We're at a moment that has been building for well over half a century. Psychedelics were blossoming in the 60s and then we have the Nixon crackdown. What's just happened for the first time is that the Republicans have become champions of psychedelics. We're not talking about trip involves. We have the power to change your brain. There will be $50 million coming out of the federal government for psychedelic research. My prediction would be five to ten years. There'll be 10,000 psychedelic clinics all over America. Dr. Rick Doblin is the founder and president of maps, the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies. His goal is to harness psychedelics to change the way we think, feel and live. What in six Americans is on an SSRI? New drugs for mental illnesses are about controlling symptoms and not getting to the root cause. The goal is for therapists to be cross-trained in LSD, MDMA, psilocybin. And then they customize treatments for the big worry about the more profit psychedelic companies is they want to run away from therapy. When you don't do therapy, you don't take advantage of the neuroplasticity. People need to buy more of the drug. That's this capitalism versus altruism. We want a secondally literate population that has learned about psychedelics for prevention, spirituality, connection. You don't change an old model by criticizing it. You change it by creating a better new model. My MB-OX breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep. Bring us in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us.

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Are we on the cusp of possibly tens of thousands of psychedelic clinics across the United States or are the pharmaceutical companies setting us up for their profit over our healing? Our guest today is Dr. Rick Doblin. We've spoken to him before. He's the founder and president of Maps, the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic. His professional goal is to help develop legal context for the beneficial uses of psychedelics, primarily as prescription medicines, and for a very, very specific and fascinating set of cases. Dr. Doblin's going to explain how maps just celebrated its 40th anniversary, history so much has changed even in the last five years in terms of how we understand trauma, treatment, resistant depression, and how these medications are actually tapping into the neuroplasticity that the human brain is utilizing to change the way we think, the way we feel, the way we live. And in particular, veterans and for underserved populations where rates of addiction, rates of abuse, rates of trauma are higher, how can we get more people that help they need without falling into a pharmaceutical mess? There is so much potential on the horizon, but Rick highlights the one major mistake people are making with psychedelics. You do not want to miss that. We're also going to talk about I began and the recent conversation about can this medicine actually change the way we see the opioid crisis, the way we view addiction in general or is it another way that we're opening ourselves up into a world that we don't yet fully understand. We're so excited to welcome back to the breakdown, Dr. Rick Dublin. Break it down. My mind is fantastic to be here. I'm really delighted. Always excited to talk to you, but we're especially excited to talk to you in this moment. Can you start us off by sort of giving us a lay of the land of where psychedelic research is and in particular what moment we are in at this time in history? Well, we're at a moment that has been building, I would say, for well over half a century. So 1970, we have the Controlled Substances Act and criminalizes psychedelics and then Nixon decides to really launch a global international war on drugs and that wipes out psychedelic research. So for decades, there was no psychedelic research anywhere in the entire world. That was sort of the peak of American power. And one of our worst exports was the drug war. So beginning in 1992, a new group of people took a hold at the FDA that were reviewing psychedelics. And actually it shows how different social justice movements sort of intersect with each other because it was the AIDS movement, the act up, that felt that the FDA and the 80s, when people were dying right and left from AIDS, that they felt that the FDA was overly focused on risk and not enough on potential benefits, particularly for life-threatening diseases. And so they had a protest act up around the FDA building, which they'd never ever seen before. And then in response to that, the FDA created this group called the pilot drug evaluation staff that was to pilot new ways to evaluate drugs more quickly. In a way, kind of like the national priority vouchers, that Trump has just awarded, you know, in this executive order. But anyway, that group decided to open up the door to psychedelic research for beneficial uses that happened in 92. So then we were really maps at least was doing safety studies with MDMA. Then research started in the end of the 90s with psilocybin. And then we basically had about 25 years of enormous investments right now. The nonprofits which began this research have raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million in donations to bring us to this point. But the farm industry has now put in investors close to $6 billion. So we are at this stage where there's just an enormous amount of psychedelic research taking place not just in the U.S., but in many, many places of the world. Not in certain places like Russia, China, North Korea, places tragically like Ukraine, which we've gotten a $240,000 donation from the Open Society Foundation, from George Sources Foundation, is a trained Ukrainian therapist. But Ukrainian laws are left over from Russia and they criminalize research with Schedule on drugs. So until MDMA has made a medicine somewhere else or psilocybin or until they change the law, nothing can be done in Ukraine. But we've got an enormous amount of research. And I'd like to refer people to psychedelic alpha, if they're interested in, it's a newsletter for investors in this area, but it does the best to track what's going on. And they have what's called the bullseye chart, which I'd never seen before till they did it, which was great, which is that the center of the bullseye is FDA approval and the only thing that's in the center of the bullseye is Spravado, a nice emmer of ketamine by Johnson and Johnson, which was approved without therapy and I think is a real bad model for what's best