized and And so the theory of this um spiritual emergence network is that If we don't try to suppress the symptoms. But help people work through their issues.

That they will end up uh potentially uh finding a new balance and be more healthy. So I had gone through a month long training on how to work with people. In these uh spiritual emergencies. And I had just come back home to Sarasota to Florida to New College where I was a student. And

I was only home for four or five days and then a friend of mine Um, called me up and he said that he and his girlfriend had done M DMA together and under the influence of M D M A she had remembered being raped and almost killed. And that this was a terrifying memory for her. She had previously been in and out of mental institutions as a result of this and other traumas.

that she experienced and she was so bothered that she might hurt herself as painful memories had come to the surface That She checked herself into a mental institution and she stayed there for about six days. And they gave her the same old drugs

that she had gotten before and discharged her and she felt hopeless that these drugs had not helped her before There was nothing. That she knew of and she was even more uh deciding to try to kill herself. And so my friend called me and he said um

Can you help her? And I had sold them the MDMA. So I felt that in some ways. I was responsible, but I also felt like I have just got this training. in this uh spiritual emergence work

But I'm not qualified to work with somebody that's At the at life's at the the razor's edge of death and life. It's so much worried about committing suicide. And so I felt that Um, this was one of the most important turning points in my entire life. And and I felt like if I were to say No to her, she didn't really have any other options. She tried the best that

Western medicine could give her. She'd been hospitalized, she'd been medicated, none of that work. And so I agreed at least to talk to her. And so during our conversation I asked her that if she would just promise not to commit suicide. When we were working together I would take uh a chance, I would gather some women friends and we would create a support system for her and we would try to work with her.

Because what I knew about MDMA And I think this is important for people to realise is that It brings things to the surface, but if you're not prepared for that. You can end up worse off. A lot. And that's where the therapy comes in. It's not just giving the pill, it's the context, it's how you react.

to this internal material as it's coming up. And so Marcello was the woman and she agreed to um not commit suicide while we were working together and that gave me the courage to work with her. And so she came down to

Um, Sarasota and and moved into my house for about a month. And we did it first off, we did an MDMA experience and it was So hard. It was so painful. It it was like a tour of all the traumas That she had in her life. I think that's also a clue for people is that

Most of us When we experience trauma will be able to be resilient and can get over it. And it's not always the case, but those people that end up with PTSD are often

Those that have had a series of traumas, sometimes going back to childhood. Um And so this was the case for Marcella. So the first session was MDMA and it was a series of these Um Traumas that she'd experienced

throughout her life and I felt like we made a lot of progress, but it didn't feel to either of us Like the problem had been solved. um a new way to move forward. And so the next thing I thought was let's try LSD.

And so the next session began with LSD. This was about um uh ten days after the first session. So we we'd had um first session, we'd had some integration time. And now we did an L S D session. And during the What what I knew also about LSD is that it was the first drug used in the treatment of PTSD.

And it was the first psychedelic drug and used in the treatment of PTSD. And it was used by a doctor Bastians. Who was a Dutch psychiatrist, and after World War Two He started using LSD for what he called concentration camp syndrome. And he worked with a lot of Um

Holocaust survivors, but he also worked with a lot of Dutch resistance fighters who were in the camps and They later after the war became part of the Dutch government and they protected him. And Bastians was the last person in the world That still had legal permission to give LSD to people. Up until the late seventies, early eighties. So I knew that L S D had been used Or

Treatment of PTSD. But that it had been it quite difficult. And so under the influence of L S D, Marcella Got increasingly fearful. That MDMA can reduce the amic activity in the amygdala. LSD doesn't do that.

So The fear came and she had these images of Being on a foreign planet Under a double sun and baking to death. And it was just too terrifying. She couldn't make any progress at all.

And was stuck. And so I thought well maybe if we administer half a dose of MDMA That would decreased the fear enough so that she could continue to Process uh what was happening, what was coming up to her in her memories. And so that was the breakthrough was this half a dose of MDMA. And after that

By half a dose you're talking about like seventy five milligrams, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, sixty, seventy milligrams. Yeah, that that it just cut the fear to the point where she could s now finally process things. And so the symbolic thing that she had about being in a foreign planet With the double sons and baking them to the death The the symbolism was such that um

It was related to something in her life. So under the influence of MD May, it condensed to being On Earth with a single sun after she had been Raped and beaten and was thrown outside. Um, under the sun and left alone.

So it turned into something in her life. And then what she started sharing was That this had been a date rape situation and that This person had told her that if she ever told anybody about what actually happened or mentioned his name that he would kill her.

