 You guys got so quiet. So hello, welcome everyone to the first ever cooperation of the Psychedelic Society of Vienna and Students for a Sensible of Drug Policy Vienna. My name is Orsi, over there. I started the Austrian chapter of Students for a Sensible of Drug Policy, which is an international grassroots organization that mobilizes and empowers young people to take part in the political process. And we're pushing for sensible policies to achieve a safer and more just future for ourselves. And we're fighting against the current counterproductive prohibitionist policies, particularly the those that really harm us as students and young people. I kind of feel like I have to give a disclaimer here that we don't condone or condemn drug use. We just respect everybody's right to take decisions about their bodies and their future. And we want everybody to stay safe. So this is about SSDP. And the reason that I am investing a lot of energy and time in establishing this is because two years ago when I was studying in my master's program of communication science, I started talking about my own interest in psychedelics. So this is social sciences. There was nothing to do with the substances. I was interested in the stigma and how it impedes research and people's rights to basic human rights. And I was met with a very, well, it was a surprising reaction for me. But as I learned more about the subject, I realized this is very common, that I basically got kind of isolated, not just academically, but it affected my social life as well. I was the drug user, the junkie, just because of one part of my life didn't really fit people's expectations of what a responsible adult should do. So I'm really excited to sit here and host amazing people who work to raise this stigma that I've experienced firsthand. I would like you guys to introduce yourself really quick as a starters. And then we dive into our topic, psychedelic science. My name is Natalie Ginsburg. And I'm the Policy and Advocacy Director at MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. And I live in Oakland, California. Hi, everybody. How are you all doing? Thank you for coming. It's late on a Tuesday. The weather's been really nice. We're happy to have you indoors. Thank you for being here with us. My name is Ismael Lodido Ali. I work as Policy and Advocacy Council at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. I'm a lawyer and I work in policy and advocacy with the background in human rights and criminal justice reform. I got involved with Students for Sensible Drug Policy myself four years ago in 2014. And then while I was in law school, actually, while I was a graduate student, and then led my chapter at the end of my law school career and then recently have transitioned into leadership. And I'm currently serving as the chair of the board of directors of Students for Sensible Drug Policy as well. And I have the immense privilege of getting to work with these incredible people and talking about these amazing subjects in a lot of different contexts. And I'm really looking forward to sharing things with you all today. Hi, hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. And thanks to Marlene and Orsi for the invitation. My name is Constanta Sanchez. I work at the International Center for Atomotanical Education Research and Service. We are based in Barcelona, Spain. And while I'm a drug policy researcher and advocate, and I coordinate our legal human rights and policy and advocacy activities, I'm happy to be here. Hello, and good evening. My name is Marlene Rupp. I'm very happy to see you all here. We were, for a short while, we were considering of changing the room to a smaller room. And I'm very happy that we didn't do that. So I am Marlene. I am the author of the science blog sapiensuke.com, where I published a series of articles about psychedelic drugs. And I'm also the co-founder of the Psychedelic Society in Vienna, about which I will tell you a little bit more at the end of our event today. I'll try to use this one. Thank you guys so much for coming today. And yeah, all of you, for showing up in such a great number. So to get us on the same page, I would like to start with a question for you guys. And it would be cool if more of you would answer. So what do we mean when we talk about psychedelics? What are psychedelics? And why is it important for us to talk about them in this context? You can't hear me. Let me do it one mic. So the question I asked is, just to clarify, to get all of us on the same page, what do we mean when we talk about psychedelics? What are these substances? And why is it important for us to talk about them? I'll start by just giving some basic definitions to start us off. The word psychedelic means mind manifesting, which really gives us a pretty broad range of effects. And the word psychedelic, as a noun, is often used to describe the substances that help us manifest our mind. The root and the similarity between these substances, although they have a tremendous variety of different effects and they come from chemicals and they come from molecules and they come from plants and they come from our own minds, essentially, is that they give us access to some sort of altered state that, depending on the experience, can illuminate different parts of one's experience or one's inner self. And I'll pass it on to give a little bit more context. Well, I was actually offering maybe a little personal view on the topic. And we can later talk about what psychedelics, what the definition of psychedelics are, but