 The title of the event is Psychedelics in Scotland, the future of mental health. So we've got a wonderful panel here today. They come from all sorts of backgrounds, but they're going to explain a little bit about the current landscape for research both in Scotland and the rest of the UK. We've also got some people who have lived experience of psychedelics as well, so we'll be hearing from them. So a little bit about me. I am a neuroscientist. I'm an ex-NHS doctor. I've worked in the pharmaceutical industry and I've also worked on nice and signed guidelines. But my current passion and possibly the most rewarding thing I've done is working with military veterans and spouses who are in crisis. And that's part of the reason that I've got involved with some of the psychedelics work. So I'm also going to put, just talk about a little bit about background and put things in context, which is just to talk about some of the statistics about substance misuse and mental health in Scotland. Short and sweet, it doesn't make for pretty listening, but in 2021 there were 1,300 drug deaths in Scotland. In 2021 there were more than 14,000 drug related hospital admissions in Scotland. In 2022 for over a three month period there were more than 10,000 referrals for substance misuse and alcohol misuse to community services. That's just within a three month period and that was incomplete data. 2021 there were 753 suicides in Scotland and I've seen published an estimate that one in four adults in Scotland over a year long period is expected to have mental health problems. So these are very sobering statistics. Having said that we are at a very exciting time because for a long time we've been treating mental illness and substance misuse with the same drugs over and over again and now we have an exciting time where there are new therapies on the horizon. We've got a huge reinvestment across the globe in psychedelics research and research into psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and it's fantastic that lots of research evidence is now being disseminated across the world and a lot of that is thanks to the pharmaceutical investment. There are a lot of companies competing in this area now. So they are at the forefront of highlighting the public awareness of mental health but also the potential that these treatments might actually bring for future therapies. In terms of where we're at across the globe, Australia has stepped forward recently as the first country to legalise the use of certain psychedelic compounds and that will come into effect in July 2023 when MDMA can legally be prescribed by a psychiatrist for PTSD and psilocybin can legally be prescribed by a psychiatrist for treatment resistant depression. These drugs have been rescheduled but they are still controlled drugs so it will be heavily monitored. So I'm going to move on to our wonderful panel now and I'll introduce them one by one as they speak and will be open for questions afterwards. So I'm going to start, to my right, is Professor Jo Neal who is Professor of Psychopharmacology at the University of Manchester. Jo has a long distinguished background in drug discovery and she is on numerous committees related to use of psychedelics and other medicinal compounds and she also runs her own consulting company. She's having involved in drug discovery but I will let Jo introduce herself and she's going to talk a little bit about the barriers to research in Scotland and the UK. So thank you very much Ailsa, thank you to Anna and Fiona for organising all this and to Ailsa. And this is such an important issue everybody. So as Ailsa said I'm a prof in psychopharmacology and I've worked in drug discovery for a psychiatrist treatment my whole career which is coming up for 40 years. Trying to develop better treatments for severe psychiatric ailments so for addictions, for depression, PTSD, anxiety, panic. Disorders that are hard to treat and for which there's a huge need for better treatments. Now I was an animal researcher and I ran my own company out of the university testing new treatments developed by big pharma, small pharma and biotech. And the really sad truth of all this is that in all that time we never developed a medicine that made it into patients that made a difference to patients' lives. And as Ailsa said we have a mental health crisis and that's been exacerbated by the pandemic. Your suicide rate in the roof, highest rate of drug related deaths. This is a crisis and this is urgent. And the treatments that the psychiatrists have available to them are essentially very similar to the treatments that were discovered serendipitously in the 1950s. So that's over 70 years. So the so-called SSRIs, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors to treat depression. They're used also to treat anxiety, the antipsychotics that we're using today. They're essentially based on the same brain mechanisms as those original medicines. So in terms of innovation in psychiatry, we really haven't come very far. And people with mild to moderate mental illness can respond well to these drugs. But that leaves two thirds of the population and people with severe mental illness untreated. Now, with all the work going on, and I guess we've kind of always known this because of the use of psychedelics by Indigenous people, cannabis, plant medicines for thousands of years, for spiritual purposes, for healing. I guess we've always known the potential healing power of psychedelics. So we're talking about psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms. It grows all around us, everywhere. DRT, which is the active ingredient of ayahuasca, which is made by the banisteriopsis vine in South America. So it grows naturally. And Hoffman made synthesized LSD in 1938. He worked for Sandals, a big pharmaceutical company. They could clearly see there was potential for this new drug, but they didn't know what for. So it was distributed widely to psychiatrists, psychologists, people who could work with it, with patients. And there were a number of research studies published in the 50s, in the 60s. And of course it all got shut down by the Nixon administration in the 70s. And all psychedelics got put into schedule one of the UN Convention and were considered to be class ayahuasca. But the results of the clinical trials in those days for addictions for the existential anxiety and depression that occurs with getting a terminal diagnosis, cancer diagnosis, other disorders. We've all met people, my mother died at pancreatic cancer. We've all known people who've died in fear, in pain. And the psychedelics have enormous benefit for people at that stage of their life. Humphrey Osmond treated 2,000 people with alcohol use disorder with LSD during the 1950s and the 70s. And he got a 45% abstinence rate. In alcohol it's enormous. The success rate is 7.5%. So you know we've no any dream of having a medicine that's good. And it's here. So it got shut down. And with the psychedelic renaissance that started in the late 90s. And this started because of the people like David Knott, like Rick Doblin, Bill Richards. They never gave up. They were there at the time. They knew the potential. It all got shut down from them, but they never gave up. But the struggle that they've had to get any research going has been completely unnecessary. And that's because of the scheduling. So schedule one, and we're all bound by the misuse of drugs act. That has caused so much harm and has got us to this horrendous situation. The definition is that there's no medical therapeutic benefit. And we know from all the trial data that that's not correct. So it should never have been put in schedule one. So just to put this into context. People like me who want to research drugs like psychedelics or any psychoactive drug. We have a research exemption for anything that's outside of schedule one. So we can research heroin, cocaine and cytamine. Dreads that are potentially a lot more harmful than psychedelics. The cupboards in my lab were full of them. I used to find the psychedelin as the model in the animals. The cupboards were full of it. NHS is full of these drugs because they have medicinal potential. We have an exemption. We are allowed to hold them. Or academics, we know what we're doing. Universities are full of dangerous chemicals. We know we're missing and we don't have accidents with them. We're very carefully inspected and controlled. So one of the issues for us is that it's very confusing for us. And it's easy to break the law