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Psychedelics Today

Dr. Ben Sessa - MDMA in the UK

Psychedelics Today

Psychedelics Today, LLC

Life Sciences, Science, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.6598 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2018

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Download Dr. Ben Sessa is a writer, psychiatrist, and researcher working in the UK to start the first ever MDMA for alcohol addiction study. We have a very exciting discussion and even get Dr. Sessa's first reaction to the idea of DMTx. We also explore Ben's background and his experiences with psychedelics legally - Ben is one of the few people who has ever received MDMA, LSD, DMT, ketamine, and psilocybin in a legal research setting. We hope you enjoy this episode! Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.

Links

Books

The Psychedelic Renaissance

         

To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic

FHSA Front Cover Only

The Psychedelic Renaissance

PR book

Psychedelic Drug Treatments

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Dr. Ben Sessa - Videos

https://vimeo.com/38063005 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UygZnBTWW0M

About Ben Sessa

ben bwDr. Ben Sessa, M.B.B.S., M.D., B.Sc., M.R.C.Psych., is a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist working in adult addiction services and with custodial detained young people in a secure adolescent setting. He trained at UCL medical school, graduating in 1997. He is interested in the developmental trajectory from child maltreatment to adult mental health disorders. Dr Sessa is currently a senior research fellow at Bristol, Cardiff and Imperial College London Universities, where he is conducting the UK's first clinical studies with MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD and alcohol dependence syndrome. In the last ten years he has worked on several UK-based human pharmacology trials as study doctor or as a healthy subject administering and receiving test doses of LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, and ketamine. He is the author of several dozen peer-reviewed articles in the mainstream medical press and has written two books exploring psychedelic medicine; The Psychedelic Renaissance (2012 and 2017) and To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic (2015). In speaking publicly at universities and medical conferences, Dr Sessa is outspoken on lobbying for change in the current system by which drugs are classified in the UK, believing a more progressive policy of regulation would reduce the harms of recreational drug use and provide increased opportunities for clinical psychedelic research. He is a co-founder and director of the UK's Breaking Convention conference.   Enter to win a bunch of product from Bluebird Botanicals!!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey everybody, Joe Moore here from psychedelics today. Thanks for joining us again on the show.

0:14.5

Today we have a very special guest, Dr. Ben Sessa, who is doing some work in England that you all might find very interesting.

0:21.7

So he just got some funding to kick off the first ever MDMA for addiction study.

0:29.5

We get to get into that, and it's really exciting.

0:31.9

It looks like it will be kicking off in the near future, and we should start hearing more from his team.

0:37.2

And yeah, you probably know him

0:39.1

because he's been all over the podcast and conference circuit. He had some really interesting things to

0:44.2

say about how it's okay to make progress on the psychedelic front when it feels like you might be

0:51.3

compromising your values to perhaps, you know, dress up and go to school and try to convince people that you're authentic,

0:59.3

even though you're not necessarily wearing your own authentic clothes, you know?

1:02.9

So I think really the point is that we have a lot of stuff that we can do that really

1:10.1

it's a lot easier to do if we're dressed in business

1:13.3

attire or you know maybe we have to cut our long hair temporarily just to get through something

1:18.6

but it depends on what we're doing right if you're a therapist maybe it's not a big deal but if

1:22.4

you're trying to get some really crazy project through a stodgy old government maybe you do

1:27.4

need to do something

1:28.0

like that. So I hope you enjoy the show. That's kind of my idea of what he said in podcast

1:34.3

interviews I've listened to with him before. He said a lot of things, though, and I think you're

1:39.3

going to enjoy it, and it looks like we're going to get him back on the show again in the near future.

1:42.8

So I wanted to throw out a little bit of information about our sponsors. We are sponsored by TransZen, product by

1:51.0

MthiaZen. It's a mood enhancement supplement that I've been using for a while. Same with Kyle.

1:57.0

It's great. I think it's excellent for a day-to-day supplement. It's also a really helpful supplement if you maybe partied a little too hard or made a bad decision or two. So it's, you know, something you could definitely easily take every day. And if you felt in need, you could take more. I think it's a really well-designed product. Caitlin Thompson, the designer and owner of the

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