Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion 20141221

Tom was part of a particularly shimmering moment in my own life. This is in miami in the early 1980s and it was centered around the miami herald, and particularly the sunday magazine, tropic magazine where thomas one of the principal editors. This was a moment, and i know we all succumb to the temptation, the older we get the better we were, but this was truly a moment. There was tom, dave, karl, madeline, with assist from the likes of paul levine and elmore leonard. It was a moment of creativity of innovation and of daring and editorial daring, it is a pleasure to be part of that, at least be able to watch the. The ringmasters work joseph that the post, and tom shroder. I was occasionally invited to sit at the cool kids table but i could admire them from afar. The herald folded the tropic of usually which is reminder to the younger people here the newspaper industry was an advanced agrippa to block for the digital revolution finished them off. They went on to write books and get rich. Rich. Dave barry would go to price come his nobel prize, ive lost track, and jean and tom shroder went to the Washington Post and continued to work their magic. As an editor, tom conceived and edited to pulitzer prizewinning future feature stories including fatal distraction which was a devastating story about the aftermath of a totally tragic instances when people leave small children in cars and they died because o of heat. Tom went on to launch a widely syndicated comic strip, the culdesac and added eight a best selling book, overwhelmed. As an author of his own right tom cowrote the untold story of the gulf oil disaster. His work, the hunt for bin laden, covered by the Washington Post became the number one selling single mac kindle single event so there he wrote an extraordinary book which i recommended many times to people, a book called old souls. I know this sounds like an unlikely subject, sounds like aa fringe and so they could be subject but it is totally riveting. Tom followed the four decades of inquiries the university of virginia psychiatrist in cases of people who appear to have been born with the memories and personality of individuals who were recently deceased. Apparent instances of incarnation, and the book is amazing. Tom leezer. Biz latest book acid test which chronicles the victims to acceptance of use of psychedelics, lsd and mdma for psychotherapy, especially the epidemic we have faced posttraumatic stress but its it commits pleasure to tom here tonight, and to introduce them to you now. Thank you, ed. Very nice introduction of lost mac thank you all for coming out. I hope you all signed a shining the sign i in sheet because wanted to the people who came out to talk about drugs after school. [laughter] but really, why were here, or wifi me writing about this book is because a man named Albert Hoffman in 1945 stumbled on one of the most remarkable discoveries in history, and he is an interesting story because we knew was, he was a swiss citizen, and as a child, a young boy really, he remembered having the sort of remarkable spontaneous experiences. Let me read what he had to say about this. You know, one day you and when he was 12 he was walking through a path in the forest. He said all at once everything appeared in uncommonly clear like. Was this something i simply fail to notice before . Was i suddenly discovering the Spring Forest as a factual look . It showed with the most beautiful radiance speaking to the heart as the wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness and blissful security. I became convinced of the existence of a miraculous powerful and unfathomable reality that was hidden from everyday site. I was often troubled in those days knowing that i was not cut out to be a poet or an artist. I assumed i would have to keep these experiences to myself, as important as they were. So one of the great and littleknown ironies of history is that instead of becoming a poet and a scientist so he could express this experience that he had, he became a scientist, a chemist. And this was in the early days of the 20th century, and he was working in these poorly ventilated labs, all sorts of toxic chemicals, et cetera. It was about as far from being a poet as you could possibly be. But instead of learning how to describe these experiences, he stumbled on a substance that would actually create them so that anybody who took it might have one of these experiences themselves. And what happened was he was working with the substance, basically a chemical, a swiss company, and its Chemistry Department was founded on discovering uses that came for a substance which came from a wry fungus. This fungus, unbeknownst to people for hundreds of years had been killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people during the middle ages, and they didnt even know it. What happened was it would be harvested and then it would get tainted with this rye fungus and it would cause convulsions, hallucinations, body parts which are black and actually fall off. And eventually people would die and for years they didnt any idea what was going on, until they eventually discovered that it was from this fungus. And somehow natural healers at the time discovered that even though it could be deadly, did you used it in childbirth it could hasten the contractions, hasten childbirth, and stop the bleeding afterwards. So for generations this had been used, you know, in childbirth, and so his boss began to experiment with this substance, and he discovered that the basic molecule that all the active parts were based on was something called lysergic acid. And so hoffmans job when he got there was to start experimenting with search acid search acid and he started playing god and combined with different chemicals that he thought, maybe they might have an interesting use, medical use. And he did 24 of these things and he found some useful compounds. And then he did the 25th one, and that was combined with by a salon which was derived from ammonia. And three at the lysergic acid, and the german word begins with an s. It was the 25th company tries of this is lsd 25. You synthesize this and the guys in the lab are unimpressed but it did have some kind of constriction of blood vessels but not as good as some of the other compounds you come up with. It in but anything else that particularly attracted them. Daily noted in their lab notes that the animals like it to display sort of this odd restlessness for a few hours after theyd given him lsd 25. And yet so you been doing a lot of chemicals and this is one they said, its no big deal. And yet somehow hoffman couldnt stop thinking about lsd 25 or to the point where for five years it was in the back of his mind that he thought they must have missed something, but the overlooked something. So five years later, and this was in 1945, im sorry, 1943, he decided he was going to read some the size of this compound to cut basically tossed in the garbage. He started to do it. As whos working on it he had a really odd feeling. He started to feel like you need to lie down. And he had to