by having something that's a derivative. Do I, for example, as a 2A agonist? It's schedule one. It doesn't make any sense. There's no scientific basis for where these drugs sit. Research is very, very difficult to do. The UK Home Office stance is that you can do this research. All you need to do is get a controlled drugs license. That's from the Home Office. That's true, but the Home Office is under staff. It costs a lot of money. You have to be inspected. You have to have locked, alarmed cabinets. There's somebody qualified to dispose of the drugs. It took me a year. I'm in Manchester University. It's one of the bigger ones. It took me a year to get my controlled drugs license. The form is impenetrable. The least they can do is make it a simple form. There's a lot of bureaucracy. There's a lot of stigma. And it costs me a lot of money. It must have cost 6,000 out of my research budget to get all the cabinets in place. You have to pay every year to have it renewed. But that's, I'm an animal researcher. What about if you want to do a clinical trial? So James Rucker down in London. Every place you have the drug, every building has its own controlled drugs license. So he had six different locations where the drug was blinded, where it was manufactured. All those places he had to pay for the license. It took years to get the research going. And it cost him at least 25,000 before he was able to get a drug into a patient in his clinical trial. And for David Knott for the first Imperial trial, it took him two years to get permission. So the home office said you have to have ethics. Ethics said you have to have the controlled drugs license. So he's just going on with that. He did it three years. The first MRC grant ever for psychedelic research and it was two years out of three years. So it doesn't make any sense and what we're asking is for us to have an exemption for the schedule on restrictions. Which I think should be a relatively straightforward ask. I just want to read you out a quote because I decided to do some research. A qualitative study talking to academics about their difficulties with the schedule on status and whether it was easy for them or whether it had an impact. And this is a quote. So it's a very, very, very, very select people that have the potential to do schedule one research. The funding and you know the workforce is kind of like so many barriers have been put up that you have to be a very specific few. You have to be particularly famous and have loads of grants and loads of philanthropy money behind you that they're willing to chuck millions at you and it's an unavailable thing. What we find is that people in smaller institutions will not do this research. A colleague of mine wanted to do in vitro epilepsy work with calibers. He couldn't get control drugs license. So the scheduling is stopping people doing this work and it's really, really important that we change that. So that's me. Thank you very much. Thanks Joe. It's one of the most important messages about rescheduling. There is plenty of research work to be done. We need to expedite that research work, get it started and completed as soon as possible so that we can gain a bigger picture about past, current and future use of psychedelics in Scotland and that would require the rescheduling. That would require lobbying of Westminster. So it's very, very important. Thanks Joe. So we're going to move on to Dr Murad Wachbach who has come up from the University of Newcastle and he is a specialist registrar in psychiatry and has been running some of the clinical trials with the Compass Pathways Group and he's going to talk about some of the clinical trial results that have been going on. Thank you very much Yann Sir. Good evening everyone. It's nice to see some faces from earlier today. Nice to see you again. I hope you find some nuance in this time when we talk about things. I come to this talk as a psychiatrist and somebody who is interested in consciousness in general. I am a psychiatrist registrar so I'm almost done with my training. I've been working for the NHS for about 10 years now and I did a little bit of psychiatry in Egypt before coming here so I have seen my fair share of people who are struggling with depression, anxiety, substance misuse, difficulties with drinking, with drugs, both in my personal and in my professional life. I don't think mental illness escapes anybody. It is in all of our families, all of our friends and it's no mystery or it's no surprise that it's at the very forefront of the health crisis at this point. I came here around 8 years ago with an interest in psychedelic therapy because I really can't find anything that's more interesting to think about or to use as a treatment as these substances, all of them. There's a few that work in different ways and the really interesting thing is that they are a marriage of substance and psychotherapy and this is something that doesn't really happen very often. Sometimes there's a divide between talking of psychological therapies and medications but the way we interact with these substances is that there is one or two administrations over a long period of time but with a lot of work in between and what we have been finding over the past 10 years and we have come so far over the past 10 years when I was first turned on to this maybe in 2012 it would have been a far, far dream to be sitting in a room like this to be talking about the research that's going on right now. I can't believe that just two years ago we finished a study that had 260 people who were randomized to one of three doses of psilocybin which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. We are at the forefront of MDMA potentially becoming a treatment for PTSD despite of the incredible hurdles that people have to go through to get these substances to study and it's a real shame because of exactly that you have to be a very special and specific kind of person to get this license because you have to really know that it works and want to work with it so much that you're willing to push past that and we lose so many incredibly gifted smart and very talented people who can take us further than we would go ourselves if we were to study these substances and just part of why I find them so fascinating so let's take psilocybin for example psilocybin is the drug found in magic mushrooms people take that and their entire mode of consciousness changes the way they see the world, the way they view themselves the way they connect with themselves completely changes their thoughts change, their emotions change if we think about if yourself has for example a job of keeping you safe from your internal difficulties that is completely taken away so people can be faced with things that they have been stowing away for years but have been coming up as symptoms and people describe this they describe having really vivid memories they describe having thoughts that they never thought they would have had before and some of them come out really well and that's what they need and they're well for six months to a year some of them come out having had a difficult experience and it takes them perhaps six months a year but eventually a lot of the people that use them seem to get to a place where they wouldn't get on their own another equally interesting one is MDMA for example MDMA will have heard about it it's colloquially called ecstasy or it's in the pills that are colloquially called ecstasy and what MDMA does is really interesting so what they're using it for now is for post-traumatic stress disorder and for people who know a little bit about it they'll know that one of the hardest things to do is to face the trauma that happened so what happens when somebody is faced with an overwhelming trauma is that the brain doesn't process it in time fully and so it comes back as nightmares, as flashbacks as really intense anxiety as a real strong urge to avoid any situation that reminds a person with the trauma and it takes over, it completely takes over a lot of people go into addictions a lot of people take their own life sadly and one of the biggest hurdles is being able to go back and talk through this trauma now with MDMA for example it's an incredible drug what it does is it keeps people's lucidity so it keeps people engaged and aware but it takes down their fear response so what happens is what we call the window of tolerance which is basically the space where somebody is in where they can think through something without being overwhelmed