And so this had been um About ten years before. That We she and I met. But

this kind of fear that if you ever tell anybody about he'd kill her, that was like a poison pill in her brain that she was a prisoner of this. And so being able to tell the story Broke the spell. And then I think what I'm gonna do. The next step was is that um

When she explained that it was day rape, I said, Well w what did you like about this guy? And she immediately threw up. Was this just this? Instantaneous reaction of throwing up. And then she started explaining that he had liked animals.

And that What she had one of the reasons why she was thinking of committing suicide was that She could never trust herself. To find love, to find companionship, because her previous instincts with this guy had been so wrong. And so going back and being able to look at

Where she made this mistake that that Just because somebody likes animals doesn't mean that you can trust them. She started to regain her ability To um trust herself. about how to move forward in Assessing threats, assessing how people are gonna act to her.

And she was able to let out all of the About um what had happened to her. And so that was the transition for her.

Yeah. We did not need to do a third session. That was the one that really changed things for her. And so that was nineteen eighty four. And so Over time. As I was watching how she was doing, we kept in touch, she kept getting better and better and better.

I think that's another really important thing to say is that she had had these overwhelming feelings of fear with these memories. But under the influence of MDMA, the first session and the L S D M DMA combination The second session She was able to learn that if you can bring these feelings to the surface and express them.

That they don't need to overwhelm you, that you can process things. that you don't have to launch into these fear-based reactions. And so what what you started out, Tim, by saying early on is that people do better at the twelve month That even without more MDMA and without more therapy, that they've learned a process about how they handle Their medications.

Uh they're they're they're problems, I mean, and their emotions. And so That's the same thing that happened for Marcella, and so Throughout the eighties and into the nineties when The

whole concern about uh The Rave movement was growing and the NIDA funded research the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded researchers claiming That M D May was neurotoxic and would reduce long term functional consequences after a single dose. I kept watching Marcella and I kept seeing her get better and better and better.

And she later then decided that she wanted to become a therapist. She was an artist. She decided that she wanted to become a therapist to help others. And she went back to school. To become a therapist. And now she is one of our lead therapists, and she and her husband, Bruce.

are one of the lead trainers of other therapists. And that was an experience that really motivated me to think about MDMA for PTSD as being an ideal combination. And and If we

Sort of zoom out from that one. that story of one person, I can also say that I personally know at least a dozen people who have had their emotional lives and relationships with their loved ones resurrected because of uh M DMA and and these

these uh d different compounds. Uh to the extent that just as one example, uh a a friend of mine Uh had his wife say You're once again the person I married. Right. He had been so withdrawn and shut down and compartmentalized and

Self isolated that he He ceased to resemble the person. She married and uh Not to say this happens all the time, but it happens more often than one might think. Within a very short period of time, like you said, after two or three Sessions with competent

Guidance. ended up with with that type of outcome. And I'd I'd like to Hear what you think of of this way of describing the the session because I the importance of the therapy is paramount. And the way I heard it put to me by someone uh who shall remain nameless, but very hypercredible, people would recognize this the scientist, but said what psychedelics do is they they create a window of plasticity. And

Mm-hmm. It's up to the person and their environment and their support to then mold to that plasticity. Right. So you create this window of plasticity where you can grow new uh you can experience a neurogenesis, right? The g the generation of new connections within the brain and so on and so forth, but to what end, right? For what Is it molded and

You can Hun your direction with the help of therapists who then provide you also with a toolkit that continues to be useful after That

Molding. integration experience. Right. Um at least that that's been my impression. So it's it's not a foregone conclusion that you take a pill and all your problems are solved, but with the right Shaping.

And guidance. uh the outcomes can be really just Just incredible. And When I think about Marcella, or I think about you, I think about

People like Roland who have been involved for so long and for so long with so little Extrinsic reward, if that makes sense. Right. I mean you think you think about it scientifically, for decades it was Considered Just career suicide at best. Yeah. And then and then it w then it was a dead end. It's like all right, it's not career suicide, but you're going nowhere. And then it was minimally interesting. And now

Uh Yeah, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, all these major media outlets. Major universities are taking notice, uh funding is being raised. But during those hard times. Uh, I'd love to hear what drove you.

And uh I I know there's one example that you haven't spoken about in as public a forum as this, but It's perhaps more recent, but I think it Kinda speaks to this. Which is the uh The suicide letter.

That Uh yeah. That perhaps you could describe for people. Yeah. Um let me say um

First off that um Just to further illustrate this story about it's not just a drug, and and then we'll get to that, which is that um One week about um twenty years ago, um Maps got contacted by two women

With almost identical stories. They had taken MDMA at Raves and had remembered being raped in prior sexual assault. But one of them told the story that she was with friends who just wanted to party And that she knew that they didn't want to hear about this heavier thing that was coming to the surface and so she stuffed her feelings down And she had contacted us months later feeling way worse.