go home. He lay down on his couch and started cant he close his eyes and he started seeing these incredible colors and patterns. This lasted most of the afternoon and then it faded. So were back to the lab and thought, what was this . He couldnt believe that is actually the lsd 25 that had done it because he had been really careful with it. The only exposure could possibly add was just a very minute amount of a substance on his fingertips, and the amount he couldve absorbed within like 100 fold less than the active dose of any kind of psychoactive chemical that was known. So he didnt think it could be that so he started like stating the formaldehyde hed been using. No such similar affect. After he eliminated all of the possibilities he decided maybe it was the lsd 25. Without telling anybody except for his Lab Assistant, he intentionally dosed himself with what he thought was a very cautious and tiny dose. He was able to write exactly one sentence in his lab notes before he could no longer write. This was during the middle of a war, so no cars were available so they had to like take bikes back, his Lab Assistant escort him on a bicycle back to his house. He felt like he wasnt moving at all but in retrospect they made fairly good time. This mustve been, i dont know whether anybody in this room might have some insight into this positively, but this mustve been an extraordinary adventures of bicycle ride. He didnt know what he had done. He didnt know what this drug did but all the new was that it was affecting him big time. He got really frightened that he had maybe poisoned himself and maybe he was going to die or maybe he was going to go crazy. And he would discover later that this was a very interesting property of the experience of taking lsd 25, was that your expectation had an outside impact on the nature of your experience. And later they would call a set and setting the expectation and the environment that you were in when you are taking it could really, i mean, make a completely transform the experience depending on whether it was positive or negative, and comfortable or uncomfortable, et cetera. He practically was in the worst possible situation because he had no idea what this is going to do. He believed that ma maybe hed taken a fatal dose, and you know, he was in extreme anxiety. And so for a long time he thought maybe he would never regain sanity, that he was losing his mind. But a doctor came to visit him when he was in the middle of this, and he was physiologically completely normal. Is a Blood Pressure was a little elevated but aside from that, nothing was going on. He got through this and it slowly faded and is able to explain his experience to everybody. And the next morning he felt remarkably fresh and the world seemed like clean and new to him. So he knew that he made a remarkable discovery, and he told his bosses who actually did not believe that the little amount paid to could possibly have affected him that way. And so he really enjoyed having him take a similar amount and then hearing about their experiences the next day. So they decided this was, their first thought was this mimics psychosis and that might be really useful because psychosis was just this notoriously mysterious and difficult to treat and devastating disease. So desperate a temporary psychosis. They thought maybe this would give psychiatrists inside into the disease and let them know how the patients saw the world, and maybe that could help them. So they started sending this out the labs and psychiatrists in Research Scientists all over the world. And so they sent it also do this, the university of prague, and there was a psychiatric student there, and he had an interesting experience when he volunteered for trial of this ever going to read what he said about it. I couldnt with how much i learned about my psyche in those few hours but the sheer intensity of the array of emotion myself simply amazed me that i was hit by a radiance that seemed in comparable to the episode of the explosion or perhaps light of supernatural brilliance that appeared at the moment of death. Although the lsd affects lasted only a few hours and is the significant part only about 10 minutes, it resulted in a profound personal transformation and spiritual awakening. So now weve gone from the making psychosis to a mystical religious experience that resulted in a conversion experience basically. Grof had studied freudian psychiatry, psychoanalyst, sorry. And he had, you know, it was a brilliant theory and very absorbing to study, that the reality was that when people got into psychoanalysis they would go for years and years, and nothing would happen. They wouldnt get better. They wouldnt change their destructive behaviors, and he was so frustrated with this at that point that he was thinking of becoming an animator to make animated films. And then he had this lsd experience, and they completely changed his idea of what he wanted to do. Because here he felt was a tool that could not, not sort of treat symptoms of Mental Illness, but he could help the patient transcend the Mental Illness itself and actually change all these things that no method known have been able to change. So he began to experiment with this with people with psychiatric problems, and he did thousands of patients with tremendous success. And he noticed a pattern and he felt what was happening was dashed in what he was he gay patients a series of lsd sessions, and he understood the means to have them in a comfortable, safe environment with a therapist right there with them. What he discovered was that the lsd experience, the exact issue so at the root of the problems we began to spontaneously emerge. These are people who maybe were like repressing these things and would never be able to talk about them under normal circumstances. But suddenly just the exact issues that needed to be sorted gotten at spontaneously emerged. And not only that, but the defenses of the patient would be diminished and the insights would be greater. And he was having tremendous success with this, and he wasnt the only one. By the mid 50s, researchers have experimented with lsd during therapy for various hero sees, depression, addiction, psychosomatic illness and traumas of all kinds. There have been scores of trials including hundreds of patients. Post reported positive results. In 1954, for example, psychiatrists at an english hospital set aside an entire ward for conducting lsd therapy with patients with severe chronic treatment resistant Mental Illness. 