or numb which is usually what happens people are either overwhelmed or numb because it's too much so they can actually go through the experience once again and they can revisit it in a way that they hadn't been able to revisit it before and because of its effects on oxytocin, prolactin, serotonin people feel an empathy and the compassion towards themselves and even sometimes towards their abusers that would have taken ages for them to reach it otherwise if at all so they are really incredible substances and if for nothing else just for their interest and how they interact with our brains and how they change the way we view ourselves and we view reality why it's so hard to study them is just really it's so difficult to understand when you do have access to things like heroin, ketamine, fancycledine which is PCP by the way for people who are not sure what it is it's angel dust which we've all heard horror stories about that all this does I think is just take us away from a new way of understanding different types of mental illness different treatments and even our own consciousness and what it means to be human one of the most interesting studies in my opinion for example when they're looking at psilocybin is for people who are facing their own death so people who have a cancer diagnosis for example and they know that it's going to be terminal in six months, eight months and they are finding it very hard to come to terms with this death the depression that they're struggling with is making it very hard for them to enjoy their lives or what's left of it having one or two experiences seems to change this so significantly that they've opened up a special access program in Canada for people to be able to access this as they're reaching their death so some people are being turned on to us Australia, Canada, Portugal are reducing their laws some states in the United States as well are going to decriminalisation so this is one of the most advanced countries in the world this is a place where people like me come from other countries to study and to learn and why we're falling behind on this crucial matter is really something that I'm finding difficult to understand so if we can take anything from today I hope that through our conversations and conversations with people who have had their own healing journeys that we rethink the way we think about these substances and make it just a little bit easier for us to be able to look at them in a way that would help us and just others around us and I think that's it for me thank you very much Thank you Marad, that was very thorough overview of what's going on with clinical trials I think it's very important that we talk about how many indications there are for psychedelic use there are dozens and dozens of trials that are ongoing I'm sure you could list off 10 if not 20 indications off the top of your head I've seen some for chronic pain, anorexia some really quite troubling conditions that affect so many people worldwide so the potential is enormous lovely, thank you very much Marad so we're moving on to Jake who has sat at the end Jake is a co-founder of the Scottish Psychedelics Research Group and he's also a specialty registrar in psychiatry and Jake is based in Edinburgh and he's just going to talk about the situation in Scotland from a psychiatrist's perspective Cool, thank you Ailsa So my name is Jake I am a psychiatrist working in addictions in Scotland and in short I'm in search of better tools to work with I could probably leave things there and I'll expand a little bit I've been a doctor for about 10 years and I've been working in mental health for about 7 years I've been working in addictions for the last 3-4 years that's my area, that's my specialty I set up the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group with Anna Fiona and my friend Christof who's currently helping to facilitate a psychedelic retreat in the Netherlands at the moment We set up a couple of years ago with I guess with the intentions of not wanting to get left behind by England and the rest of the world I felt a bit sick and tired of seeing all the studies coming out of London and Bristol and Exeter and all these exciting psychedelic trials happening but nothing at all in Scotland I spoke to a friend about it and he said surely in Scotland you'd be pushing against an open door with your drug and alcohol problems but it's not really panned out that way So yeah, we set up a couple of years ago with the intentions of starting a community building gathering people from across mental health academia, people with lived experience to try and essentially start a community start movement here and with the express goal of setting up a clinical trial that we're still some ways away from sadly as Joanne laid out the barriers in terms of money, cost home office licence but yeah, we're getting there So yeah, why did I choose to go into psychedelics or why did I sort of choose this path I think yeah, in psychiatry some of the drugs that we work with are SSRIs SSRIs and antipsychotics and I mean not to belittle my profession too much but a lot of the times I think that you could probably teach someone how to be a psychiatrist in about four to six months really just a lot of guesswork, sort of chuckless medication at someone I hope that it works and it's really a lot of, I don't know I think it's not unfair to describe psychiatry as a palliative profession we treat symptoms, we palliate people very rarely sort of cure people that's not a word we use in psychiatry we don't tend to cure people, we don't tend to sort of see healing that's not a word we use in psychiatry either as Murad was saying and Joanne was mentioning I think that what psychedelic assisted therapy can offer people is a chance to sort of get to the roots of well for me it's addiction that I work with get to the roots of their addiction and in my experience that is primarily trauma it's people with PTSD it's people with complex PTSD it's people with childhood neglect sexual abuse, physical abuse and the vast majority of the people I see are drinking are using drugs to self-medicate to press that down to sort of to block that out to numb it out and I mean people describe it as a maladaptive way of coping I think that's quite an adaptive way of coping I can probably do the same if that was my background so yeah I think that psychedelics offer us something new and I think that in Scotland we have the we have the workforce, we have the skill set we've got a trauma-informed workforce we've got prescribes, we've got psychotherapies we've got skillful sort of holistic practitioners from across a range of different areas within mental health and out with mental health that I think that with not a huge amount of training I think it's possible to upscale our workforce to be able to effectively and safely work with psychedelics there are risks, there are risks to any medication whenever I speak with someone about starting on an SSRI anti-depressant I have to warn someone about the risk of suicide these medications can in rare cases increase the risk of suicide and these are not necessarily safe medications that we're working with there's risk at any intervention there's risk to any medication and I think that with psychedelics we have a chance to offer something different a chance to help people, I guess help people cure help people heal and I think that in Scotland we've got pretty much the worst drug related death totals in the world pretty much the worst alcohol related deaths and alcohol related disease in the world I think that it's foolish to not try something new we've proudly rolled out the match standards the medication assisted treatment standards the year before last and essentially it's more of the same it's methadone, it's getting people on opiate replacement therapy and then we've come up against a bit of a break wall so we've got someone stable on methadone they've stopped them from using heroin and then what, there's probably people in here who have lived experience with addiction or that know people that have used addiction services in Scotland and we're highly limited in options and I think that in short we need better tools and psychedelic assisted therapy is one of them we've got a lot of skillful practitioners in this panel in this room and I think that it's something that Scotland should be looking at so I'll have to say for this so thank you for listening Thank you Jake it's obviously heartening to hear that there's somebody so passionate