And the other woman who contacted us just days away said that she was at a rave, took MDMA, the same thing happened, but she was with a girlfriend and they went off into the corner and talked about what happened to her. And they were able to process it. And then she was able to go back to the party and now she felt better After months later. So

It's not the substance itself, it's how you respond to the material. Now what drove me to do this in the first place was Um a certain kind of desperation, I would say, about um about the world. So when I was a very young boy born in fifty three, uh from a Jewish family I was raised with stories of the Holocaust. I had um distant relatives killed, I have a lot of Israeli relatives.

And just the thought that There could be this uh dehumanization. And genocide and Just Irrational thinking was terrifying to me. And and that led me more and more to think about

No, psychological factors. And so I just felt that There was this imbalance that we as a species have and that I as an individual have. Where we are overdeveloped in our minds and underdeveloped in our emotions and spirituality. And so this was now about um Fifteen years ago

And I had been contacted by this fellow who was quite Um troubled. And he wanted to be uh refer to an underground psychedelic therapist. And I wasn't ready to do that. And so he happened to live not far from where my therapist lived.

Uh down in Florida. And so I referred him to my therapist. And he worked with my therapist for a couple of months. Um, at this point I was in Boston. I didn't live down there. But um He went to to my therapist for a couple of months and then he called me up and he said

Um, it's just not doing what I need to do. I would like you to uh Go ahead and refer me to an underground therapist. And so we we talked about it some more. And he indicated that he had had um a tendency towards epileptic seizures.

And it's conceivable, it's rare, but it's possible that psychedelics can catalyze a seizure. And I felt like The kind of Underground settings are are just not appropriate for somebody that could have a medical crisis.

And so I I I said to him that I just Could not in good conscience refer him to an underground therapist. And and he said, All right, he he felt Kind of sad and and Seem to accept it and and

And that was the end of our conversation. And I didn't hear anything for about three more months. And then I got a call from The police in his hometown. And they said, Do you know this guy?

And I was like Frightened, I wasn't sure what they were Talking about. And I said, Yeah, I do know him. And and he did contact me and I referred him to my therapist. And then he wanted further therapy. I wasn't able to help him with that. And they said, Well, he's committed suicide

And he's left you a suicide note. And we wonder, um, would you like to see it? And I was like taken aback. But I said, Yeah, if he's written a note for me, I I should I should wa I should read it. No matter and I thought it was gonna be

You could have helped me, but you didn't. I'm really mad at you. Why didn't you do this? Um And when I got the note The first thing I noticed was that He hadn't committed suicide a few days before then.

He'd committed suicide the very next morning after our phone conversation. After I told him I couldn't refer him to an underground therapist. And that somehow it had taken three months for the police to to get around to calling me. So that was Shocking once I just saw the date on his letter that that it was

connected to me giving him no more hope that he decided that he would kill himself. And the the note was the opposite of what I thought it would be. It wasn't condemning me, it wasn't angry It was this kind of sad sentimental but Gracious note. And he said, I don't blame you. For not referring to the me to help. I I blame the system. I blame the drug war. I I

I I feel that I might have been one more person who would still be alive. If this therapy was legal. And you can tell people about this note. If you want to do so.

And that I just hope that my experience will motivate others to try to seek treatment and and motivate you to keep trying because There's a lot more people that Need help like this. It it was a beautiful note. It it it it was just so um

Tender. In a way. And then just to think that he wrote that and then Right then after that killed himself. And so that's always been in the back of my mind that that there are people out there People that we know

that need help. You you talked about twenty veterans committing suicide a day. Th there's roughly fifty thousand people that commit suicide every year in America. And We need to help them that there and there's way more whose lives are so warped by PTSD or depression or anxiety or fear. That they they need our help. You've put in so much time.

And We are in a very Exciting. Period right now. in terms of the

place of momentum for what you've been working on for so many decades. And I'd like to bridge to that. Because the The Suicide letter you mentioned speaks to the desperation. It also speaks to what types of therapies could be available to people, even if they have

Certain medical complications like epilepsy with proper supervision if Compounds were reclassified, meaning they were taken from Schedule one, the most restrictive drug class, no known medical

application, high potential for abuse, uh there may be other criteria, but Things were thrown into there somewhat willy nilly. During the Nixon administration. And Uh it's

It's extraordinarily challenging to get them out. But uh I wanna just speak to what's happening right now. And uh also perhaps tell an anecdote first, and that anecdote is I've come to know. We're recording this during uh

Uh The Covid nineteen crisis. It's far from over. Uh this is gonna be, I think, a very long Difficult. period for millions of people and I've become friends with

ICU docs. So senior attending physicians in New York City and elsewhere. And uh one of them who's completely psychedelically naive, he's never used any of these compounds. Uh reached out to me because he does not know how to process what he has seen and what he's had to do.