61 out of 94, about twothirds either recovered or improved after six months. They concluded lsd appears to be of utmost value in psychotherapy. Both in cases otherwise resistant to therapy and as a method for avoiding the prolonged time necessary for a full psychological analysis. In 1958, an analysis of scores of trials came to these conclusions. One, lsd 25 lessons the defensive. Theres a heightened capacity to really earlier experiences within a Company Release of feeling. Three, therapist patient relationships are enhanced, and number four, there is an increased appearance of unconscious material. And then they said this unique property cannot be masked by any other method or tool available in mainstream psychology or psychology. In addition it offers unique opportunities for healing of emotional and psychosomatic disorders four positive personality transformation and are conscious evolutions. So between 1950 and the mid 1960s there were more than 1000 Clinical Trials, i mean papers discussing 40,000 patients, several dozen books, and Six International conferences on Psychedelic Drug therapy. In 1960, a physician named Stanley Cohen surveyed the result of 44 physicians is conducted drug trials using 25,000 doses of lsd with 5000 different subjects under widely varying conditions. He said he found quote no instance of series of prolonged physical side effects or any evidence of victims potential. The enormous scope of this, lsd is an astonishingly safe drug. Then again in 1963, there was a Global Review of all the psychedelic therapy studies, and it concluded quote some spectacular almost unbelievable results have been achieved by using just one dose of the drug. So we are in a situation here where by the early 1960s revolution of, in psychiatry, was fully under way. There were therapist all over the world that were using this with great success. The treatment of all callers him was so successful in callers him in canada that the canadian government changed saying it was a proven treatment. Then the cia got involved. And the u. S. Military, and actually the nazis had been examined in with it in the before the discovery of lsd. The nazis decided that it might be a good idea to give this to people before they tortured them, and then maybe see what, yeah, whether they could get more out of them. And they have very conflicting results. Some people said it was a bunch of garbled, did work at all. Most people said if somebody who knew what theyre doing can elicit anything from people under the influence. So the army found these papers after the war when they seized all the german records. The cia began to experiment, and they did such noteworthy thing to say actually had a brothel in San Francisco where they would lure unsuspecting johnson and does their dreams with lsd and just watch what happens. Getting someone lsd unexpectedly as one of the most dangerous situations you could have with lsd because again, the big immediate danger of lsd is an anxiety, real acute anxiety reactions. And if somebody doesnt know whats happening to them, theres going to be they will think theyre going crazy and thats going to build on itself. This resulted in some suicides, although many of the suicides attributed to lsd in those days were not actually the fault of lsd, but there actually were some people who killed themselves because they feared that they were permanently crazy. And in addition they were funding all these apparently studies secretly, and these studies were poorly audited and basically there pumping a lot of lsd into the culture, and a lot of people were getting this experience. Most people were not having negative experiences. They were having positive experiences. They were having the experience, some of them like the canadian researchers doing the alcohol studies took himself, many times, and this is what he had to say about it. His name was Humphrey Osmond, and he also had begun that the drug experience was out we ended up thinking was, for myself, my experience with these substances has been the most strange, most also and among the most beautiful things in a varied and unfortunate luck. These are not escape from the enlargements of the virgins of reality. And Humphrey Osmond is the man who introduced huxley to it and huxley had a summer extremes and wrote about in a book called lords of perception which introduced this idea to a wide culture. One of the recipients of the lsds the cias lsd, and the result was this. Can you pass the acid test . In the bay area they basically filled koolaid coolers full of koolaid and lsd in of the titanic parties with uncontrolled, unscreened usages of lsd, and all sorts of wild stuff happening. And another person who ended up with some of the cias acid was a guy named stanley. Stanley was the grandson of a u. S. Senator, and he decided that lsd presented such an amazing vision of how we all were connected that this drug would possibly bring about world peace. He was a student at an institution let me get this corrected berkeley, the university of california at berkeley. He was a chemistry major. He hooked up with a chemistry major and they spent three weeks at the Berkeley Library and talk themselves out of synthesize lsd 25. And then he went to work. And his first load was 3600 colored capsules, and the past in handtohand in the sort of growing Bohemian Community in haightashbury. And those, that was in the spring of 1965, and that was the first of millions of acid trips that he was directly responsible for. And between d. C. And huxley and, obviously, lsd exploded into the culture. He had an interesting perspective on this years later. He said i never set out to turn on the world. As has been clean by many. I just want to know the dose and purity of what i took in the own body. Before i realize what was happening the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was writing a magic stallion, pegasus. This hit like a bomb really, and as the culture became aware of this, the reaction was hysterical, and it was incredibly rapid. Just to give you an example, the man that i talked about, this prague psychiatrics today became a psychiatrist, Stanislav Grof, did more sort of psychedelic therapy than any human alive, and is still alive. It was thought highly enough that he was invited to become director, Research Director at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center at the university of maryland. And this was in 1967. So at that late stage, the whole revolution of psychiatry based on Psychedelic Drugs was going to pace, and he had no idea what was going to happen, even at that late date. And heres what he writes about that. At the time of my departure in march 1967, lsd was legally manufactured in czechoslovakia with the official arbuckle be as a therapeutic agent with such reputable drugs as penicillin, tetracyclines, antibiotics, insulin. Loc was freely available to qualified professionals. The general public and very little about Psychedelic Drugs and reports concerning research with such substances were published almost exclusively in scientific journals. There was no black market traffic and no nonmedical use of them to anyone interested in self extreme edition could have an lsd session provided it was conducted by an approved professional and in a medical facility. The situation i found when i arrived in the United States contrasted sharply, black market lsd seemed readily to double in all parts of the country and for all age groups. Self extreme edition force forcn University Campuses and many large cities had the hippie district with distinct drug subculture to the casualties were making newspaper headlines. Almost everyone could read sensationalistic reports about psychotic breakdowns, self mutation, suicide and