 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. There are no good or bad drugs. There are just good or bad policies. Actually, there's some substances out there that could be part of the solution. One of these solutions could be psychedelic-assisted therapy. Everyone's always talked about of poor drug users. It's this lack of autonomy. It's like, well, actually, people are using these substances because they're working. I ended up having, in 10 days, had three ceremonial doses of iboga. My depression and suicidal ideation had switched off after one evening spent with this medicine. I felt completely blocked. I felt trapped. And after sitting with this medicine, I could see a way forward. Hope returned. She lifted my head and held under my chin and sang in my face. It sang and I felt a change on a cellular level in my body. The tears changed, something changed from pain to love. I understood then that there's no amount of talk therapy can touch that kind of stuff. But it's magic. These medicines are magic. I would also like to work towards a future maybe way one day. We can go out, we can connect in 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. Welcome, what a beautiful spread of faces. We are on day three of our celebration of Scotland's Indigenous Apothecary. Yes, it's a bit of a mouthful. It means plants of the lands. My name is Anna Ross and myself, along with Fiona Gilbertson and the other Scottish Psychedelic Research Group team have put on this event. The Scottish Psychedelic Research Group was set up a year and a half ago in recognition that there is no collaborative grassroots research and knowledge exchange community in Scotland as it stands. As you're all aware, psychedelics is experiencing a so-called renaissance around the world. But what we felt when we were setting up the SPRG is that much of this renaissance was coming from the medical community and even when it is coming from the Indigenous community it's getting streamlined into a medical way of thinking and a medical way of doing it. And being psychedelic users ourselves and understanding the power of this medicine we know that there are many, many people within Scotland that are currently using these medicines and are acting as healers for their community. On top of that there is also a growing number of people within the therapeutic community that are interested in this kind of medicine. So what we were really wanting to create and what we seem to be creating going forward is this community voice. As Scottish Psychedelic Research Group we're all open about the fact that we take psychedelics. We've used them for healing, we've used them for pleasure but we're out about that. And then I meet all these incredible people who don't talk about the fact that certain substances have transformed into human beings. And hopefully with Scotland with this organisation we will be able to safely talk about that and not be the lunatic fringe. I want to create some space in Scotland where we can create an equitable cannabis market and bring psychedelic assisted therapy to Scotland and not in the way that it's been done in other countries not where you have big pharma and big capitalism. People who were in the room yesterday, some of them are creating the most beautiful, thoughtful medicines. They are working underground taking huge, huge risks to heal people. So we were wanting to create a space where that becomes something that you will not risk stay agents bursting in and breaking up and putting people in prison for and removing children for. And then do you think, I have a real hope that Scotland could achieve that and it's just how do we shape that narrative and how do we change it so that the government see and they are. We've had a meeting with the Scottish Government Drug Policy Division. I mean they're really interested and keen to see psychedelic assisted therapy as some form of treatment for addiction. There are already a couple of trials going on in the Kennedy Tower around treatment resistant depression. I think if we create a community, hopefully it becomes self-regulating and the community then how they hold each other accountable. So it's not like what would we like, it's like the community will guide our role is to hold space for the community. We are here to create that space, to hold that space so the community can then create what it needs in order to regulate itself. My activism is driven by rage and sometimes desperation and what took me to psychedelics was I was burned out by it. Like absolutely fundamentally burned out with it and I realised that rage is not an energy that creates sustainable healthy change. So when I mixed that with the mysticism and the magic of the medicine, the two energies created into something that's like sacred activism and it feels sacred. I am now a sacred activist. Sacred activism, yes. And the energy was different. Yes, people were angry but they also had hope and I've not seen that so much before. In Scotland cannabis was grown for hundreds of years, if not thousands, I mean they found seeds. It was a staple of all of the monasteries, particularly with the Celtic Christianity which was deeply spiritual. We have oral history, we don't necessarily have physical evidence yet of the use of liberty caps but I mean, come on. They grow all over Scotland. And our Celtic shamanism is very similar to many of the Siberian shamanistic things. It is without a doubt we use psychedelics. So what we're trying to talk about is not bringing in a new form of substance use but reclaiming. What I've learnt from the policy makers and from all of this is you need to create a story, you need to create a narrative. The narrative in Scotland is very much, we have this exceptional drug deaths. In regards to the harm narrative, they're not doing that. They're kind of addressing the way that they can and where we come in and where we want to do it is that actually, you know, well, psychedelic assisted medicine for example is probably showing one of the most powerful evidence of how to address the trauma, which is not just the childhood trauma because actually a lot of the trauma comes from adulthood of having to engage in drug-using communities that are criminalised and therefore have these really violent structures. So what we're trying to do is, we're