about addiction which is clearly a very big problem in Scotland I think one of the things I would like to mention is how valuable having somebody like a health economist look at the risk benefits and the cost benefits that you might get from being able to implement psychedelic assisted psychotherapy in those sorts of communities because obviously you know they are they use a lot of the medical facilities but also the social care facilities as well so yeah thank you Jake so we're moving on to the second part which is sort of discussing a little bit more about lived experience so lived experience refers to people who have used psychedelics or have been on a psychedelic journey so my left is Rory LeMont who is an ex-Scotland rugby player a formidable character we've heard his story a couple of times this week but actually I'm not tiring of it I think Rory has been on an incredible journey that started several years ago with a very difficult period of injury so Rory I'll hand over to you to tell us about your healing journey Thank you so I had a 10-year career and ticked all the boxes played at two World Cups 29 caps we've had more but I was navigating the dark side which is a lot of injuries surgeries after surgery about 15 surgeries over my 10-year career 12 knockouts as well knocked unconscious 12 times many more concussions on top of that and when I was 29 years old and I got career ending injury, broken leg that wouldn't heal everything came crashing down for me and not long after that I had to have more surgery on my broken leg and I got an infection in the surgical wound on antibiotics and immediately after the antibiotics my digestive system stopped working and so I was in this situation where I'm trying to navigate my premature retirement from the one thing that dedicated my life to and I was also navigating a huge health crisis where my digestive system just stopped working I couldn't struggle to feed myself couldn't digest food I was struggling to walk so I couldn't eat, couldn't walk stuck at home mourning the loss of my career, my way of life mourning the loss of my future because I couldn't see a way forward how could I move on when I could barely feed myself losing huge amount of weight four stone in four months doctors had no answer for what was going on I was in a real crisis deep depression followed suit navigating really intense physical health issues with my digestive system and many more other symptoms heart palpitations muscle spasms bloodshot eyes, insomnia I was in a physical health crisis and also a deep emotional crisis just wondering how the hell had my life gone so wrong a year before I was flying high representing Scotland in the six nations representing my country manifesting my childhood dreams and suddenly here I was just in this horrendous position lost my way of life lost my job lost my friends lost my future and just stuck with no help no support Scottish Rugby Union had cut all medical support and I was on my own cut a drift and it was the material I felt was so painful the emotional pain that I was experiencing on top of the physical pain was almost unbearable and I was stuck in this position for quite a long time a year and a half and it was getting to the point where I couldn't see a way forward I couldn't see a way out of my situation and I was at the stage where as if this continues for much longer I'm going to have to take my own life because this is unbearable and I was hoping for some kind of intervention someone to come rescue me and for a long time nothing was coming until I heard a guy called Aubrey Marcus speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast this is in October 2014 and he was speaking about his experience with the plant medicine Iboga which is very powerful African plant medicine that is used for spiritual healing, emotional healing and also for drug addiction and there's many many benefits to it but when I heard Aubrey speak about it I knew in my heart there's a full body knowing that this was a tool that was going to help me get out of my situation and so within a couple of weeks I managed to get myself out to Costa Rica and in 10 days at the retreat centre that I was attending I had three doses three ceremonies with this plant medicine after the first night my suicidal ideation was turned off my depression was alleviated after the second ceremony I had a blueprint a vision for my future hope returned and I could see a way out of my what felt like before an impossible situation and with that hope my meaning to life started to return I could see a reason to live and from that moment onwards my challenges I was facing were still there nothing changed in my outer reality I was still having the health physical health issues but I was blessed with this knowing that I could get through it and that I could see a way where I couldn't see a way forward before I could now see a path through the challenges and that the thought of taking my own life at this stage now seemed absurd but I'd been in that state for a very long time and part of my journey was when I was in that state in that horrendous situation as I said the doctors didn't have an answer they wanted to write my issues off purely a mental health issue part of my problem that I got me into this mess was my overexposure to pharmaceutical drugs pop and painkillers, anti-inflams, opioids exposure to anesthetics taking these things every day for many many years for over a decade and so the thought of running to a doctor to get anti-depressants more pharmaceutical drugs I knew that wasn't an option and here came into my life a natural plant medicine that works in harmony with the body and it completely transformed my outlook of my life, my situation it gave me insight about the wounds my childhood wounds that I carried deep emotional understanding of the forces that had contributed to my deep unhappiness and through that awareness of the wounds that I carried as well integrating these wounds into my conscious awareness I was no longer haunted by the wounds of rejection and pain that had gone through the wounds of betrayal that I had experienced and so I was no longer bound by the past the pain of the past and I just had all this optimism to look forward to see a way and to cultivate a new life for myself the problems didn't disappear but my whole perspective of my life and who I was and the strength I had within me had been lifted and from that point onwards that was just the beginning of my healing journey working with natural therapies breath work, meditation nutritional therapy with the indigenous tribes who work with these medicines with ayahuasca spent time in Colombia and in Peru and deepened my healing, my journey tapping into the indigenous wisdom and their powerful plant medicines their healing medicines that were deepening my healing and bringing more love and more joy into my life and I feel blessed that I was in a position to be able to afford to spend the tens of thousands of pounds that it cost to get out to South America and to Costa Rica whereas here there's thousands upon thousands of people men and women who are struggling who are hundreds every year taking their life because they're in so much emotional pain and so much suffering they're not in a position to be able to spend tens of thousands travelling to foreign lands to connect with plant medicines that heal and that's a travesty that people's healings out of their reach and we have an opportunity in this country to change the legal status of the plant medicines that are showing incredible, incredible results for healing depression for helping people to navigate the challenges that they're facing so every day that passes that these substances can't be researched and are out of reach of the masses we're losing lives unnecessarily and I've no doubt that my life would be in a very different position if I hadn't been able to connect with these medicines and I really feel that these medicines these plant medicines have saved my life so I just want to to anyone who's listening to understand we need to change we need to change the laws we need to reschedule them so that they can be researched and that they can become accessible so thank you for listening Thank you Rory that was a very powerful testimony that you gave there I think I'm going to reinforce one of the points that I find most poignant which is that we need rescheduling of the psychedelics in order to enable not just research into pharmaceutical compounds but also research into