He's seen so much death. He's had to make decisions about who gets ventilators and who don't. He's had to talk to, say, someone who is Older with a lot of uh a lot of comorbidities who's probably not gonna make it even if they intubate them and talk to the family about why they're not going to get a a ventilator. I mean th things like that.

And He doesn't know what to do. Right. And Should I say this? It's just because I think this is

Trauma and the difficulty in resolving trauma. and the inefficacy of treatments for say PTSD. Is so profound. Uh And it's also very timely, right? I I feel like right now talking to these first responders, talking to many other people who've been affected, who have loved ones who have died.

uh who are simply suffering from acute anxiety. Uh and this is bringing a lot to the surface that I'm kinda watching the Tide go out and that there's it's a tsunami on the way of very high volumes of PTSD.

And I also have personal experience that I may discuss another time. So for all of these reasons, right, looking at the data, first of all being driven by that and seeing Results that represent an order of magnitude. uh jump from anything that is close to being in second place. seeing video of the transformations that can take place and I recommend everybody

watch Trip of Compassion if you can. It's it's very intense, but the payoff is worth it. U meaning maps. And uh PSF C, so the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative have launched a thirty million dollar Capstone Fund. So this is a campaign to get MDMA assisted psychotherapy across the finish line.

and make MDMA a medicine. And After decades and decades of working on this you have a number of excellent people involved with maps on the on the executive team. You have Advisors.

uh now who have a lot of experience in uh pharma, biotech, drug development. And Uh I'm at a point. I've been waiting for this point. You might not know this, but I I've contributed to maps over the years in smaller ways, and I've been waiting for this precise window. So you're raising thirty million to get it to the finish line. You've already raised Internally.

From people you know around ten million. Yes, ten million. And over the last week or so And it's been an incredible week. A lot of things have come together beautiful. I've worked with Joe Green, who's president of PSFC. That's the psychedelic science funders collaborative. to get together a ten million dollar matching grant.

Originally, as you and I know we were going to record this podcast and we didn't have any matching grant. Then I thought, let's put together five, I'll be part of that five, and then we ended up at ten and the intention was to announce it As we're doing On the podcast. And I'll I'll explain

what that means and more accurately, it's a challenge grant. So you've got me, I'm putting in a million, you've got Peter Rahal, who's founder of RX Bar. James Bailey, founder of Bale Capital, Blake Mykowski, founder of Tom's all seven figure commitments. Then you have Steven Alexander. Cohen. of the Steven and Alexandra Cohen foundation coming in.

In a big way with five million. And you have other people who are also committing capital. And What makes this so exciting is that You've raised ten of the thirty. Now we're committing to the middle ten.

Which is the hardest to raise, right? That middle ten is often the most difficult to raise. in a challenge grant, which means that if Other people are able to donate. Ten million.

If Maps is able to raise an additional ten million, it activates our ten million and boom. We're at the finish line, which is hard to believe. It's quite amazing that all this came together. Uh but Well, I'm so glad the microphones didn't work the first time and gave you something to do in this Uh period of delay.

Ha ha Yeah, everything if everything is happening for you and not to you, what does it look like? And uh this has been one of the stranger, more surreal, and exciting things that has ever happened from a tech delay. And This is extremely close to me and represents such an opportunity. And just to to clarify again. Ten million is raised of the thirty.

uh I and the group I mentioned are committing to a ten million dollar challenge grant, which means if another ten is raised to activate that boom. We're at the finish line. This is so close and to me represents such an opportunity. And I was speaking with a a a doctor and a scientist who's who's been advising uh you guys and he said you know there are some risks, but the asymmetric risk reward is is just incredible for this, meaning

But once done. meaning if if you have MDMA reclassified, you know, the ice is broken for a dozen other things for the entire field, for the entire industry, right? So if you're looking for A spearhead opportunity. that is time bound, right? That means there is time sensitivity to this. Because you're executing phase three trials. This is an immediate

Opportunity. Uh that if you really want to sort of bend the arc Of History and if you're interested.

in any of these other compounds like psilocybin, as I am, I've committed a lot of resources and time to supporting research at places like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College in London. You have to be interested in the outcome of this phase three trial with MDMA. Uh it is it's it's going to be the precedent setter. Uh so I'm I I was not planning

On making another large commitment like this. Thank you. Doing things that you didn't plan, but it is the moment, as you're right. It is the moment. And of course, huge thanks to Joe. I don't want to skip over that. And we're looking for people who can really Help donate on any level. You can go to maps.org.

to donate at any level, one dollar, ten dollars a month, twenty dollars a month, but We're Especially looking for people who can make larger Donations and by larger donations. I would say

six figure or seven figure commitments over a two year period. So my million dollar commitment will be uh is planned for five hundred thousand in uh late twenty twenty. So let's say around October, and then the remaining five hundred thousand Yeah uh the end of twenty twenty one, let's just say October again. So you get to split it across Uh

multiple years, it's tax deductible. And so if you might be able to contribute a hundred thousand dollars or more. Over multiple years. Then You have Two ways that you can learn more.