trying to make sure that the drug users has become the norm. Nobody's questioning it. It's being done over and over and over again. And we often do that in spaces where there are police who have done utterly horrific things to people. Horrific things. They've ruined people's, men in front of their children screaming and they've taken them off to prison for six years for cannabis. And nobody says, what happened to you and your childhood that you became part of this terrible institution and you managed to stay in this and torture people for smoking pot. Or what happened to you as a politician that made it okay to make benefit cuts to such an extent that people are dying and committing suicide. Those are not the conversations that we ask other groups of people. So why do we do it with people who use drugs? So, and I don't think we should. I don't think you should ask anybody those questions. I think they're personal, deep questions that you probably should do in a psych... Psychedelic therapy? Yeah, we should all be doing that. 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 traumatized 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 loved me. I said goodbye to every single one of them. I thought of a 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? Is this going 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 who 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. In those circumstances, I had psychological support. There was somebody that I'd 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 or 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, damn, 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 but 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 a 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 have 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'd like to think they would but that wouldn't exist if I hadn't have 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-abiding 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 and 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. Well, 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, we can connect in 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, 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. My son Jake has bipolar disorder and to be sitting here on a panel like this it just feels like serendipity to me. This is just magic. Thank you for sharing your story and I'm so glad that you're still here. 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? Was he severe enough when he went to car stairs for six weeks? Was he severe enough when he spent a year in a rehab mental health ward? 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. 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 this community help us. So I think what's happening in spaces like this and what we can take forward into the world it's just so important. I had just about a 10-year professional career played at the highest level of the game and achieved a lot of glory played at two World Cups childhood dreams being achieved but on the other side of that there was a dark side a big price to be paid and that was the effects of injuries and the demands of the game so in my 10 years as a professional player at 15 surgeries and I was on pharmaceutical drugs every day opioids anti-inflammatories and at later points in my career benzos huge cocktails of different chemicals and I also on top of that was knocked unconscious 12 times and anyone who's looked into the effect of concussion knows that it can have a profound effect on mental health. So at the age of 29 I got a career-ending injury this was 2012 and it was a broken leg and it was a year later sacked for being injured unable to heal and not long after retiring from the game forced retirement I had to have more surgeries on the injury and I was put on antibiotics because I got a surgical infection immediately after the antibiotics my digestive health collapsed so at this time in my life I was navigating the big emotional trauma of losing my job my way of life the only thing that I'd ever really known so dedicate my life from childhood to rugby, to that sport but here I was 29 years old discarded from the game losing my identity as a sports person losing all my friends my rugby family here I was navigating a very complicated situation emotional pain from the loss and also the loss of my physical health I lost four stone in four months because I was struggling to eat any food numerous other symptoms that were popping up I was in a real bad way on a physical level and on an emotional level it didn't take me long to spiral down into a dark depression and suicidal ideation and I was stuck in this state of pain for a year and a half and I was in the stage of thinking well this continues for much longer I'm going to have to take my own life because it felt unbearable a miracle came through and that was when I heard Aubrey Marcus' testimonial on the Joe Rogan podcast it was back in 2014 and he was speaking about his experience with the Plant Medicine Iboga he was speaking about it for about 30 minutes and when I listened to that I knew this was something that was really going to help me I just knew this was the intervention that I'd kind of been praying for and a couple of weeks later I managed to get myself out to Costa Rica which wasn't easy at the time I had a broken leg that also wouldn't heal so I was struggling to walk I ended up having in 10 days three ceremonial doses of Iboga and I won't go into the details because it's you know it's take the rest of the day just to go through one journey but the result was a transformation of my overall outlook my depression and suicidal ideation had switched off after one evening spent with this medicine and I was given a blueprint for moving forward with my life and I could see away through the challenges that I was facing which I couldn't before I felt completely blocked I felt trapped and after sitting with this medicine I could see away forward hope returned and then also very quickly after that experience I was introduced to a couple of Colombian brothers who served at Ayahuasca and they invited me out to Colombia and I ventured out with them spent time with them and they took me down into the Putamaya region with the co-fan, the indigenous