maybe to give you an idea of why people get interested, become interested in psychedelics, I could share my own story really, really short with you. That's years ago, these substances had a profound impact on my life. They helped me working through my own issues in ways that maybe more conventional therapies couldn't. And my personal opinion is that we live in an over-medicated society, like so many people suffer from all sorts of addiction and depression and anxiety in various, like some a little more and some a little less. And while classical psych-meds like antidiacipines and antidepressants, et cetera, certainly help relieving the symptoms, I think that they rarely tackle the underlying issues and I think that psychedelics offer a very different approach here. I think they work exactly where it hurts the most and in that way they offer this very different approach, an approach that really inspires me and an approach that you guys can certainly talk a lot about, like what you see in your work about what is possible with psychedelics, this transformative effect in people. When you were speaking, I was thinking a lot about how psychedelic healing or psychedelic therapy tends to work kind of more holistic ways. You were describing a lot of our current approach to mental health and to pharmaceutical medication is often very symptoms-focused and maybe you'll be prescribed multiple different medicines to adjust multiple different symptoms and never really are trying to understand the root cause of all the difficulties that you're facing. So one of the really powerful things I find about psychedelics is that they tend to work in this broader kind of expanded way and because of that often can work quite well in collaboration with other holistic healing modalities, things like yoga, meditation, just things that really take into account your mind and body as one entity instead of these separate. All right, thank you guys so much for sharing your personal stories and point of views. So I would like to dive into our topic which is psychedelic science at New Frontier in mental health and what the organizations that you work for do in exploring this New Frontier and maybe a little bit of how you got into your line of work and your relationship to psychedelics and this new way of treating mental health. My story actually does have a bit to do with what I was just mentioning and I was working as a social worker actually in graduate school working. First I was a guidance counselor out of middle school in the South Bronx and a really highly kind of traumatized high poverty neighborhood and then I was working at an alternative sentencing court for people who are arrested for prostitution. So instead of being sent to be incarcerated to prison they had the option of mandatory therapy and working in those contexts just really helps me see one that our approach to mental health was really broken because it was so symptoms focused and it felt like we were just putting band-aids on. But on top of that, that so much of the trauma and struggles that people that I were meeting with were facing weren't just about something a little bit off in their brain or of chemical imbalance, but that they had experienced systemic, huge issues like racism, police violence, things that are caused poverty, that causes their lives to things to these difficulties to develop. So that experience led me to work in drug policy reform because I saw that I thought that was in the United States drug policy is kind of driving our mass incarceration issue when a majority of people are incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. So that's kind of how I got to that work. And then when I was working in drug policy I started reading, literally just reading the psychedelic science research and I was like, hmm, this looks really interesting. What is this thing that can help address addiction and depression and PTSD? Things that my teachers were telling me, these are different diseases. This is what the brain looks like. This requires this kind of all these different, and I also don't mean to demean the many modalities that are developed to treat these many different things. But yeah, just having that context and then learning about the work was actually what first drew me, but I have to say it is quite funny at my work because most people in the psychedelic field have had very personal experiences and I will say I've made up for lost time, but when I first started working on maps I was really like, wow, the research is fascinating. And cannabis had been a psychedelic ally to me and I think had kind of helped me have an understanding of what other psychedelics might entail, but so what does max do? Thank you. So, maps, our goal is developing the medical, legal and cultural context for the beneficial use of psychedelics and cannabis. So, that mission is quite big and we've decided to focus and prioritize on the medical space initially. Well, for the first 30 years because maps was founded 30 years ago and in that vein we conduct FDA approved, which is the medical drug development system in the US. We also do research outside of the US, but federally approved drug development research and our focus, our main area of focus is using MDMA assisted psychotherapy to treat PTSD. And we've been quite successful with our, we've finished phase one and two of this research and starting phase three, which is the final phase of research and we expect to finish in 2021 and our results are incredibly promising so much so that we've actually received