murders. This kind of atmosphere led to an extreme paranoia in the halls of power, and in congress this guy, sidney jones u. S. Said elsie was remarkable safe drug when used under Laboratory Conditions testified to congress and he said, weve seen something which is more alarming than death in a way and that is the loss of all cultura cultura, philosophy of right and wrong, of good and bad. These people leave a value this life without motivation, there lost to society, lost to themselves. That was the prevailing view among the authorities. Interestingly, this was an interesting little footnote, except for a senator named Robert Fitzgerald kennedy. And its been reported in various places, but never with good attribution and never substantiated, but possibly true that kennedys wife had undergone psychedelic therapy to good effect, and benefited from it. Maybe its true, maybe its not but heres what kennedy had to say during these hearings when they were proposing to put lsd in the most restrictive quality of the most dangerous drugs with any kind of medical purpose. And he said, i think we can too much emphasis and so much attention to the fact that it can be dangerous and that it can hurt an individual who uses it that perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that it can be very helpful in our society if used properly. Fda interference with the Scientific Investigation of so promising the drug as lsd is ill advised. So he lost, of course. He was sort of a lone voice in the wilderness, and lsd was put on schedule one, which is the same sort of level of probation as heroin. It was declared to no medical use, and what they managed to do was completely shut down all research into the possible beneficial uses of Psychedelic Drugs in general. And what they also didnt manage to do was we put a dent in the illicit use of lsd. So remarkably in their attempts to stop the illicit use, they shut down all legitimate research, and for 30 years as a witch or not, and illicit use just went along its merry way. So anyway, thats sort of the background to acid test. And really what acid test is, its about the very unlikely way in which we came from that point to the point now where there are a growing number of fda Clinical Trials using Psychedelic Drugs to do with a whole range of psychiatric problems such as from autism to alcoholism to smoking addiction, and most notably which i will get to later, posttraumatic stress disorder. So basically what the book does is it follows three people and the arcs of their lives knit together, kind of tell this whole rather incredible story of how this came to be against tremendous odds. And my involvement in this is kind of odd. In 1975, i was a student journalist at the university of florida. Thats me with their, and i was editor of the college newspaper. I lived in sarasota, florida, and i went down there on breaks all the time. And i was down in sarasota, and i noticed, i dont remember exactly whether i, like, happened on this by just wandered around town or whether i saw like possibly a small blurb in the local newspaper about his hippie who is like out in the woods building with his own hands is really fantastic house. And he had this pet wolf, so i go up there and i write this story about him for the newspaper supplement and the university of florida, the Student Newspaper supplement. The story doesnt directly mention Psychedelic Drugs, but he had this heres the cover, but you can see this very psychedelic looking stained glass window in the background. And basically he was talking about that this house meant to sort of express and a concrete way all these principles that he learned, you know, about not following and other peoples rights just because they were there, but in like finding your true self and exploring, you know, doing things with quality and for the purpose, for the value of doing it itself, and all these things that were floating around in a certain subculture in those days. That basically was trying to put psychedelic principles into use, integrating them into ordinary life. And i have had, i think, i had some interest in that. I dont know how many of you have ever been in gainesville, florida, but its a college town surrounded by cow pastures. The interesting feature of these cow past year is that theres cow shit in the cow pastures, and in that cow shit grows mushrooms. So it was quite possible to sort of wander out campus on an afternoon, pluck a bunch of mushrooms and you know, those of yourself with them and have an experience. Well, some people get it for recreation. I never understood that. But i and the people i knew were doing it intentionally because we thought it was revelatory. We could learn stuff from doing it. And want experience i had always stuck in my mind. I was, as a mushrooms started to take effect, i started to feel, you know, very peculiar all these anxieties and fears that have been kind of rumbling around my head forever, and some of them were about things that were happening that day, you know, in relationships i was having and summer longterm fears about life in general. And the more i became sort of into the drug experience, the heavy all these anxieties and feelings seemed. And i started to have this vision of this, like, boulder that was like almost making it impossible for me to breathe. This incredible weight on me. And as i was doing that and feeling incredibly oppressed by it, i also saw, and you know, the thing about this expense was a was like an intellectual concept. It was like i really saw and felt these real things. And i saw that this incredible weight that was making it, really making the struggle for breath, that i was actually holding this boulder with my arms to my chest and it just hit me in an instance that all he had to do was open my arms and that boulder would fall away. So thats what i did. And all these fears and anxieties disappeared like a soap bubble popping. And, you know, theres some experience that people talk about in these kind of altered states that they wake up and they go, what . I mean, a friend of mine once had a gigantic insight, and he wrote down on a piece of paper. He wrote it down so he would remember the next day, and he woke up the next and to look at the piece of paper, and it said, everything is something. [laughter] so i think at the time that was incredibly profound but, yeah, a lot of these things are ineffable. But this was something that made, i still understood it, not only the next day but for the rest of my life. And i went on and i, you know, i left college. I stopped doing Psychedelic Drugs because i had a family. I got a professional career. It was still illegal. I couldnt risk those things and there were still dangers involved with it, both legal ones and, yeah, for all i need psychological and physical ones. So i stopped doing it but i am sure member to that experience, among others. In fact, i tried to practice doing that, and i learned it wasnt easy, and it still isnt easy. But as i tried, the fact that i was aware that that was a reality for me, that you basically to some degree chose to feel negative feelings, that it was a