healers down there, the titers down there and I went on this adventure of self-discovery working with Ayahuasca, deepening my healing deepening my understanding of my life and integrating the indigenous wisdom which has been a absolute profound part of my healing journey is that the wisdom that the indigenous tribes carry I've been really integrating that wisdom these experiences with these life-saving medicines into my life I have gone through a radical shift in my physical healing and also a radical shift in my consciousness where I am no longer haunted by the wounds of my past I am able to navigate the challenges in my life with a lot more grace a lot more peace and I've really managed to through working with these medicines and connecting with the indigenous to cultivate a life of real joy and connection I really believe that the future is bright and this land needs individuals like each one of you here we need to spread the message and because we know how much suffering there is in this land with the rate of suicide particularly across the population but 75% of suicides are men and I really the work that I do at my health retreat which I've set up with my partner Shannon is helping men connect to the heart connect to the wisdom, their intuition and to try change this culture of neglect and damage that's been going on for too long I used a combination of things I used a lot of cocaine which gave me focus and energy and made me able to work I used alcohol to anaesthetize I used nicotine to enforce a message that I wasn't worthy of being healthy I used relationships as a way of enforcing that I wasn't worthy of being in a healthy relationship my drug was feeling shit about myself my drug was not feeling good enough not feeling worthy and somehow feeling that that was my fault and that I deserved this and I used a whole number of things to reinforce that story alcohol was one of the best because when you're full of cocaine and you drink an obscene amount of alcohol you can remove yourself so far from reality and you can wake up in police cells with blood all over you you can wake up with no money after being paid in cash the night before when you've got bills to pay it's a great vehicle for waking up in the morning and feeling shit about your life you know the drug for me isn't the drug it's the chaos that the drug brings to my life that's what I can sit in all the time that's what I need and the progressive part of my illness was finding more extreme version because for me to shame myself I had to become more and more extreme right that was my drug that was the progressive part and at times in my life I used I would come off being a really heavy drug user and I'd be in a really dysfunctional relationship where I was using cheating and shouting and as a way of enforcing that message that I was no good the addiction is to the feelings afterwards you know it's not a but I mean the substances are great right and the orgasm is great and the obsession to have these things affect us from feeling shit about ourselves but really it's when we wake up that's the one I'm fucking rubbish you know that's I'm not good that's the drug and that's the narrative that that's actually what we work with now with medicine you know medicine is just the medicine is just a vehicle for us getting people into a space where we can talk about changing the narrative in one's life and how we go about doing that with the support and structure and mentorship from other particularly men in my case we do a lot of men's work with psychedelics now you know because I am one and it means I have first experience of the problems that men are having and so that's what we do you know we create environments for men to be vulnerable for men to talk about the things that they've done as a way of enforcing this really negative narrative in their heads that was you know often created in a time that they don't remember you know it's just always been like that and then they've gravitated towards people, places and things that have enforced that message and often people have been through prison or you know they've been in the criminal justice system for a while and again that has enforced this narrative that there's something different about them when actually you know they were just young children that didn't have an environment that was conducive with healthy brain development when I was growing up when I was an infant my family had sort of joked that Patrick just stopped crying when he was about two years old two and a half years he just stopped crying no more crying so I'm in this I'm in this ceremony with Ayahuasca on that first retreat and I'm not really getting anything from the medicine there's no visions, I've just had a song sang to me directly from the shaman and yeah I'm not really getting anything from you know it's the second night and I'm like what's going on you know where's these snakes and you know where's the mother and I roll on to my side and I just started crying my eyes out and I like I hadn't I don't think I've ever really cried like this in my life you know I'm convulsing you know with crying I'm sort of losing control of my body with crying and I hear in the background pat needs help pat needs help and it's the translation coming from the Shabibu lady to the facilitator and before I know it I have two shaman sitting directly in front of me when holding my knee and the other holding my other knee and they're starting to rock and sing with me you know and I'm crying my eyes out and my head is down and I'm just like sweating and crying I've shat myself you know I'm just a mess I'm an absolute mess and they're rocking with me and they're rocking with me and it's it was and Juanita this Shabibu lady this one hand gesture completely transformed my life she put her hand under my head which was held in shame I was in shame response to the world I couldn't receive any of this love that they were giving me and that's kind of a metaphor for how I'd been experiencing my life and she lifted my head and held under my chin and sang in my face and I felt a change on a cellular level in my body you know the tears changed something changed from pain to love and I just and I started like trying the words thank you in my terrible Spanish and just you know it's shitting myself again and