for patients. But it's a great model for what's best for shareholders. Because when you provide ketamine without therapy, the results not very durable and then you just keep needing to buy more and more ketamine. You pride it with therapy, the results are more durable, but the pharmacomony doesn't make any money on the therapy. Okay, so we've got the bullseye is only spravado, but in the inner ring of phase three studies that are either been completed or national priority vouchers, we have quite a few entries in there, use Sona, which is a nonprofit that's working out of Madison, Wisconsin on psilocybin for major depressant, depressant disorder, compass pathways, which is psilocybin for treatment resistant disorder, they're probably going to be the first one through right now. Then there's LSD for generalized anxiety disorder, five MEODMT for depression. There's a series of these that are either close to completed or completed with phase three or in the review process and then in phase two, there's a lot more phase one preclinical. So there's just an enormous and I think what's just happened for the first time, which I think would, you know, shock many people if they haven't heard about it is that President Trump, the Republicans have become champions of psychic Alex. And I think that's because of the strategy that we embarked on a long time ago to try to get bipartisan support in part through working with veterans and others. Why has psychedelic research become a political tool? What is actually happening? Well, I would say the opposite in a sense is that our strategy was to take psychedelics out of the culture war so that they would not be, you could say coded red or coded blue or that they would. So psychedelics were definitely counter culture, anti-Vietnam war, pro-environmental rights, pro-civil rights, pro-women's rights. And also the reason being expanded consciousness allows for a lot of opening. And if you were to, if you had to decide which kind of politics would more align with opening consciousness, more love, more sex, more beautiful in touch with your body, you would say, okay, that feels like a, like a democratic or a liberal or a progressive kind of thing. So that sort of pitted, right? That movement against people like Nixon, who were known for wanting to keep things the way they were, keep the sort of conservative order, whatever that means, American values, whatever that means, the patriarchy, right? All that stuff. So, so then you have this alignment of people associating this kind of movement and consciousness opening with, let's say, the Democratic Party. So explain now what's flipping. Okay. So one of my favorite moments of the White House hour-long signing ceremony with Trump signing this executive order was this other podcaster Joe Rogan, standing behind Trump and over his shoulder, explaining to him why Nixon criminalized psychedelics. And what Joe Rogan was explaining to Trump was that, and this comes from a quote from John Erlichman at the end of the 70s in an interview with a journalist Dan Baum, where what Erlichman said is that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were the hippies and the civil rights movement. And he couldn't stop them from protesting, but if they could criminalize the drugs that they were using and use the drug war to bust up their meetings, arrest their leaders, stick them in jail, that they would do that. And then Ericman said, did we know that we were exaggerating the risks of drugs? Of course we did. So the psychedelics have been underground for thousands of years. And let's just go back a very beginning, which was from 1600 BC to 396 AD was the Ellicinian mysteries. And this is the foundation of Western culture, the Greeks. Brian Murerescu wrote an entire book about this mysterious kind of, yeah, cadre of humans who opened their consciousness in a variety of ways to understand the mysteries of our existence and the universe. Well, a variety of ways, yes, but they all drank a potion called, called Kikian. Yes. And then they marched a couple hours to elusis where they had the ceremony. It was underpain of death. You couldn't say what was in it. And to show what they really thought about it, this is kind of amazing, speaking of the patriarchy. But they said that women and slaves could participate in the Elisynian mysteries, but it involved the psychedelics. And it's not exactly clear what was in the Kikian, but Albert Hoffman, Gordon Wasen, who helped bring us, you know, LSD in mushrooms. And speculated that it was a air god of fungus on the weed and rye, and that it had LSD like ponets and that they were all tripping. And everybody that we think of from the history of the Greeks, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, all these people, our comedies, they all had these experiences. And it was wiped out by the Catholic Church because the power structures, in many cases, don't want you to have a direct connection to spirituality. Of course. And, right. And also, you know, drinking, drinking the blood of Christ, what Brian Morescu talks about is that is one of these remnants, right? Of a time when ingesting something meant you became one with it. And I remember as a kid, I was like, how could they think that Christ is in the liquid? And then when I read Brian Murerscu, it made sense because the only other time that happens is when you break through the realm of consciousness and you become one with the universe and then you are drinking the blood of God. And it all makes sense and you have a revelation. So yeah. It all makes sense. Yeah. So then we have the conquistadors and all that. We have the the middle ages, the burning of the witches. We have the conquistadors who see peyote and mushrooms as sign of the devil, but also those who are often the center of the community. So those would be the first people that would be killed would be the shamans and the people that worked with non-ordinary structures. Mine, B. Alex breakdown is supported by RULA. No matter how you handle emotional stress or life's challenges, everyone can benefit from therapy. 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for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they'll ask how you heard about them, make sure to mention my ambiolets break down to support our show. This episode is sponsored by Wondering Jews and Open Door Media Brand. If you've ever found yourself feeling like you have more questions than answers, you're in good company. The Jewish people have been like that for thousands of years.