decision you made for various reasons like maybe to avoid responsibility or, you know, to just feel sorry for yourself. And that all you have to do is choose not to feel them, and you didnt have to. It was like a muscle that i learned to develop. So i was aware that there seem to be some lasting value to these experiences. Then i went on and i became, as ed told you, i became the editor of tropic magazine. And i was looking at a tampa area newspaper and there was a story about this sort of perpetual College Student so i decided that a new sort of quote design a Psychedelic Drug called mbna was the key to psychotherapy. This is going to revolutionize psychotherapy. Pashtun mdma. This was in 1985, and i was reading the story and i looked at the name and it rang a bell. The name was rick doblin it was the same guy that id seen in the woods building this house. So thats me in 1985, and that is the cover story that we did on him and it says the selling of ecstasy on the cover, and inside the headline was, a tim leary for the 80s. So then another 20 years or so passes by, and now i am the editor of the Washington Post magazine, and they see a story in the new york times. Theres a little article that was about the first Psychedelic Research done at Harvard University since tim leary was basically written out on a rail. And as im reading it theres an organization that sponsoring this research us were brought up to harvard, and the founder and director of this organization was a man named rick doblin. Same guy. Thats me in 2007, and thats rick. And so i said, okay, this time im doing the story myself. I called them up, and not only did he remember me, he had on his desk in front of him both those stories i just showed you. The reason he did that was because he just had a meeting with his board of directors, and he was trying to impress upon them how parties in which it come from this wild man hit the to this guy was able to do hippie, so it most prestigious academic institutions in the world. And in a study at harvard was going to be, to use mdma to help people who are suffering from extreme endoflife anxiety that some people with terminal cancer. You know, and i think they chose that partly because in the old days during the days of psychedelic therapy, they did use it for that. But also because, you know, if someone with terminal its hard to argue that the longterm risks of their health were something that was a dealbreaker. Although they did indeed argue that at some point. And so i went up there and i started interviewing the people involved with the study, and it was all fascinating. They were starting to recruit subjects for it. And then maclean hospital, the harvard psychiatric hospital, changed directions and there was a new president. That president took one look at this on his desk and said, we dont want to have anything to do with this guy. Into the kind of, actually they found a way to get the dough to give the money directly to the hospital, but it never really recovered from that. So the statement was still operating, even though he had gotten that far. But, however, there was a study going on in charleston, south carolina, at the same time also sponsored by his organization which is called the Multidisciplinary Association for psychic psychedelic studies which is based at the most boring name you can have with psychedelics in a. A guy whod been an emergency room doctor who decided he didnt want to treat the end result of Mental Illness, which was knife wounds and suicide attempts. He wanted to try to get in at the opening act and to prevent these things happen. And he didnt just want to do things to like stick tracheal tubes down their throats. He wanted to have a more collaborative relationship with them. So he became a psychiatrist. He had his own, i mean, i talk about this and i talk about this in the book, i dont think ive time to go into this here but he had his own experiences, positive extremes is, with psychedelics. As i describe similar ones. So he had an interest in healing, and he read Stanislav Grofs book and the whole point of the Stanislav Grof book was written with the altered state itself which aided in healing, and the people had known as in various cultures for thousands of years and thats what Psychedelic Drugs have been used in personal growth, spiritual growth and in healing for thousands of years. So he even went as far to go down to peru and to edit into a bunch of these shamanistic rituals with a Psychedelic Drug that comes from a rainforest line, very intense experience. He told a funny story about getting there. They had to like flies in, take a big dugout canoe up the river, get into a smaller little canoe and go of a small river and then get out and drag it, and get out and walk through the jungle. He knew his conduct to do this jungle walk before he went, and so asked the guy in the town, should we buy some rubber boots to protect ourselves against snakes . The guy said well, you could but, you know, actually the real dangers snakes are up in the trees and the danger is if they dropped a plunger and you will be dead in minutes. So he said that was a really wonderful lesson in focusing your attention as they walked through the jungle to these ceremonies. But anyway, he had teamed up with rick, and how this all happened is really whats going on in this book. Is that he teamed up with rick and decided that theyre going to try to do this for the first time here since mdma was made illegal in 1985 because it hadnt really been invented when lsd was put on schedule one. So theyve been trying for and rick doblin is an amazing guy, and when he knew that they were going to make mda mdma toledo, and basically heres this guy is a College Dropout who somehow managed to invent himself as the leader of this psychedelic psychotherapy method. And what he did was he started the citing that he would send out packages of mdma on it was still legal to all these big name religious figures, and they did it. And they said things, like the newsweek quoted one of them as saying, you know, this is what happens after 20 years of meditation, its what happens in an afternoon with mdma. This was quoted in newsweek from the world famous rabbi. Anyway, through tremendous odds everything they got these trials going. The third character in the book is a marine named nicholas blackstone. He decided he was going to join the marines when he was 16. He actually went in at 18. You know, within months he was in iraq and handling a. 50 caliber machine gun in the throat of a humvee and and he had to do things like, you know, he that is going to go there and deal with these professional jihadists. And instead of these kids are walking out of alleys spring ak47s at them and gives no choice but to blow them away with it. 50 caliber machine gun. Bullets that can knock down walls. So he has that experience. He sees a truck right next to him get blown up and he has come he cant get any closer because its burning up and has to watch his friends burned to death inside. His own truck gets blown up to it gets pretty badly injured and is in the middle of this horrible firefight and cant