One is going to maps.org. Forward slash capstone. That's number one. Maps dot org forward slash capstone the second And you can do both, of course, is emailing capstone at maps.org to set up a meeting with Rick. or a member of his development team to learn more about the groundbreaking work that they're doing. And even if you can contribute, say

a dollar, ten dollars, a hundred dollars, you can go to maps.org and set up Some type of uh ideally recurring donation. That can that can also add you to the chorus uh in support of this. to unlock the healing power of of EVMA, which has already really been demonstrated and needs to be further demonstrated through these phase three trials. Uh and I'll I'll just say uh one more thing.

Um So there there are a couple of benefits actually, so it's not gonna be one more thing. It'll be a few more things. Th there there are There are benefits to doing this if you contribute in a big way. So let's just say if you're if you're able to contribute A million or more. uh then uh you can participate in

the community known as PSF C. Uh of which Joe Green is is the president. Graham Boyd also does great work. So the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, PSFC. Includes all sorts of members. Matt Mollenweg of Automatic, Genevieve and Steve Jervison.

Incredible entrepreneurs and investors. Austin Hearst Jeff Walker, George Sarlo. And uh there are All sorts of uh different sort of community threads.

Yeah, PSF C helps with due diligence and bringing in Uh advisory uh capacity specialists and so on to assess different opportunities in the psychedelic space. There have been uh group zoom.

chats with people like Michael Pollan, I believe uh Jared Diamond if I'm not Mistaken. And and others so there there are uh there are a lot of fun things that are done with this smaller group. And uh I'll I'll link to more on PSFC.

Uh But Uh suffice to say. This is a this is an incredible opportunity. Um

this represents I mean it represents a lot of money to me. That's not uh a small amount. Uh one of my largest contributions to anything ever. And Uh the reason that I'm doing this because I I've uh raising money is a hard business, Rick. I mean you you've done it for such a long time. Fundraising is is tough. And What I've noticed is that Some people seem to think they can take their marbles with them.

And Uh w and you can't take your marbles with you, meaning the money you've accumulated. So I think it's really worthwhile to ask if you do have some flexibility in finances or some some savings that could be applied to something you care about. Yeah, if you know someone affected by trauma, if you know someone whose lives have been devastated by

addiction which was used to numb or avoid. feelings that are the result of trauma. Uh And you're looking for a very high Leverage.

Asymmetric payoff. Possibility. this is an excellent place to put money. And I do think that A dollar now is worth ten dollars five years from now. This is a Time dependent.

Opportunity is the way that I'm that I'm looking at it. And Uh you know, if not now. If not with this, if you've If you find it of interest or if you These compounds have had a a huge impact in your life.

Where are you gonna put the money? Right. Like where else? And you should have a good answer to that before it's an immediate no to this. That's my perspective, right? If you're just holding on to it in case. I just don't view that as a satisfactory answer. And maybe I'm just maybe I'm just maybe maybe I'm just all fired up, but uh I mean I've committed Something like five percent of my total. net worth over my my entire life, right? Like everything I've done to

psychedelic science, including this capstone fund with maps. It's it's It's had such a tremendous impact in my life. It's completely Changed my life. For the better. I don't know if I would be here without some of these compounds, quite frankly. And

Uh I know I'm not alone in feeling that way. So To put the numbers in context, I also want to say that over the history of maps Over thirty four years we've raised um over eighty million dollars. And so now we're talking about another thirty million. And that will get us approval.

If the research goes well. As we think it will. In the United States Through the FTA in Israel, through the Israeli Ministry of Health, and also in Canada. through Health Canada because we have fifteen phase three sites Two in Israel, two in Canada, and eleven in the United States.

So Yeah, other number to put in context here is the number that it normally takes pharma to develop drugs into medicines. And it's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The pharma industry will tell you that it's well over a billion dollars. In fact, the latest number is roughly two billion dollars to make a drug into a medicine. But

What they do is they amortize all their failures into the few successes. Around half of the money almost is opportunity cost on their money. Then they have to do a long period of um safety studies, which fortunately for us, because MDMA is such a ecstasy, such a demonized drug. There's been hundreds and thous there's if you go to Medline, there's over five thousand papers on MDMA or ecstasy.

at a cost of somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred fifty million dollars to produce all this data that we've been able to um review and assess and then submit to FDA. So that what we're gonna end up spending for phase three is somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty five million or so. With thirty five million already raised and then another thirty million coming from capstone.