the natural indigenous species that we have in Scotland that have powerful healing properties so thank you for sharing that with us Rory so I'm going to move on to a fellow board member of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group and this is John Anson and he's going to tell his own personal story of lived experience with bipolar disease and psychedelics Thank you so I'm a neuroscientist as well and I also work as a therapist as an integration therapist so I support people that had their own psychedelic experiences and journeys I've had bipolar all my life and also this is the first time that I'm sharing my story so I'm going to try not to get emotional about it When I was 11 years old I was brutally raped I told nobody and I held that trauma in until my mid-20s I think when I had my first psychotic episode I then tried to end my life three times over the course of the next few years fortunately I didn't succeed caused immense pain and suffering not just to me but to the people I loved in my life, my family, my friends I was sectioned at one point and traumatised further because I was restrained physically and forcibly injected with something I think it was a sedative because I lost consciousness very quickly afterwards lots of psychiatric medication to manage my bipolar some of it helped for a while but also I lost a lot of other things in that process I lost my creativity I felt like a robot often and I think I got to a point in life in my 40s where I think I just couldn't go on anymore and I remember walking towards walking home and there was a rail line and I thought, I'm done, I'm going to check out I just can't go on like this anymore I went up to the train line I knelt down, I broke down in tears by the side of the train line and I thought I'm just going to put my neck on the line and I'm going to wait for the next train to come along I thought of all of the people that love me I said goodbye to every single one of them I thought of the train driver and the impact it was going to have on them and somewhere inside of me, some part of me remembered the early stage clinical trial that had been done by Imperial and I thought, come on John you're a neuroscientist surely you can can you find a way, is this a last ditch attempt? can you try this, is this going to work for you? I didn't want to end up taking something that I thought is possible, I could have had a manic episode from that because I'd already had plenty of that in my life and I should say up to that point I'd had psychosis once, at least once every year of my life can you imagine how damaging that would be not just for me but for the loved ones for my wonderful wife I did her best to support me through many of those episodes through my family who were just at their wits end didn't know how to manage that situation so I took a leap of faith and I thought well I'm going to try this myself ever being a scientist I thought well I'll set this up as close to a clinical trial as possible and the circumstances I had psychological support there was somebody that I had agreed that I would speak to a therapist who was comfortable with me talking about the experiences and I decided to try it for myself I was terrified and it came from a point of pure desperation because I didn't see how I could have a future anymore I just couldn't live with the trauma with the pain and every time I tried to talk about it previously I would become retraumatised and feel suicidal afterwards and there was no end to that process for the best part of two decades the first time I ever tried it, therapeutically there's no understatement to say it changed my life there's two clear messages I had from that the first one was down dude you didn't understand as much about the mind as you thought you did as a neuroscientist the second one was meeting my younger self he was traumatised and it was like there was some entity who I thought might have been some version of myself in the future and that was kind of holding like a safe space for me and I said this is going to be really hard for you for you need to go through this, you need to face it and there was a younger me there rigid with fear traumatised, blood stained and I had a dialogue with that person and I held them in my arms and I said I'm so sorry you had to go through that that we had to go through that but you survived this because you became me and at a certain point I just felt all of the tension go and they just kind of absorbed into me and then this other entity or whatever it was however you want to conceptualise it some part of myself said yeah it's a kicker dude isn't it and said this is just the first part of your journey you need to go to therapy now because you're pretty fucked up you need to go to therapy and you need to work this process through so I came back from that process feeling that I'd experienced some really deep healing but knowing that there was a lot of work yet to do so I did, I went to therapy I got that was hard in itself but it was also part of my healing journey I had subsequent journeys which also tackled other aspects of the trauma that I'd experienced and over time I came to a different relationship with it and one day I decided to train as a therapist myself because I wanted other people to experience the healing that I had so one of the things I do now is I support people with bipolar in that context and I think about it what if I hadn't taken that leap of faith and I had actually gone through and ended my life not only would it have had a devastating impact for my family for the people who loved me but all of the people that I've managed to help since maybe they wouldn't have got help I like to think that they would but that wouldn't exist if I hadn't found a way to heal myself and I should never ever be in a situation where one has to choose between their own life self-preservation their mental well-being and not being a law-biden citizen under the laws of this country you should never be putting people in that situation so my hope is that not only can we have greater inclusion so that people like me can get access to the help that is needed, desperately needed I should say that in most clinical trials the recent one by Compass Pathways excluded people like me are locked out of this we are excluded from clinical trials nobody wants to help us why? personally I think sometimes it's because they're too worried about their grant funding or they say to me we don't want to do further harm but by doing nothing harm happens so what I would like to see is diversity so that people like me can get the help that they need but I would also like to work towards a future maybe where one day we can go out connect to nature we can harvest our own medicines and we can bring them back and use them in legal ceremony in a meaningful way that's the future I would like to see so thank you for listening John incredibly brave to choose the Scottish Parliament to speak to about a very deeply personal experience you clearly feel very strongly that this is a healing journey that others need to also embark on in your position so thank you for sharing that so we're going to move to my right we have Karen Llewellyn Karen is the mother of two sons who has I think it would be fair to say had a struggle over the years dealing with drug related issues not her own but those of her sons and actually Karen has a very personal experience where she herself has turned to psychedelic therapy and she's going to tell us that story thank you Karen well John I thought I was going to know what I was going to talk about tonight until I heard your story and it's just totally changed completely so before my children were born I was a conductor on ScotRail and in 1994 a gentleman did in front of my train and the only thing I know about that man is that his name was Joe and he had bipolar disorder and of the back of that happening my husband and I decided to start a family and then he was born and up over 1995 and then Jake came along in May 1997 and my son Jake has bipolar disorder and to be sitting here on a panel like this it just feels like serendipidating this is just magic so thank you for sharing your story and I'm so glad that you're still here yeah yeah yeah what I want to say is it's I'm going to use the words of Christian Amarty it's no measure of good health to be well adjusted in a profoundly sick society my sons have had a spiritual allergic reaction to the toxic world that we live in so we tried to get help for Daniel when