Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:04]

It's Ted talks daily Amelie's who in some circles, psychedelics still suffer from bad branding during the 1960s counterculture.

[00:00:12]

But the latest resurgence of research is reshaping our understanding. Psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin actually show great promise for treating mental illness, addiction and neurological problems.

[00:00:25]

Researcher Rick Doblin shares the potential for psychedelic therapy and how it could change all of us in his archive talk from TED 2019.

[00:00:36]

Hey, Ted, talk to daily listeners. I'm Adam Grant, host another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. It's called Work Life and it's about the science of making work, not suck.

[00:00:46]

Next time, why do we get trapped in bad decisions? It's almost like you're gaslighting yourself, like you're telling yourself. No, no. Like all of the evidence around you is not correct.

[00:00:59]

But there are ways to pull the plug on bad decisions before it's too late. Follow WorkLife with Adam Grant on Spotify now.

[00:01:08]

Ted talks daily, is supported by progressive progressive, has you covered when it comes to car insurance, starting with built in savings like discounts for being a safe driver, you can also save when you start your, quote, online or have multiple vehicles on your policy. In fact, drivers who switch and save with progressive save over seven hundred fifty dollars on average, start a quote online and see all the discounts for yourself. Visit Progressive Dotcom today national annual average auto insurance savings by new customers surveyed in 2019.

[00:01:38]

Potential savings will vary, discounts vary and are not available in all states and situations. Support for TED talks daily comes from ODU, ODU, suite of business apps, has everything you need to run a company. Think of your smartphone with all your apps right at your fingertips. ODU is just like that for business, but instead of an app to order takeout or tell you the weather, you have sales, inventory, accounting and more. You name the department.

[00:02:04]

We've got it covered and they're all connected. Joined the six million users who stopped wasting time and started getting stuff done. Go to ODU Dotcom slash Ted to start a free trial. That's odd. Ooh, dotcom slash Ted. Hey, Ted, talk to daily listeners. I'm Adam Grant, host another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. It's called Work Life and it's about the science of making work, not suck.

[00:02:31]

Next time, why do we get trapped in bad decisions? It's almost like you're gaslighting yourself. Like you're telling yourself. No, no. Like all of the evidence around you is not correct.

[00:02:44]

But there are ways to pull the plug on bad decisions before it's too late. Follow WorkLife with Adam Grant on Spotify now.

[00:02:53]

Preparing for this talk has been scarier for me than preparing for LSD therapy, psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy.

[00:03:10]

Dr. Stanislav Grof spoke those words. He's one of the leading psychedelic researchers in the world and he's also been my mentor. Today, I'd like to share with you how psychedelics, when used wisely, have the potential to help heal us, help inspire us, and perhaps even to help save us. In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelic research flourished all over the world and showed great promise for the fields of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, neuroscience and the study of mystical experiences.

[00:03:45]

But psychedelics leaked out of the research settings and began to be used by the counterculture and by the anti Vietnam War movement. And there was unwise use. And so there was a backlash. And in 1970, the U.S. government criminalized all uses of psychedelics and they began shutting down all psychedelic research. And this banned, spread all over the world and lasted for decades. And it was tragic since psychedelics are really just tools and whether their outcomes are beneficial or harmful depend on how they're used.

[00:04:20]

Psychedelic means mind manifesting. And it relates to drugs like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline. Iboga and other drugs, when I was 18 years old, I was a college freshman, I was experimenting with LSD and mescaline, and these experiences brought me in touch with my emotions. And they helped me have a spiritual connection that unfortunately my barmitzvah did not produce.

[00:04:58]

When I wanted to tease my parents, I would tell them that they drove me to psychedelics because my bar mitzvah had failed to turn me into a man.

[00:05:09]

But most importantly, psychedelics gave me this feeling of our shared humanity, of our unity with our life and other people reported that same thing as well. And I felt that these experiences had the potential to help me an antidote. To tribalism, to fundamentalism, to genocide and environmental destruction, and so I decided to focus my life. On changing the laws and becoming a legal psychodelic, psychotherapist, now, half a century after the ban, we're in the midst of a global renaissance of psychedelic research.