go to the aid of his best friend who was bleeding to death from a piece of shrapnel that went through his femoral artery. Theres this moment that he described i have in the book where he doesnt really realize whats going on and tell hes looking down after this firefight is finally over, and hes looking down from his current, and hes like, he seeing his reflection in the front seat and it does make any sense to him. And then he realizes that hes looking at his face in a pool of his friends blood. So these kind of experiences torment him. He comes back, yeah, and he came home but he couldnt ever really iraq because every time he fell asleep there iraq would be and he would feel bullets going through his brain, and people would be shooting rpgs at him, and he would like to wake up screaming and he would wake up and altering his wife to put her hands up. And it was, he just felt, you know, he did all the da stuff. He took all the medicines and only made matters worse. He felt there was no hope youre a cat to the point where he would take you go sit on his bed and take his Service Revolver and put the barrel to his brain and just cant imagine he could get rid of all this hot mess in his head just but a simple twitch of his finger. Became very close to doing it. He knew he eventually would do that and he was desperate. Thats when he became thats when he came upon a notice of study that they were going to do, use mdma therapy, to treat ptsd. This is an image, an amazing picture that his friend took when he was in iraq. So the climax of the book is a therapy session that he took under the influence of indian a with michael and michaels wife sitting beside him and basically letting the mdma direct the session. Thats one of the principals, you know, going back to what grof said about how the material just naturally arose. I wont completely tell you the result of what happened there coming, the sessions were incredibly moving and traumatic to me. What i had was i had, like, you know, 60 hours of videotaped session. So it was like i was able to be a fly on the wall in those sessions. They were really quite remarkable. I wont do you exactly how it turns out, but this is nick today, a shilling for my book and looking very cool, i think the kind of looking like i did in 1975. And so the thing is though that now that the trial, there was a trial before the michael vick, the first one mostly women who had ptsd as result of rape or sexual abuse. And they measure the clinical markers of ptsd using the you know, the state of the art test. And then they measure him again after the therapy, two months after the therapy. And then a year after, and then in this case they didnt like an average of three and a half years later, a really long time. 80 of people involved, 83 of the people involved in this therapy had longterm lasting remission or elimination of their ptsd. None of them in that 80 would have even been diagnosed with ptsd after just three of the sessions which is, you know, so unlike any of the other treatments for ptsd they are doing. By the vas own calculations, up to 20 of the 2. 5 million soldiers returning from iraq and afghanistan are coming home with ptsd. If you do the math, thats half a million people. Not to mention the fact that the people who got ptsd in vietnam still have it. And, in fact, its costing the va more in disability and health care now than they were immediately after they came home. So thats what we have to look forward to, and this harvard economist calculated that basically between disability and health care, that we are just the people with ptsd. And this is forgetting the 22 suicides every single day of veterans, that would cost us a trillion dollars over the next 30 years. So given all that you would think that the pentagon and the va who have enough spare change in their couch cushions to get this research on the fast track, and the fda which has the power to declare this an urgent need and put it in an expedited thing, that that would be happening, but its not happening. And, in fact, theres tremendous resistance. Just to give you an idea, when i said and request to the pentagon to talk to somebody there about the book, i got bounced around from department to department, and from service to service. And then finally they simply stop. They gave me the run around they started saying, well, you know, nobody here ever had that discussion when i knew for a fact that they had. And then ultimately they just stopped talking to be altogether. And when im going on the diane we show on october 2 and asked me if i could get somebody from the pentagon, and i tried my contact there and i got this note that from this very highly placed military officer that, what he said was its just too dangerous for folks in the uniform. And im thinking, too dangerous . Discussing this promising therapy is too dangerous . Whats dangerous is leading have the million and treated victims of ptsd go through their lives without any solution. So to me thats like the worst kind of cowardice. They are funding, they are on pace to now. Phase three is one of dozens of locations of hundreds of patients and caused tens of millions of dollars, and they are funding the they are like having indigo go campaigns. They are raising 50, 100,000. Where people were taking mdma in uncontrolled situations and there were some bad results. 25 of the apes were dying. The deaths were incredibly rare and the results of really sort of extremely negative conditions. So they knew something was wrong with this. But that if we delay their study for two years and two years later the person who did that study issued a retraction and the drugs that he had used, that were labeled as mdma were actually of methamphetamine, not mdma. Methamphetamine misses badly come the dangers stroke. Methamphetamine is a prescription drug. In every step of the way, the stigma of psychedelics makes this much more difficult. If this were any other drug from a sub on somebody currently but that was getting these results from the pentagon with the investing in it and the fta would be fast tracking it. The really interesting thing is obama and announced this initiative with the government was giving all this money to fund this trial with they would plant computer chips in people sprayed any sort of pacemaker come with the that somehow computer chips with fans that negative suppression. It is nowhere near that to mention its invasive has permanent effects. So it really is about the psychedelic experience. It is threatening to a certain part of our culture. I will pass the microphone around. I have a twopart question about the contrast to troop between psychedelic therapy in other treatments. Is it your position that ptsd can only be treated as such to flee through the use of psychedelics . No, no, no. In fact in these trials that people submitted in the protocol it says they only will take people with extreme readings of ptsd in the diagnostic scale np, people would, people have tried other therapies that have not benefited from them. They only take treatment resistant. There is some cognitive behavioral therapies. People get better from