he was in primary school and Cams told us that he wasn't severe enough but fast forward to was he severe enough when he went to prison when he spent a year on a rehab mental health board so at what point do we go upstream and help people and this is my problem with the medical model it's not helping so we have to do something different and if we don't get the help from the state we'll do it ourselves I'm not asking for permission and I am not asking for forgiveness from anybody to get the help that we need so the trauma that we have taken on board as a family as a community we are beginning to realise it's on us to fix it maybe it's coming to help us so I think what's happening in spaces like this and what we can take forward into the world is just so important so to be here tonight and I mean no disrespect to anybody here that works in the medical model I know there's a lot of people that are doing their best but it needs to change and it needs to change so rapidly because we are in such a serious crisis we mental health and addiction and I think we've reached a tipping point now we've reached a tipping point we're in emergency mode so yeah I can't think of what else to say but John, thank you thank you yeah that's all I have got nothing thank you Karen that was definitely a mother's story there I think one of the most valuable things you pointed out there is that we need to do things differently whatever we're doing is not working currently so we now need to come up with solutions and we come up with solutions as a society we shouldn't need to come up with solutions as individuals this is a societal problem wellbeing affects everybody so thank you Karen for sharing that so we've come to the end of our panel time and I'd like to put out to the floor for questions oh Anna, straight away you need to wait for a microphone in this situation you can because I was wondering if you could speak to us just a little bit about the role of psychedelics and healing the trauma in families in regards to problematic substance substance use that can cause issues I kind of went off the beam there didn't I so they're all in psychedelics and healing families I think I think what I would like to see I don't know if my husband would ever be up for this but I would like to see whole families going through this together because I think the great thing about my experience that's taught me with psychedelics is that there's no need to feel the fear that to sit with that level of pain you didn't feel that fear you just sit with it I mean the second trip that I did when I was sitting with my grief from my friend who passed away in 2018 there was so much joy attached to it at the same time and it's just part of life that pain is part of life and you've just got to lean in here and accept it as part of the human experience so yeah I would like for for my you know footsteps to be followed by you guys so yeah yeah I'm sorry about this John or anybody's experience of trauma the first time you came back around your anniversary and you realized it wasn't going to be like it had always been can you just briefly describe how that feels what do you realize it's not going to slam into you that part of that you you don't have to answer if you don't want to because right now it's hard and painful so I find am I right in thinking that you you want me to kind of reflect on where I am now just the general sense of feeling if it makes sense when you realize the anniversary is approaching but it is no longer the old anniversary if you kept it from me well personally I separate my life into my life before psilocybin mushrooms and my life after that's the only anniversary really that I kind of really think about because everything up until that point was shit to be honest not only because of the trauma but after psilocybin mushrooms it was I could regulate my emotions better I was able to have a greater degree of insight into my health and what I needed to do to stay well and I've been psychosis free for over seven years not once since then have I had psychosis that's a game changer for me that's been incredible I could never have done the level of training that I've done subsequently if I had psychosis every year so the impact is and that's just for me but never mind the impact that's had for my family and the people who love me loving wife and family and they feel they've got somebody back who they love as well from that and it also means that I can be there to support them now in a way that I never was able to because I was too busy firefighting on my own crap so when the anniversary comes around I put a little kind of rose on my altar I call it this kind of remembrance and I just say thank you so much to the universe for for the opportunity for the fact that these medicines grow and also to myself thinking thank god you took that leap of faith because without it couldn't be very different so thank you thank you thank you especially to the panels that came in spoke openly in a bit or secular accuser I think the more of us that talk openly about that secular accuser and the use of people and the world is one place you know for each of the panels we are now in Scottish Parliament what do you want Scottish Parliament to do? Oh I don't I don't mind starting on that one I think the obvious one is that we need to lobby Westminster we can only change access to good quality research if we reschedule the psychedelics and I think I think Anna will discuss this we need cross-party working groups on psychedelics I also think that we need regular evidence updates and that might be yeah we need to be looking at what the other countries are doing why are they doing it why are they doing it first what can we do to keep up with the developments if Australia are treating people with psychedelics and we know that it has good outcomes why are we leaving people and their well-being and their health and their journeys until we reschedule I just think we should be expediting good quality research somebody else We need funding to lobby for funding for research I think your enemies should be lobbying Westminster to make psychedelic assisted therapy legal and to decriminalise maps that has had a very big impact on the states and has enabled them in various cities to change their roles this is urgent we need more research we need funding but we need to enable people to access this knowledge I'm happy to go next I would like to get to a point where we integrate legally psychedelic assisted therapy into mainstream counselling of psychotherapy so that appropriately trained therapists can work with it because I think that adds greater flexibility and diversity because there is a diverse range of people who need it for different reasons and they are the best population to be able to work with this not just have it within the NHS system so that's what I would like to see beyond that I would like to see all plant medicines decriminalised so that people who want to use it in meaningful ceremonies do so without fear of imprisonment because we have lost contact with our own indigenous practices of shamanism druidism where these substances have been used for a long time so there is precedent for that and the only way that we are going to get there is together so I agree with the other panellists that we need MSPs to lobby Westminster to change the laws accordingly so that we can get this done and get people the support that is desperately needed I'm not going to add much to that really I think it's rescheduling seems like just a no-brainer to me really and I think the criminalisation goes really closely with that mainly if nothing else of course to give the chance for people to experience it the way they would like to experience it but for people who are already experimenting themselves and already taking it upon themselves to explore their own consciousness to have a place to go when they find themselves in a difficult situation because what we find happening now is that people can find themselves not finding the space to hold them after they've had the experience which is really essential so I think they go hand in hand so that would be my wish I think most things have been said already but I would just be encouraging our politicians to just look at Portugal look at the transformation that country has gone through since decriminalising these substances it's turned into a health and wellness hub of Europe and all the positive the reductions in disease and deaths HIV and just the tourism that's