[00:05:50]

Psychedelic psychotherapy is showing great promise for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, depression, social anxiety, substance abuse and alcoholism. And suicide, psychedelic psychotherapy is an attempt to go after the root causes of the problems with just a relatively few administrations as contrasted to most of the psychiatric drugs used today that are mostly just reducing symptoms and are meant to be taken on a daily basis. Psychedelics are now also being used as tools for neuroscience to study brain function and to study the enduring mystery of human consciousness and psychedelics and the mystical experiences they produce are being explored for their connections between meditation and mindfulness, including a paper just recently published about lifelong Zen meditators taking psilocybin in the midst of a meditation retreat and showing long term benefits and brain changes.

[00:06:55]

Now, how do these drugs work? Modern neuroscience research has demonstrated that psychedelics reduce activity in what's known as the brain's default mode network. This is where we create our sense of self. It's our equivalent to the ego and it filters all incoming information according to our personal needs and priorities, when activity is reduced in the default mode network, our ego shifts from the foreground to the background and we see that it's just part of a larger field of awareness.

[00:07:29]

It's similar to the shift that Copernicus and Galileo were able to produce in humanity, using the telescope to show that the earth was no longer the center of the universe, but was actually something that revolved around the sun, something bigger than itself. For some people, this shift in awareness is the most important and among the most important experiences of their lives. They feel more connected to the world bigger than themselves. They feel more altruistic, and they lose some of their fear of death.

[00:08:04]

Not all drugs work this way, MDMA, also known as ecstasy or Molly, works fundamentally different. And I'll be able to share with you the story of Marcella, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from a violent sexual assault.

[00:08:20]

Marcella and I were introduced in 1984 when MDMA was still legal, but it was beginning also to leak out of therapeutic circles. Marsella had tried MDMA in a recreational setting, and during that her past trauma flooded her awareness and it intensified her suicidal feelings. During our first conversation, I shared that when MDMA was is taken therapeutically, it can reduce the fear of difficult emotions and she could help move forward past her trauma. I asked her to promise not to commit suicide.

[00:08:59]

If we are to work together and she agreed and made that promise. During her therapeutic sessions, Marcela was able to process her trauma more fluidly, more easily, and yet she was able to tell that the rapist had told her that if she ever shared her story, he would kill her.

[00:09:21]

And she realized that that was keeping her a prisoner in her own mind. And so being able to share the story and experience the feelings and the thoughts in her mind freed her and she was able to decide that she wanted to move forward with her life. And in that moment, I realized that MDMA could be very effective for treating PTSD. Now, 35 years later, after Marcela's treatment, she's actually a therapist. Training other therapists to help people overcome PTSD with MDMA.

[00:09:57]

Now, how does MDMA work? How did MDMA help Marsella? People who have PTSD have brains that are different from those of us who don't have PTSD. They have a hyperactive amygdala where we process fear. They have reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically and they have reduced activity in the hippocampus, where we store memories into long term storage. MDMA changes the brain in the opposite way. MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, increases activity in the frontal cortex, and increases connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus through traumatic memories to move into long term storage.

[00:10:41]

Recently, researchers at Johns Hopkins published a paper in Nature in which they demonstrated that MDMA releases oxytocin, the hormone of love and nurturing.

[00:10:52]

These same researchers also did studies in octopuses who are normally asocial unless it's mating season. But lo and behold, you give them MDMA and they become prosocial. Several months after Marcel and I work together, the Drug Enforcement Administration moved to criminalize ecstasy, having no knowledge of its therapeutic use. So I went to Washington and I went into the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration and I filed a lawsuit demanding a hearing at which psychiatrists and psychotherapists would be able to present information about therapeutic use of MDMA to try to keep it legal.

[00:11:33]

And in the middle of the hearing, the DEA freaked out, declared an emergency and criminalized all uses of MDMA. And so the only way that I could see to bring it back was through science, through medicine and through the FDA drug development process. So in 1986, I started maps as a nonprofit, psychedelic pharmaceutical company.

