 This is an interdisciplinary conference on psychedelics research. It's a subject, an academic topic that you can study from a great variety of academic angles. So you have psychologists, psychopharmacologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, therapists. And they all study the psychedelic experience and the effects of psychedelics on the human. LSD was really discovered in 1943 and by 1949 people were using it in research settings in the United States and elsewhere. And through the 50s and 60s there was an enormous amount of research with LSD and psilocybin and it was one of the top areas of research for psychiatry. But the CIA was researching it for mind control and it seeped out into the public settings and then the Grateful Dead and Timothy Leary and the counterculture started using psychedelics. You're teaching people how to use their head. And then they started saying we don't want to go to Vietnam and kill people for stupid reasons. And there was a lot of social turmoil and then there was a massive backlash by President Nixon. We must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States. The problem of dangerous drugs. And then there was decades of no psychedelic research and then finally we were able to start it up again in the 90s. And now there's more psychedelic research going on that anytime in the last 45 years there's a renaissance in psychedelic research, psychiatry is opening up to it. There's a lot of problems that the current medications don't treat. So what we have is a combination medication and psychotherapy package. And that has been shown to work better than medication alone or psychotherapy alone. We've this year finally broken the taboo on doing a study with LSD. And we did a brain imaging study which has very much expanded our understanding of consciousness and how psychedelics turn off the function of the default mode network, i.e. ego dissolution. And the brain becomes much more single unit which is communicating across different centers talking to each other in a way that doesn't happen in ordinary everyday consciousness. And that kind of underlines the feeling of unity expressed by the mystics. And now it's a well-known fact that the default mode network is hyperactive in quite a lot of conditions, illnesses, such as depression. So we thought well if that's turned down let's use it to see if it can treat depression. It's incredibly valuable as a aid to healing process. We have a trial that was recently completed in cancer patients who are anxious or depressed, secondary to life-threatening cancer diagnosis. And in that case psilocybin showed very significant efficacy lasting out to six months. Most people have these deeply meaningful potentially transformative experiences that look very much like naturally occurring mystical experience. It's of the type that are reported by religious figures across the ages. One of the main reasons I think where there's an interest for scientists and also for therapists and psychiatrists is that they are able to produce an experience that can have enduring lasting therapeutic effects. There's no single psychotic medicine that has that potential or that effect right now when you look at the available medicines right now. I'm studying the acute effects of LSD on the brain mechanisms involved in altering the emotional engagement with music. People tend to respond really emotionally to music in a psychedelic therapy context and for that reason it can be an opportunity to deepen these emotions and come to a better understanding of what these emotions mean in a therapeutic context. Can you explain us what the ayahuasca is? A long-lasting cooking of two different plants, both of them from the rainforest. It's capable of leading you to an altered state of consciousness. It apparently increases mystical experiences. It might be used in a therapeutic perspective to treat different conditions like addiction and depression. We know that there are so many plants and herbs in the Amazonian rainforest and the fact that people just discover this combination is just very hard to explain. Do you have any explanation for that? My explanation actually comes from the explanation that the Indians give. They say usually is that the mushrooms told them what the formulation of ayahuasca was. Our main area is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. We also have MDMA for autistic adults with social anxiety. MDMA for people with life-threatening illnesses that are scared about dying. We're doing work with Ibogaine outcome studies, observational studies of Ibogaine clinics to look at Ibogaine in the treatment of opioid addiction. So how did you become interested in this field of psychedelic research? So I'm a resident psychiatrist myself. As a doctor I wanted to provide the best information. So yeah, that's why I get connected to here. Did you learn anything exciting at this conference? Anything you would like to highlight? Yeah, I've learned a lot of different things. I think there's really good imaging studies going on showing the changes that are taking place in the brain both visually but also with music. So I think that's very nice and also I think it's therapeutic role for addiction. The idea is that one can use psychedelics and other substances to induce audit states and this should be a tool to investigate the basis of consciousness in general. Part of my mission is to tell philosophers, look, there's this amazing pinnacle of consciousness one can acquire through psychedelics and philosophy is a great tool I think to analyze it but it just hasn't really been done much of late. What do you think what can psychedelic drugs give to people apart from therapeutic use? I think it can really give a lot, you know, we talk a lot about mystical experience, about the consciousness expansion, about the feeling of connectedness and empathy towards other beings. I don't think the clinical setting is the only setting in which people can experience psychedelics. I mean, if you look at indigenous cultures over the years, over the decades, over the millennia, there's always been traditional ceremonial use of psychedelics for religious purposes, for divination, contacting forefathers. What are the major barriers to psychedelic research? The major barriers are regulatory. So in the United States, these are Schedule 1 compounds, meaning that they're available for research but only very restricted conditions and so the cost, if you will, of entering into research is very high for an investigator. We have generations of people who grew up believing that these drugs were associated with unusual toxicity, they made you crazy, they broke chromosomes, you know, people burn their eyes out looking at the sun and there's some resistance to giving up some of those biases. What would be the ideal regulation of these drugs? How would you control access to these drugs? People who are adults should have legal access to psychedelics but they should first try it in government licensed clinics just so they know what they're getting into and that should be very low-cost, paid for by taxes on drugs and then if you have no big problems, then you get a license and you can buy it on your own and do it on your own. We're talking about substances that have the potential to change the life of a lot of people and even perhaps how our civilization works. But then again, we have to take care because we're not talking about something that people would accept easily. People would see psychedelics as dangerous and we have to take care in bringing these results and making some sort of balance between politics and science.