coming in why can't we get Scotland Scotland is a magical magical country and we are so blessed to be in this land and we can create such a beautiful space for people to experience healing and the culture is ripe for healing when there's so much suffering and trauma and pain that's within the Scottish population it's an act of compassion and I just I'm really grateful for all the pioneers here and the scientists as well who are doing this work and trying to push the change in the legal status Scotland can become a beautiful haven of healing with these changes I'd love to see that Are there any more questions? This evening I left very deeply inspired by what everyone has said tonight I guess my background with this would be I was involved in the second of the first I'm official with those prevention centres in Glasgow in 2019 My background involved the dealing with the poorest communities in Scotland the deprived communities in Scotland where I learned that drunk use was larger on efforts to try and medicate themselves and try to deal with deeply difficult circumstances and when that was only reformed by my experiences on the overdose prevention facility we weren't equipped to deal with the deep trauma that people had but nonetheless we were able to keep people alive primarily who were using opioids but I think what you've shown tonight is a whole new dimension to how we can help people and for that I'm very grateful for you to share that information I'm currently working on a member's bill on drug death prevention Scotland Bill and one of the big challenges we've got is the legislative competence within the Scottish Parliament to deliver that overdose prevention licensing framework but nonetheless there's a lot of thinking going about how we achieve that under the current devolved reserved competences and also how we've achieved things like heroin assisted treatment under the current restrictions so I would say there's probably a mechanism for us to look at how we can do this having home office explicit approval and actually you can prescribe anything really clinically so let's look at how we innovate just say please get in touch as a follow up and we can look at how we can use this bill as a way of trying to innovate in this space but adding any understanding of how psychedelics could perform a role here that was deeply helpful to society so thank you for that, cheers Thank you Paul I don't mean to put you on the spot here but we are about to call for some MSPs to sponsor a cross party on psychedelic medicine so it might be something you want to think about sort of going forward Cross party group certainly have a role biggest challenge in this parliament is getting enough people to be quarrel for anything because there's such competition for time there is already a cross party group on mental health there is already a cross party group on medicinal cannabis so there might be opportunities to broaden the agenda or scope of those existing cross party groups so that's something we can discuss I would also suggest as a mechanism to get parliamentary time to discuss this in more detail would be to utilise the public petitions and citizens participation committee which until recently I served as a member of we only need one signature to trigger a petition that's based on the quality of the petition I wouldn't frame it as something that's at risk of saying it's a reserve competence I would put it as how does the NHS in Scotland develop this field and that's something that would open the door so that's being an inquiry that the petitions committee and the health committee could take forward so it's certainly something I would be happy to do and other MSPs would be happy to go along and sort of advocate for when it came to the committee I would say that's actually probably more useful than a cross party group can often just be talking shops that don't do anything not to be rude about CPGs but it's actually more useful if you get a committee doing something there you go that's fair enough it's true that you meet three times a year but we have the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group that we've set up a year ago and the whole point of that is to create this user voice that can then feed into a cross party so the work gets done behind and then effectively you're just meeting three times a year to make that campaign but thank you so much for turning up wonderful do you have any more questions or comments wonderful panel really wonderful panel it was nice and it was said and felt I could see you feeling each other it would be beautiful thank you I hope that's given the strength to another man in the room to come forward for that often a lot of these suicides are down to that that issue certainly a few of my attempts were and I can't remember the first time I heard someone a grown man speaking about that transformed my life so thank you for that something I'd just like to make sure because legislation and whatnot I think was integral in working with these medicines as a practitioner as a participant and I think the biggest impact could be made in this field if we go fund me together and get some of these politicians or some of these retreats that are going over in Holland and ask potentially if we make a difference because it starts with the individuals you want to start it with me and talking about this stuff and campaigning about this stuff all the time that's what we're doing we're changing lines and often the people that rise to the top of narcissistic systems are the people that need our healing the most and quite often that's politicians I mean just look around the world about who's running us that's not who's meant to be a charge so here perhaps perhaps perhaps when we're building the infrastructure what this is going to look like for professionals and for non-professionals working with medicine is that we built into the infrastructure that we have to be working with medicine on a personal level and they have to really not be doing much else that means they're full dropped and that goes for politicians as well just to be clear Thank you My name is Samuel Holmes and I run a family's company for change group for families affected by drugs and alcohol obviously facility and more than family school group for families affected by drugs and alcohol I'm among the three adult addict children and I've came to this event another event that few on an analyst have put on so that me as a modernist 65 years old understands what psychedelic drugs are cos that's what sends me to us as parents drugs so drugs means you can't take drugs that's bad so bad experiences with addiction in my family but I'm learning and I'm understanding what psychedelic means so to get this over to the public by me, Amane with the adult children and all my family's foot boots and family's campaign for change group for the high ones to be honest you need to come and to the family group to make us understand what this medicine is going to do to heal us as families me as a mom I'm not going to treat and try because I'm starting to realise the trauma I've had and I'm now 65 I could have quite a good life for the rest of my life in my older years and my family and all my friends and through the groups need to be educated to understand it and I think that's a part everybody that's taking part in what I've listened to is absolutely amazing I'm blown away by it but you have to understand the normal joe public family when you hear the word psychedelic drugs because that's what comes into it if we can start educating people and go round the family support groups we've got a few for the highlands to the borders and I think and I've invited people on our Zoom group on a Thursday night so we can reach more people and I would like to see that promoted that through today earlier on we were speaking to the we were preaching to the converted that's now the people we need to reach we need to reach the people that didn't understand and see how much healing psychedelics can do for families so I think that's another way forward and we need to start talking about it with families no individuals and being part of a group makes it even more widespread so everybody's welcome to families campaign for change or middle of the family support group to start spreading the word to the families Thank you to everybody the panel was incredible great learning and hugely rich conversation my background's in HIV activism and the thing that's used as the excuse is stigma I'm really