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and make sure to hit subscribe. Check out wondering Jews with Michal and Noam podcast and subscribe at unpacked.bio-nmx. Great subconsciousness. Then we have this blossoming in the 60s and then we have the Nixon crackdown. And so I think what's happened since then has been two major things. One has been in some ways the tremendous success of the pharma industry in coming up with new drugs for mental illnesses. But then the recognition that these drugs almost always are about controlling symptoms and not getting to the root cause and, you know, conveniently for the farm industry, their stuff you got to take every day, often for the rest forever. Yeah, there was a great article actually today in the New York Times about psychiatry starting to talk about how to teach people about tapering off of their psychiatric medicines, what in six Americans is on an SSRI of some kind? It's just enormous, but there was this growing recognition of the limitations of that approach. And also this sense that there was a lot of people that didn't even get symptom control. There were treatment resistant that didn't get help or more prone to suicide. And then we have the rise of what actually, when I started maps in 86, the big focus for me for this bipartisan support was Vietnam War veterans. At the time, there was several hundred thousand of them who had PTSD and it was costing the VA, in the neighborhood of $4 billion now because of Iraq and Afghanistan wars and who knows what's going to happen because of this Iran war.

In other words, there is over a million veterans on disability for PTSD.

It costs the VA somewhere in the neighborhood of $17 billion a year just on disability

payments.