ptsd without using psychedelic turks. But theres a lot of people that dont get better and a lot of people who cant go into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy because probing around at the cost of their words is so painful that it sends them into a sort of shock reaction that provokes all the symptoms. It makes them worse. So of course theres other treatments, but this is probably if these results hold up, visit affably be the most effective treatment and would deal with certain people who cant benefit from any other treatment. The second part maybe you misunderstood this as well. Do you feel that before groff started working with lsd that psychoanalysis was invariably inexpensive unproductive loop. It was certainly expensive. The view was there was far too many people for whom it was disappeared can you pass the microphone around . Two quick questions. When lsd was rendered and illicit drug, warrant or a number of prominent psychiatrists in psychotherapy is testified to the beneficial uses of it . Break was behind that. That is much of the story of my boat. Lsd just got made legal. They knew that was going to happen with mdma. Saucier shalit came to discover the psychotherapeutic possibilities was a berkeley professor and experiment on himself with this and had this experience that made him think this to be a credible and psychotherapy. The candidates of a friend, a psychiatrist to head for years been treating people with psychedelics and he was about to retire and then show again showed him the mdma and he continued on to list a. Some estimates that he convinced a 10,000 practitioners to use it in 200,000 clients. The urban dictionary calls the Johnny Appleseed of mdma. So yes, ricks idea was to you have to say this truck has no known medical purpose and yet for years people have been treating thousands of patients successfully with it. They were doctors and therapies and scientists around the country who testified. Rick organized this and got them together in a suit vsda when they tried to do the schedule one in 1985. They were years of hearings in cities around the country and at the end of the year, the Administrative Court drugs in the favor of the plaintiffs. Mdma does have accepted medical use because that is defined by. Yours. Its not defined by the fda. It is not under clinical conditions. Both of those things would require that it not be in schedule one, which wouldve allowed therapeutic use and certainly research. In the dea basically said if their football and we are going home. They just ignored the Administrative Court judge. There was an appeal. The Appeals Court also ruled dea was an error in saying there is no accepted medical use. The dea basically changed their definition and that was the end of it. What happened then was most of the people involved said that they, the game is over. We are going to drop this. Someone underground and continued to do legal therapy. The rick said no, we will fight this battle in time for a basically taught himself how to do this i am then he decided that wasnt going to work, so he ended up going to the Harvard Kennedy school and getting a phd in Public Policy because he wanted to get inside the fta and understand how they thought. He was part of this theme called the president ial fellowship which was to fasttrack people and i must got a job at the fta and the dea by matt about it and said not this guy. He spent 15 years tilting at windmills until finally they had the first study. So that is basically the arc of what happened. It is interesting how the power of suggestion can impact negatively on use of these drugs are reputedly as well as have a pejorative impact on somebody using it without a professional overseeing it. I took acid about 20 times and micro friend had been taking it about twice that. On the second to the last occasion she saw her death. We had to get coricidin and we stopped using it. Basically she had a bad trip because she had read all of these negative accounts that worsen patient while in the paper and continued to be. Have always sought under professional care that its less likely to happen. Exactly right. What he says this if you were in a therapeutic situation and you have to have a chance to ask or answer a, do it. It actually becomes a rebirthing. That is the point of negative experiences with professional guidance. His actions to bring up the difficult material. Somebody who is in a reassuring environment to work what theyre doing can actually end up doing a Pivotal Moment with this mystical convergence. Theres no question that people who self experiment are running the risk of severely dangerous reactions that can really get out of hand. Hi, he talked a lot about the current state of art on research and policy in the u. S. And under our umbrella issue in the United States. I know theres a fair amount of Similar Research going on in other parts of the world and theres also people who are seeking this sort of thing. For instance, it boga in canada because that is a harrowing recovery team. For alaska in peru or Something Else in mexico. Can you speak to the International State . Theres a few things going on internationally. One is more actual Clinical Trials. Math is behind many of them. They are sponsoring studies in half a dozen countries around the world. They have tried anothers. He even tried in saudi arabia and they actually got pretty far in that crashed and burned because of their treatment model, which involves having a man and woman president and that didnt work in saudi arabia. And then, the religious uses in the native american church, which is the i o bus got, where it is legal to be used and theres been court cases about that. People do go down to have that kind of experience, so that happens as well. I wrote about for five years ago called the Harvard Psychedelic Club just a biker free for guys that came in 1861. A lot of a lot of people think more than anyone else who is responsible for the backlash. A backlash in his 30 year rule in the above ground resources. I interviewed rick for interviewed rick what i was doing my work on that and i havent idea that it would be a great idea for a book about this new wave of Psychedelic Drug research and ive been putting it off and putting it off. I thank you for writing the book so i dont have to do it. I still feel there might be another book in there about this larger new wave of not just Scientific Research, the spiritual exploration. Actually, i do deal with that and it connects. Let me give you an example. At Johns Hopkins university, theres a man named roland griffiths. You probably know that name. He was a guy who came to Psychedelic Research through his interest in meditation and the astounding disco statements and he had a background in testing drugs to find out how it did if they were. So its a specialty. But it also says interesting things with apes and humans to see how much work they were willing people notoriously lie on surveys. They want to see how much work they were willing to do. In the personal life, he was fascinated by his study of meditation and these amazing states that vitamin c. Brought him