breakthrough therapy designation. It's called from the FDA, which basically indicates that they're are so excited by our results that they want to work with us to make sure that this process will keep going. And then on top of that, we received another agreement called the special protocol assessment agreement, which basically means that if we get, if our results are at a certain level of success following up on our similar to our phase two results that their FDA is actually required to approve it as medicine. So we're really, really excited and we do research with a few other substances but I'll let Ismael tell you a bit about that. Hello again. So I'll start with a little bit of the background, like how I got here and then how that's related to the work that I'm doing now with MAPS. And it is kind of a crossover of that personal story and the larger structural issue. I was 11 years old when 9-11 happened and after 9-11 in the United States, there was a huge reaction by the domestic law enforcement to begin spying and doing illegal surveillance and other infringements and curtailments of civil liberties in the United States. So as a teenager, I became very disillusioned very quickly around this relationship with my faith. I was raised Muslim. My family are both immigrants to the United States and I felt like that was a system that I could agree with in some ways. And yet I was being told and seeing this huge shift in the culture that was reacting to this identity that I had that I didn't even fully understand at least at the time. And then right around the time I was kind of 16, 17 years old, I began exploring kind of these ways of grounding and with these ways of expanding my experience, partially as a reaction to this trauma and this fear and this kind of dissociation that I was experienced as a young person directly as a result of that kind of political framework that I was put into. It wasn't my choice, but I was there. So I had a psychedelic experience as a 16-year-old that really kind of helped shape a lot of the personal kind of socio-political cultural frameworks that I had been offered but never actually fully understood. And it was right around then actually that I also discovered maps on the internet in like 2005 or 2006. So flash forward 10 years, while I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and I went to law school to focus on two things, either the domestic curtailment of civil liberties focusing on surveillance and kind of that issue within the United States or drug policy because I had been studying incarceration and had been studying the way law enforcement in different countries was used to reinforce these massive kind of multinational systems of control via drug policy. And I knew that and had seen that and had been kind of experimenting for many years but didn't actually necessarily see the place where the connection happened. So I was working in civil liberties in incarceration reform and setting human rights when I was in law school and then I met Natalie. And in 2015 we met and really kind of started realizing that because MDMA is so close to approval in the United States, we're now about three years away because cannabis was very rapidly becoming medically available and now recreationally available in the United States because other research was happening with psilocybin and these other substances all over the world. We knew that something was coming and something had to change. So I was able to join MAPS really to help Natalie and to help Rick and to help the team focus on this kind of new space that we would soon be entering. We knew that like cannabis, the process of mainstreaming a substance that's been demonized and stigmatized for so many years requires certain kinds of education, certain kinds of engagement and relationships. So I kind of brought that knowledge that I had and that experience that I have working in criminal justice reform and human rights and trying to bring a framework of access to medicine, of access to religious and spiritual freedom, of access to cognitive liberty, these things that our minds and that our bodies should have access to but because of these repressive systems, whether it's the global drug control system or something else are limited to people in these different countries, whether it's in the United States or otherwise. So the work I do with MAPS and the work that we do together is really about helping bring frameworks, bring regulatory, personal, cultural, medical, spiritual frameworks to this use in a way that actually gives the people who are having these experiences a place to land. In the 1960s, there was this huge explosion of interest in psychedelics and everyone was really excited but because in the West and in the North you didn't really see the systems that you have in these indigenous tribes that have been using many of these substances for thousands of years because we're kind of missing those systems. Psychedelics showed up and then imploded and then created this kind of emptiness, this reaction that prevented research for so many years and now we're at a position where we've been doing research, we have some evidence and we got to move forward, so. Talking a bit about the work we do from ISEERS, it's slightly different from the work that MAPS do but it's very related at the same time. We, our main focus is psychoactive traditional plans I mean for that like as plans like ayahuasca, iboga, piote, most rooms, et cetera. So the particularity that we face is that well in the broad sense that the mission