And it's the the median is is is around um or the low end is somewhere like three hundred fifty million for pharma to make a drug into a medicine. So the things that contribute to us being able to do it so efficiently are first off We have a bunch of uh highly mission driven people. We have eighty people now working for maps.

Um, we don't work at pharma salaries. We a lot of'em are what we call refugees from pharma from Novartis and other pharma companies that are really passionate about psychedelics. So we're mission driven uh we're not returning money to um investors, it's all about uh donations and then once MDMA becomes a medicine it will be

Um, sold in our MAPS public benefit corporation where we maximize public benefit over Um profit and whatever profits there are get reinvested in the mission of maps for further research. So it's extremely efficient. The other thing to say is that there's only two drugs that have been designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD by the FDA. One of them is MDMA or

M DMA assisted psychotherapy. The other Was a drug called Tan Maya. Yeah. Tonics pharmaceutical companies. It was a repurposed old drug from over thirty years ago that was a sleeping pill. And the thought was that maybe they could make it

to help people sleep through the night who have PTSD and not have nightmares and get better rest and And so we did our interim analysis in March. Tan Myers Interim analysis was done in February.

And they were f they failed. They were told that the study was not gonna get significant results. It failed for for utility. And they had already spent well over a hundred million dollars on this study. And that's all lost. And we've got lots of stories like John Lubecky, but still to do it in the context of a clinical study, a phase three study.

A very um un invariable, you know, treatment. You know, you can't customize it to the person. It was a little bit um anxiety. Provoking. But when I open the uh email from the data monitoring committee.

I was just elated to learn that we didn't need to add anybody. That we have at least a ninety percent or greater probability of obtaining statistical significance when the other People are finished the study.

And that we have at least a medium effect size, which is r uh good, but our phase two data. Hold was a large effect site. So We are on track, we have de risked it, we have demonstrated in this inner analysis that We have a very good chance of succeeding. And so I think that when we

Амаджен you know, investments in in charitable purposes. Um you do have to take the chance of Is it gonna work or not? But We we cannot say that it's gonna work a hundred percent.

But we believe that um it will work and One important thing also is scaling, and you hear this all the time in in tech. And You talked to earlier about Michael and Annie Mitthoffer being, you know, these phenomenal therapists and their Um

They are phenomenal therapists. They were our they treated more people in phase two than anybody else. And so what we decided to do for phase three. was to take Mike Lani out of phase three and have them instead train new therapists. To conduct.

The phase three studies. And so Marcella and Bruce are Uh they're still working on phase three, but they're also spending much of their time training other therapists. And so

What we've demonstrated in phase three was with about seventy new therapists Many of whom had never done MDMA before, but they had experience in trauma. And they were able to get Phenomenal.

results that we're on track. So It's new therapists who are able to get this these results. And so that's why I really think that it's gonna be scalable should we Obtain um FDA approval for

prescription use. And the Smashing Grant that you're doing is just phenomenal to really help us do this. We also have what's called an agreement letter. From the FDA special protocol assessment process. We went into after we got permission from FDA to go to phase three, we engaged with them in an eight month process. Where we reviewed every aspect of the phase three design, the statistical analysis plan, and all the other studies that they're going to want to see.

And we managed to get what's called an agreement letter. And so that agreement letter means that they are legally bound to approve the drug if we get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and if there's no new safety problems. They can't question the methodology or anything like that. So I think

The um The the ninety percent is the you know the best farmer will do for the regulatory. Th the other thing we we should be concerned about is um you know backlash against psychedelics you know how likely is that But one of the most important things of our fundraising so far

Has been that we have Obtained funding from people across the political spectrum. I think this is a a really important point. Because people might assume that everyone donating to this is sort of tie die wearing hippies with a few extra coins in the pocket, but that's not true at all. You have

People on say the right, you've got Rebecca Mercer, you've got uh all sorts of uh folks, Elizabeth Cook, then on the let's just say the left, for sake of simplicity, you've got uh certain of the Rockefellers who've donated millions. You've got People like George Soros, so there's an entire spectrum.

Of donors. who are contributing to this cause. And uh Certainly that minimizes the likelihood of political backlash, but it speaks Even more so to the fact that you have such sympathetic populations you are trying to help, including veterans.

The disabled American veterans Just put out May one their Um bi monthly. Um magazine and the cover article is about MDMA for PTSD.