So what I like to say is that maps, the nonprofit that I started in 86, we just had our 40th anniversary on April 8th. Well, conveniently, we had our 40th anniversary party in San Francisco on April 18th, which was the exact same day, the executive order came out. And just this, it really added a lot of, almost for 20, almost for 20. But it real well, and for 20 is more about marijuana. For 19 is bicycle day, which is more about psychedelics. And so this was for 18. And that's when our party. And so what we've had is this growing use of psychedelics by veterans. And I think one of the more notable ones that led to this White House meeting was the drug I began, which I had the, I was about to say I had the pleasure, but I wouldn't say it was a pleasure. I had the grueling experience of having a highly beneficial experience, which is one of the most important experiences of my entire life, my whole life was psychedelics, which was a mixture of LSD and I began, which I did in 1985, given to me by the cell Leo Zepf, who we called the secret chief. So he was the leader of the Underground Psychedelic Therapy Movement, and actually I began, had been introduced in the U.S US in the 60s by Claudio Narono, who was also a Jewish psychiatrist from Chile. And so it was then in the 60s that Howard Lotzoff, who was addicted to heroin, but also interested in psychedelics, tried I began and woke up without any withdrawal symptoms after he did the I began. So we've had a lot had a lot of Navy seals go down to Mexico and other special operators receive eye-begain. And then often some of these clinics would give five MEODMT, which is the Tode, which is very short-acting days after the eye-begain. So that really developed this incredible constituency, including Marcus and Morgan LaT, brothers who were both Navy SEALs, one of which is in Congress, and they've had their own experiences with Ibegan. And I think the big transformation has been Rick Perry, who was the former governor of Texas in Trump's first cabinet. And he and I have become allies, and he's become really allies of this entire movement to the point where he himself has gone down to take Ibegain. And so they were able to get $50 million from Texas for Ibegain research. Obviously, consistent with our disclaimer, this is a very, it's a, I wanna say that it's a complicated medicine in that, you know, we're still sort of learning what and how the sort of mechanisms are and also there's tremendous variability, you know, and this is one of the things about the kind of research that you do and support, is that we're taking medicines, right? That are tapping into, in many cases, your deepest kind of wounds, your deepest love, your formative memories, some might even say ancestral memories. And those things don't follow a predictable course, which makes them so special and interesting to study. And that's why integration and therapy is so important because it's not like taking Iuprofen, right? It's not like taking a medication where, okay, this is generally speaking what's gonna happen. Many things get opened up, right? So when we talk about ibup gain, maybe you can tell us a little bit about its history. What was unique about your kind of therapeutic experience you had with it? Also, maybe you can explain a little bit what it means to have Ibegan and LSD and sort of what that chemical compound opened up. Yeah, although just to clarify, so I had Iboga the root, not Ibegan the extract and the clinics now are using, I began the extract and it has really unusual properties. I mean, the thing that I began does or Ibogaduz that no other psychedelic does that we know of helps people go through the withdrawal from opiates and resets your brain. So that even in a couple days days you are no longer addicted. That's actually a danger in some ways because of people then relapse and they use the same dose they'd used before. Now their brain is reset and they can overdose and die and that has happened sometimes. So I began has that unique property. In other aspects it's like other psychedelics in. In the sense that it opens you could say that there's a membrane in a way between conscious and unconscious mind that we all experience during our dreams at night. But through meditation, through fasting, through all different mechanisms, people have found that there are ways to sort of open up this permeable membrane and if things emerge, you know artists talk about it or being inflow people talk about being inflow. So that when things emerge with psychedelics in general, people talk about I began as more about connection to ancestral ancestral memories I didn't actually have that experience, but I do want to just briefly speak about Rachel Yehuda. And she's done work with Holocaust survivors and their children and identified epigenetic mechanisms by which stress levels, anxiety levels are passed on from parents to child. Yeah, we've talked about this intergenerational trauma and how there actually is a science to it. It's not just anecdotal and she obviously is, you know, someone we've spoken about a lot in terms of this research. So yeah. Yeah. And then she's also been doing some studies recently to show does successful therapy change these epigenetic markers and there's preliminary evidence that it does so that it

doesn't mean MDMA therapy, which is what she's looked at, but just successful therapy of any kind.

Just to say we're also getting ready, this is slight tangent, but we're getting ready to work with

MDMA with couples therapy where nobody has a diagnosis. So we've got a project at Columbia

...