just purging and just cleaning and the following ceremonies I just laughed my ass off that week and and that and some then profound experiences with Campbell where you know during that ceremony I was unable to throw up that ayahuasca ceremony it was coming out the back the back door you know and then after explaining this to this Campbell practitioner and I'm doing some really serious work with me with regards to teaching me how to get things over my chin and it took it was a three three hour Campbell ceremony with dots all over my arm you know fresh medicine fresh medicine and and the day that we learned to do that was a day that I learned to speak differently like there was something fundamental changed in the energetic system of my body and I understood I understood then that there's no amount of talk therapy can touch that kind of stuff that's sublingual that's beyond language it's on a vibratory cellular level it's magic these medicines are magic I've worked in drug discovery my whole career to test the efficacy of new psychiatric medicines all sorts of disorders for addictions, for trauma for panic, for anxiety for schizophrenia for depression and in all that time we have come nowhere so about six years ago I decided to give all that up and to focus the rest of my career and all the effort I have and all the knowledge I've acquired working on psychedelic assisted therapy the reason that I've switched is that they work the clinical trials now are showing that they work remarkably well for illnesses that it's very very hard for the psychiatrist to treat so severe depression, treatment resistant depression where somebody has tried four or five of our currently available antidepressants still not responded post-traumatic stress disorder addictions, what do we have to really help people with addiction we're talking about psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms DMT the active ingredient of ayahuasca from the banisteriopsis vine the DMT trial for severe depression has just read out those results are extraordinary and that 50% of people were in remission 12 weeks after one dose of DMT and the results with MDMA and their phase 3 trial for treating PTSD they're extraordinary 67% of people in Rick Doblin's phase 3 trial no longer met the criteria for PTSD that's absolutely extraordinary this is a completely new paradigm in treatment of lots of disorders one or two high doses with all the assisted therapy but you're not having a drug that you have to take on the regs at all maybe you need a top up dose in a year six months that's extraordinary they heal people healing is not a word we use in psychiatry so the drug laws are stopping people doing research and that's just an absolute disgrace DMT what people are using is attached to plants all over the world you know Rory talked about the Shibibo tradition ayahuasca the Chakruna plant the Chakruna plant needs to be experienced in its full spectrum it needs to be experienced with those other alkaloids it usually needs to be mixed with banisteris cappi it needs to be mixed with the alkaloids the harmolines and the harmolas can really affect it's an interactive experience it's an interactive experience and that is going to be completely missed if we keep going down this route and we don't start singing and chanting and getting together and doing all those things that our egos don't want us to do this work has to be done in group it has to we're only getting people when we're working individually with a client or individually with someone we're getting them ready for group I understand that it's the way that we're going to have to go but we have to now at grassroots level understand that unless we get the voice of the drum into the session then this will just be lost like Gabapentin coming from fly agaric mushrooms like Fentanyl coming from opium like you know, quite crappy cannabinoids coming from a really magical plant you know, this is what we need we need the sound of the drum beating bang, loud, loud start doing it now like, yeah all of this information that you're presenting on these graphs has been done for 50 years, it's just new stuff we don't need any more of this we need more drums that's actually how we heal we heal together in group with these medicines full spectrum, full spectrum human I'll just leave it there I only had a few minutes, thanks can I just tell you, Jake just brought a shamanic drum recently hook you up you're welcome hello everybody we have been dealing with these mental health addiction issues for over 10 years now guys and when I got the opportunity to go to a retreat back in November I jumped at it because I realised that I had so much unprocessed trauma the experience that I had on the retreat it was so empowering so joyful when I look at that window and I see all the trees my first trip was all about trees it was all about reconnecting with myself it was about reconnecting with my family it was about reconnecting with the earth and I just sat in commune with a tree for six hours and it was beautiful I cried I saw the most amazing colours, fractals you name it and I felt peace in a way that I never had before ever my way of seeing the world and dealing with the world it was just this night and I'm so grateful to the community, I'm so grateful to the plants I'm so grateful for the opportunity to be able to pass it on to other people as well because people Sandra and our community need this they need this so that's thank you Karen oh I think we're having a mother son okay which is lovely that was a lovely account thank you Karen connected to the spiritual antenna with the dearly missed Karen McKenna plot of attraction for fractions of fractals, fracturing into fragmented factions and their interactions with you and me in this 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 and 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 agreed to it 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 minds will rend and first be slain that I am I and I am Jake forsaken on the lake of time awakened from the open up my eyes I'm shaken for the cut ties with lies heartbreaking I've spoken my words are out in the open play out my heart like show pins show me the world like only you can I'm hoping spin out a tail like token mend the heart that's broken I've spoken