So I I think We're in we're in As best shape as we could possibly be at the moment. Which is why I've uh come off the bench. Uh and um I'm back on the field and I just wanna

I just want to s kind of simplify and clarify uh a bunch of what was just mentioned. So first is Uh very few guarantees in life, but I have decided to reengage and kind of push in all my chips on this right now because I I view it as being

Highly de risked. High probability of success. with uh very asymmetric payoff. I mean it opens the door, paves the way, breaks the ice, whatever metaphor you want to use. for potentially, you know, a dozen compounds, including psilocybin. This is a very, very important what I would consider, say, Vanguard

Moment. uh and initiative for psychedelics overall. And MDMA is the representative that is furthest ahead. So I'm putting in a million of my own money, which is a lot of money for me. We also have, as I mentioned before, Peter Rahal. And James Bailey, Blake Mykowski, and then, of course, the Steven and Alexander Cohn Foundation. Huge thanks to all of them and others who are contributing money. for this ten million dollar challenge grant. And If you have the possibility, if you're open to considering

Donating six figures, meaning a hundred thousand dollars or more. over multiple years. then please check out maps.org. Forward slash capstone. And you can also email

Capstone at maps.org. And uh I feel like I've done my homework on this. I mean I've been very immersed in this world and the science for Oh yeah, five or six years now. And uh have given maps smaller amounts of capital to see how well that's used in the past. I've done that with other outfits in different universities. And uh this is the right time.

So If you need More convincing uh then I would suggest watch the Jonathan Lubeck video. Created by the economist.

Uh looking at MD May's treatment for PTSD, also consider watching Trip of Compassion. You can find that at Tim.blog forward slash trip. uh which I suggest everybody watch anyway, just because it shows How badly someone can feel they are damaged and flawed and Irreparable.

and how they can regain their footing in life and really feel resurrected. I mean, it's it's incredible to watch and you get to see it in visual storytelling with real session footage. Uh but I hope you guys will will join in. Like if you've been sitting on the sidelines wondering how can I support? How can I get involved, and a lot of people, hundreds of people have asked me, This is a good place. to place some chips. I'm putting in a lot of chips personally, so I'm not just talking the talk. I'm putting a lot of skin in the game. Uh and Yeah. Now

Yeah, Tim, there there's another background factor. So We have tried the traditional sources of funding and that has not worked. So for example, there is over A million veterans that are receiving disability payments from the veterans administration for PTSD. And it cost the veterans administration somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty billion dollars a year. on these disability payments and they

pay multiple billions of dollars every year on SSRIs and other things. To treat people with PTSD. And yet we've not been able to get a penny. From the VA. In fact, we are paying researchers. Affiliated with the VA to blend MDMA with their non drug psychotherapies

As a way to try to educate the VA. So maybe one day they will get involved, but I don't think they're gonna help us get it approved. The other thing is the National Institute of Mental Health. So last week there was an article in the Washington Post about How covet is gonna produce um, as you said, a tsunami

And one of the people that was quoted was uh the woman in charge of PTSD research at the National Institute of Mental Health. And so we've been trying for about fifteen years to get any kind of support from the National Institute of Mental Health. And so I just sent her an email the other day. And I said is there a way for N IM H to help us. This is a crisis. You've acknowledged this in public.

Um and the answer was no. And the reason is because They say that they only look at mechanism of action studies. sort of academic science studies on how things work. But the FTA to approve a drug You need to prove safety and you need to prove efficacy.

But you don't have to have the faintest idea how the drug works. And in fact, a lot of the drugs that are approved We don't really know how they work. But The important thing is can we reduce suffering? Can we give them to people and if it seems to help We don't need to know the mechanism of action. So

At nationalist mental health, though. says no, we only support these scientific studies. So we've tried the VA, the Department of Defense, the National Mental Health. A lot of the major foundations the Welcome Trust is the largest foundation in England. started by uh Burroughs Welcome stock, by pharmaceutical stock, they're focused on neuroscience and psychology. And they said, um, go away. It's a reputational risk for us.

Yeah. I said it's a reputational opportunity. But didn't work. Well let me let me speak to that because um this has been a question a lot of people have had for me. I've been very public, obviously, in the the New York Times pieces and Fortune Magazine and on the podcast. I've spoken very transparently about my s my support of scientific research related to these compounds. And I will say that

particularly given the populations we're talking about victims of sexual abuse. Uh disabled veterans. People suffering from PTSD, treatment resistant depression in uh say the Hopkins studies. I have been

absolutely astonished at the zero amount of blowback that I've experienced. It has been Purely one hundred percent. reputational upside. Uh and that's not

Why I did it. But I I I girded my loins and prepared myself to deal with a bunch of bullshit. And it just hasn't come. It's been It's been nothing but

Uh It's been nothing but support. And in fact Uh People have reached out to me.