interested I think we acknowledge that D-Crim is critical the need for solid evidence robust policy changes thank God MP's shown up to listen and obviously underpinned by incredible personal brave testimony which pisses and everything as far as I'm concerned when it comes to the storytelling but I think we live in a world of brands and I think coming to the thing tonight I thought I was coming to the psychedelic research gig and it was the indigenous blah blah blah blah and I think that's really interesting to me I'm really curious to see what the panel think about and a world of clicks and echo chamber bullshit and how we rebrand this to make it palatable to mami's and daddy's and family's my background was gay clubs and ecstasy and ketamine generation and discudency that was my introduction to a partner who lives with mental health challenges and has tried several potions, lotions and pills and I think maybe looking at where we're branding this so the tipping point that we're talking about which will be achieved through the pillars of D-Crim and policy awareness and awareness testimony and storytelling which is critical to our culture but the branding of it I just wonder if there's a conversation about brand psychedelics as a medical, social spiritual intervention for spiritual malady might be interesting how do we rebrand it, any ideas? We don't rebrand we learn from the great movements that came before us so we learn from the HIV communities we learn from the gay communities and we learn from all the communities because drug policy reform is not about drug policy it's about freedom it's about freedom from stigma and it's about freedom from criminalisation so we share the same oppressor and as long as we always remember that then that's what keeps us not divided I think the HIV movement is moving too away from using stigmas as an excuse stigmas are not cutting anymore activity I just think it would be interesting for this movement to move because of it one of the things that the SBRG is really focused on and I guess it's rebranding but it's basically saying these medicines were used in our culture up until fairly recently in human terms up until the witches were burned we've been using other plant medicines up until the 1970s as medicine but if you're talking about psychedelics the thing that we're wanting to do in the SBRG is to not say this is a new medicine say this is something that was oppressed and was burnt and killed and murdered and annihilated from our culture so all we're doing is reclaiming most of us in Scotland spent our early October or not most but many of us in Scotland spent our early October you know in the early morning sort of foraging for those little mushrooms so we're talking about something that grows everywhere and so yes there is an idea about branding but I think what we really like to do is more just say this is part of us we're actually reclaiming our heritage as a way to heal the society that's been caused by Cartesian style neoliberal capitalism fucking popular state fucking popular state I'm sorry I'm sorry yes I don't know if that had to answer and also like the other movement we get honest you don't want to do that way Hayden because you get honest coming out and saying this is what I'm talking about can I say something about that can I say something about that so I'm a cannabis and psychedelics journalist and so I write for mainstream so that's exactly who I'm talking to are the people who don't know anything about it so I'll write for the times and independent in the mirror so it's the masses you know and while yes we do need to be talking about reclaiming and everything really what I mean it's already happening this rebranding it's already happening you've got this renaissance it's suddenly become part of the wellness movement and it's quite trendy you know so it's coming out anyway when you bring out into the mainstream these stories about the families and about the parents, the mums the people who have suffered as children and the people who continue to suffer as adults and what's going on there that's what actually rebrands it because at that point you're not looking at it as a drug anymore you are looking at it as a medicine and that is already happening so it's literally when you it's the language you use to talk about it and make you frame it and that's what I'm doing it's what other people are doing in the mainstream so it's happening but you're absolutely right what you're saying about the language you use the way things are titled and whatever it's really important and key to it as well OK thank you I'm just noticing the time and I think we need to be wrapping up I wanted to say a really big thank you to Pauline McNeill for hosting this here Pauline this is the final event of a series of three day events we hope to be having more in the parliament as we've said as we've mentioned we would really like some MSPs to consider setting up a cross party and psychedelic medicine I know it's tokenistic but the reality is is that we have these elements Pauline you missed that when Paul was talking about the tokenism element of the cross parties so there are other mechanisms for those of you that haven't been involved throughout the rest of the groups we'd love it if you can get involved with the SPRG yep we're going to get Pauline up here but yeah thank you and also thank you to our speakers and also to our volunteers throughout the three days wonderful thank you so much and then I'm going to pass over to Pauline I'll just finally say that we're meeting at the Hollywood Tavern the brass monkey at half past eight if anyone fancies a drink afterwards important things you know got to socialize of course Anna as usual you and Fiona have provided I think some of the most amazing speakers we've had here in the parliament really really dynamic and interesting thank you so much for being here well I'm already cheering the cross party group on medicinal cannabis and a few others so I'll be happy to support it but I can't take up an office bearer's position but I think I'd like to see more discussion on this topic I mean I suppose there are similarities with what we're trying to do with in the sense that we believe in the freedom of people to be able to look after their well-being by getting access to whatever they think makes their lives better so that's the commonality I think between what you've been talking about and what we try to achieve and even though it's prescribable now I've got so many hurdles to cross and that's why having a parliamentary forum trying to break down some of those barriers is so important and I think if you're planning to do something else I wish there was a few more MSPs here I think me and Paul Sweeney have been the only two that have been here but I know there's been a lot of in fact Collette Stevenson was also here and she had to go earlier but I think there's a lot of interest in this subject another day Anna we can do something else but you and Fiona Gilbert just do fantastic work recovering justice and what you bring here is really unbelievable so thank you so much to both of you so with that we'll close the event go and have a drink and thank you very much for coming along thank you so much connected to the spiritual antenna of the dearly missed Makenna flot of attraction four fractions of fractals fracturing into fragmented fractions and their interactions with you and me and it's the perfect symmetry of sacred geometry there is no poetry that can reconcile me with my enemy because my enemy is me I see and how could I look at me kindly when I've been stumbling through this life so blindly monotone torn all alone eyes wildly searching for something outside of me trying to recover some broken shard of me when the answer was always at the start of me always at the heart of me there's no part of me that could break away and not find its way back again like a jigsaw piece lost for the longest time and then I greeted again like a long lost friend that I promised I'd bind to myself until the very end see you again around that bend now and then I comprehend that time will bend and I will break and mines will rend and first be slaked that I am I and I am Jake for sakin on the lake of time awakened from the open up my eyes I was shaking from the little cup ties with lies heart breaking I've spoken my words are out in the open play out my heart like showpin show me the world like only you can I'm hoping spin out a tale like token mend the heart that's broken I've spoken