[00:11:57]

It took us 30 years till 2016 to develop the data that we needed to present to FDA to request permission to move into the large scale Phase three studies that are required to prove safety and efficacy before you get approval for prescription use. Tony was a veteran in one of our pilot studies. According to the Veterans Administration, there's over a million veterans now disabled with PTSD and at least 20 veterans a day are committing suicide, many of them from PTSD. The treatment that Tony was to receive was three and a half months long.

[00:12:36]

But during that period of time, he would only get MDMA on three occasions, separated by 12 90 minute nondrug psychotherapy sessions, three before the first MDMA session for preparation and three after each MDMA session for reintegration. We call our training approach inner directed therapy and that we support the patient to experience whatever is emerging within their minds or their bodies.

[00:13:03]

Even with MDMA, this is hard work and a lot of our subjects have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. During Tony's first MDMA session, he lay on the couch, he had eyeshades on.

[00:13:17]

He listened to music and he would speak to the therapists who are male female chemotherapy team whenever he felt that he needed to.

[00:13:25]

After several hours, in a moment of calmness and clarity, Tony shared that he had realized that his PTSD was a way of connecting him to his friends.

[00:13:39]

It was a way of honoring the memory of his friends who had died. But he was able to shift and see himself through the eyes of his dead friends, and he realized that they would not want him to suffer to squander his life, they would want him to live more fully, which they were unable to do. And so he realized that there was a new way to honor their memory, which was to live as fully as possible.

[00:14:03]

He also realized that he was telling himself a story, that he was taking opiates for pain, but actually he realized he was taking them for escape. And so he decided he didn't need the opiates anymore. He didn't need the MDMA anymore, and he was dropping out of the study. That was seven years ago, Tony is still free of PTSD, has never returned to opiates, and is helping others less fortunate than myself in Cambodia.

[00:14:35]

The data that we presented to FDA from 107 people in our pilot studies, including Tony, showed that 23 percent of the people that received therapy without active MDMA no longer had PTSD at the end of treatment. This is really pretty good for this patient population. However, when you add MDMA, the results more than double to 56 percent, no longer having PTSD, but.

[00:15:04]

But most importantly, once people learn that if they don't need to suppress their trauma, but they can process it, they keep getting better on their own. So at the 12 month follow up, one year after the last treatment session, two thirds no longer have PTSD. And of the one third that, do many have clinically significant reductions in symptoms.

[00:15:28]

And on the basis of this data, the FDA has declared MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, a breakthrough therapy. FDA has also declared psilocybin a breakthrough therapy for treatment resistant depression and just recently approved ketamine for depression. I'm proud to say that we have now initiated our Phase three studies. And if the results are as we hope and if they're similar to the Phase two studies by the end of 2021, FDA will approve MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. If approved, the only therapist that will be able to directly administer it to patients are going to be therapists that have been through our training program, and they will only be able to administer MDMA under direct supervision in clinical settings.

[00:16:21]

We anticipate that over the next several decades, there will be thousands of psychedelic clinics established at which therapists will be able to administer MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine and other psychedelics to potentially millions of patients. These clinics can also evolve into centers where people can come for psychedelic psychotherapy, for personal growth, for couples therapy, or for spiritual, mystical experiences. Humanity now is in a race between catastrophe and consciousness, the psychedelic renaissance is here to help consciousness triumph.

[00:17:06]

Support for TED Talks Daily comes from ODU, meet Dan Danville, a guest bike company, but his old software made it impossible to keep up with demand. It took so much time just to make things work, it was sucking the life out of him. Then he found ODU. ODU automated his business by integrating inventory, manufacturing, accounting and marketing. Now he can meet the demand and grow even faster with the e-commerce app. Thanks to ODU, Dan doubled his revenue and can focus on what matters.

[00:17:37]

Go to ODU Dotcom TED to start a free trial. That's Odilo Dotcom slash Ted. Ted talks daily, is hosted by me, Elise Hu, and produced by Ted, the music is from Allison Layton Brown. In our Mixu is Christopher Fazi Bogon.

[00:17:54]

We record the talks at TED events we host or from TED events which are organized independently by volunteers all over the world. And we'd love to hear from you. Leave us a review on Apple podcasts or email us at Podcast's at Ted Dotcom PUREX.