who I never thought in a million years would ever reach out to me to confide in their own struggles and also ask how they can help. So it's It is uh from my perspective. As you said, not A reputational risk. at all. I know that's strange for me to say and I I usually wouldn't paint such a binary picture, but I really do feel right now

Uh it it is much more reputational upside. than um than downside. So let's do this, Rick. We've covered a lot of ground. I want to provide a quick recap to help people. Suffice to say, there is the Capstone Fund. This is a thirty million dollar fund to get MDMA to the finish line. I believe in this. I'm committing a million dollars. There is a ten million dollar fund. Challenge grant that can be activated if another ten million more is raised in the next

Ninety days. I'm gonna hold very strong to that deadline. This is all or nothing. And you can contribute and learn more if you're contemplating at least a hundred thousand dollars. Over multiple years again. Tax deductible. by emailing capstone at maps.org to learn more.

And or going to maps.org forward slash capstone. You can certainly contribute less, and every dollar does count at maps.org. Uh But let's uh Let's I I I think we should close up soon because that's that's the message. That's the call to action. that was uh that I think that's that's what we want to leave fresh in people's minds.

We'll link to everything we've discussed, all the names we mentioned, Leo C. Sasha Shogun. all of the books, all of the resources, all the compounds, they'll all be in the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast, including links to uh all of the maps URLs that we mentioned and also uh PSF C

the uh funding collaborative PSFC dot C O Uh but Rick, what else would you like to say? Is there anything else you'd like to close with? Before we before we wrap up. Well,

First I'd I'd like to thank you and Joe Green and Graham Boyd at PSF C. for this incredible ten million dollar challenge grant. And I I think what I'd like to say though is Um Is that

While we're Talking a lot about um MDMA for PTSD. Um I think what we're saying is that we're gonna be unlocking

psychedelic psychotherapy for so many different things. And that there's so many uses of it. And that we are also trying to market it in a way Where we really maximize public benefit and not profit. So I I think we're gonna do two things. Open the field to psychedelic psychotherapy and then also

Try to demonstrate a new approach. for public health and for pharma and Just to to the extent that people can help us get there. We really are um Doing this uh

out of love, uh out of passion, out of uh hope that this is What we can contribute and that Humanity is in a crisis, and we've got to be able to work through our fears. To work together. And I think that

Um I'm very optimistic in that sense. I think we have the tools. But we need to really bring them forward and now is the time. This Ten million dollar challenge grant.

is going to be an absolutely critical component. to our ability to move forward. It's always fun to spend time with you. You're inspiring. You are a workhorse. Uh I I I've seen you more than once running to catch your plane before they shut the gate with a laptop in one hand, like a waiter running through a restaurant typing out email. Yeah. You're extremely hard working.

And uh this is a special this is a special moment. It's it's a special opportunity. It is time dependent. And uh I'm also honored and thrill to be part of it, to be able to spend time with people like those names I mentioned who are contributing

capital because they've looked at it and believe in uh the the potential significance, uh, which I think is is enormous. And uh Uh it's a great group of people to be to be involved with. It's just it's been it's been a real blessing in my life. These are fascinating

Thinkers, fascinating people. And so if uh if this is of interest at all, if you want to just explore it, uh please go to maps.org forward slash capstone. uh to learn more and if you've decided that you've collected some marbles and you don't wanna just sit on your hands Waiting. uh and that this represents a a a potentially interesting

Opportunity. please email capstone at maps.org and uh set up a meeting to to chat more with with the team about it. But uh certainly I've only placed three big bets in this entire space and this is the third. I was only planning on making two. Uh because uh I wanted to to tip over some dominoes with the last two.

Uh and I I I just think with all the feedback I've had from specialists and doctors and researchers who assessed this, who initially were very, very skeptical. We don't have to spend time on it now. But they are now converts and um I Uh, I'm very excited for what's to come.

So again to recap. It's a ten million dollar challenge grant that has to be met within the next ninety days to be activated. Maps.org forward slash capstone. Capstone at maps.org. If you have a hundred thousand dollars or more that you could potentially put to work to be part of this.

If you can contribute anything. Less, a dollar, ten dollars a month, whatever it is, everything counts, and you can go to maps.org. Which can show you exactly how to do that. Rick, thank you so much for taking the time. Uh I know you're tireless and it impresses the hell out of me. Uh but but it's but it's still meaningful for you to uh to carve out some time to do this. So I uh I wanna thank you for

Having the conversation. Oh my my pleasure, Tim, and You know, I think we will be able together to bring these healing technologies to the world. Absolutely. And uh I will leave it there for now for everybody.

Who has tuned in. Thank you for listening. And until next time. Take care. Be safe. And

Consider checking out. Maps.org forward slash capstuff. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up.

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