into. So it occurred to him at some point that he could actually bring his personal and professional interests together by studying whether the spiritual state claimed to be produced by psychedelics, have aggravated to state that had gone through meditation. So he did one of the early studies at Johns Hopkins where they cant help the people psilocybin, which is the magic mushroom active ingredient. And then they gave him a survey on the sale of mystical experiences. He said people came in and he would ask them, okay, what did you think . While comments they appeared with two minutes bad . They said it was one of the 70 in that study, the five most significant experiences of their lives. These are Healthy People who would never do psychedelics before. They were professional types. He said you just dont hear that in drug studies. It completely blew his mind. It is the single most significant experience of their lives. So that is his real interests. To get money though, they had to start using it to treat something because thats the way it works. Nobody wants to give you money that gives people religious experiences. So they did a study where they gave psilocybin to smokers and they just reported it a week or so ago. They had an 80 success rate after six months. This wasnt from people telling them they were quitting. He doesnt do it that way. They did the breathalyzer in the whole blood chemistry thing. Six months 80 tobacco free. The best treatment otherwise being used now is 35 . So this is tremendous staff. My question was how much interested to find about publishers in this era . That is what is going to ask you. I was thinking about pitching a book myself on another aspect. You might try my publishers because theyve been incredible and they got it right away. I basically sold this book on mmo, not a big book proposal. Thank you. Of let me just say, it ended around in a longwinded way that the use of this by Healthy People to have productive and lifechanging experiences is an issue thats coming you know, a lot of researchers dont want to do that because it brings back all of that scary 60s stuff for them. They are having a flashback of 60s would not have business. And yeah, its a really important question in iraq should people out there saying we need to figure out a way and break us among them honestly although he tries not to talk about this too much. We need to figure out a way that eventually Healthy People can take this in a sacramental way for people who want to have personal growth. Because what happens with the people who have these conditions, especially in the cancer studies, the people about the transcendent experience, those are the people who lose their anxiety about dieting because they feel like hey, the idea that we are just coming in now, individuals that will disappear and that is begin today. Something that doesnt have such meaning anymore. Also they see everybody on here has a death day and everybody is living one day at a time and doesnt note the wake of the next morning. So why should i give up the rest of my life to sit here . Why hold it . So anyway, thats an important question is certainly something i tried to deal with. How were we doing on time here . So it seems remarkable to me that a few experiences with lsd or ecstasy could cure an addiction which takes many repeated exposures to a substance over time to develop here im just wondering whether theres any Research Done or whether there is any theory out there as to the neurological mechanisms. They start to do more and more research. They can actually watch the brain react in realtime. The resort of a macroscopic theory, which was unlike penicillin, which you have an infection can you take penicillin and without any conscious awareness or participation on your part, the infection is cured because theres a direct impact on your body versus these people who kick smoking or stop Drinking Alcohol and that is not because the tribe has some kind of reaction that they are not aware of. It is in fact the experience they have which makes them see themselves differently. And the Tobacco Cessation Study Committee people said suddenly the focus shifted from the short term pleasure their longterm wellbeing and they just saw the longterm wellbeing was much more important than the shortterm pleasure were before this the life had been driven by the shortterm pleasure. And so, that is like a conversion. However, you can do as mri studies and their spurts in parts of the brain theres parts of the brain that take the raw data of your sensei since the process than in two that created personality, the part of the brain that says we will not Pay Attention to this and will Pay Attention to that. You know, evolutionarily you can say that part of the brain was to help people set five in a world filled with abundant stimuli. So they could focus on the survival aspect. In the press, sometimes that gets overact if it shuts down everything else. So with psychedelics tend to do is the reverse of what you see in peoples suppression get the parts of her enterprise, that are repressed and depression becomes stimulated in the parts of the brain that are overact becomes stimulated. We have time for one more. Bring them on. I was wondering in terms of what is going on politically in the u. S. , but you think the effect of this whole situation of drug scheduling and staff will be a distorted increasing acceptance of medical marijuana. I think what is happening then certainly you can see you know, one thing i was hoping when this book came out that i would be violently attacked for being prodrug. Instead, there are all these articles say you know hey, this stuff can be useful. So i think our society is definitely reaching a Tipping Point as far as that goes on that is very important. It doesnt really matter though. Eventually if these trials progress, even if theyre late painfully slowly. If they get the kind of results that the early trials were, in this case this isnt just some drugs that they started researching recently. Remember, theres this whole 20 year history where he was being widely used and guessed they were using the standards of Scientific Research and you can attack them for all sorts of reasons. Researchers then theres no reason to believe the early results are going to progress. I can say that is a lame man. If i were one of the researchers i have to hem and haw have failed so i was at a conference of the researchers said look, ive been looking at stats since 1960s and were trying to prove something we know for a fact is true. So we are just jumping through hoops. Anyway, that will progress and someday, within 20 years at least, become a prescription therapy that people can use. The question is do we really have to wait that long for these people who might benefit from it to have the use of it. Tom, i went thank you. If i can get the pages to stop all sating. Look at the cover. Its a very nice cover. Try with a blacklight. [laughter] thank you for coming out. Have a good evening. [applause] now joining us on book tv is dennis johnson, copublisher of melville house. Though the house is publishing the report on