of ISEERS is transforming society's relationship with these traditional plans in a context in which during the last two decades approximately we have witnessed expansion of these traditional plans beyond their native context. So we can see now in many parts of the world that for example in the case of ayahuasca it's very evident that many, we can see many groups, many ayahuasca churches and many people organizing rituals, organizing ceremonies and this expansion or globalization involves not only the ingestion of a substance in a like let's say a leisure context or just for fun, let's say. It involves also the exploitation of a setting of a ritual and also the intention goes far beyond like the intention of having a pleasant time. It's most of the times involves a name of personal development of exploration, of healing or no different from like let's say like mass consumption, mind altering substances. So in this sense our work is aiming to build bridges between the native context in which these plans, psychoactive plans have been used for millennium and the new uses that we have been, well we have been spreading in non-native, let's say non-native context. So from this starting point our work, we have several work streams, let's say mainly education, scientific research, legal and policy work and also community engagement. So for example, in 2014 we organized the First World Ayahuasca Conference in Ibiza in Spain and one of the, let's say the most important results of this event was that we brought together the ayahuasca community and the drug policy community. And in this sense we have been working for approaching both the traditional plans interest people and the drug policy reform movement. So in the work that I do I coordinated the legal policy and human rights activities. For example, one of the services we provide it's under the umbrella of a program, a very big program in which Ismail also collaborated, it's called the Ayahuasca Defense Fund. It's, well the name says ayahuasca but it's not only focused on ayahuasca, it's focused on several traditional plans. And in this program, well our work is, we basically received queries of people which has faced legal incidents related to traditional plans. And some of these people they, well they got arrested or they faced drug trafficking charges for basically for importing the substances because one of the, another characteristics of these traditional plans is that they are not usually produced or they are not usually produced in the same places where they are used. So that means that for example in the case of ayahuasca the main producing countries are in the Amazonian region. So the beverage has to be exported to the places where it's consumed. So this implies that we provide the service we provide the service of legal support to people facing legal troubles. And for example we have been, as we usually go to court to help the lawyers of these persons and we provide expert witness testimonies, expert reports, defense strategy. And we have participated in around 40 cases, not only in Spain, most of them in Spain but all over the world for example in Chile, in Russia, in France, et cetera. And in this context, well basically the main, I'm not sure if I'm going to long or we'll just let me know, sorry. It's in this context what, well one of the things we have experience is that the fact that some of these traditional plans or traditional beverage contains psychoactive alkaloids which are controlled under the international drug control conventions that probably you are familiarized with. This means that these traditional plans and these traditional ways of using them, they also fall under the frame of drug control. So this means that we are in somehow in between the traditional uses and the western or western mother, whatever we can say, drug control frame. In this place in between we are also trying to promote well we work for as maps as we work for drug policy reform in a way we believe drug policy should be based in evidence, should be based in human rights, should be based in civil society participation and not only the vision of the governments and not only when I say evidence is not always or necessarily evidence in the sense we usually understand scientific evidence but sometimes we can collect evidence and that's an important part of the work we do. We collect scientific evidence that it's not always considered as such for the scientific mainstream collective. So that's also an important contribution that we are trying to push to open the spaces of debate of what constitutes scientific evidence and what constitutes cultural rights and human rights and the rights of any person, no matter if you are an indigenous, no matter where you are, the right you have to explore the options that traditional plans could provide for your personal healing and your personal development. Yeah, thinking about what you said and now I have to go back to, yeah. So after this deeply meaningful personal scientific, after this deeply meaningful psychedelic experience that I had, I realized that everything I thought I knew about these substances was wrong. I thought psychedelic drugs like LSD, they're like hard drugs like heroin and they damage your brain and they ruin your life and I thought that because that's what I was told and that's what everybody else was told as well and that's the stigma on these drugs and the stigma couldn't be further from the truth. There are, there's a large body of scientific evidence, hundreds of studies, thousands of participants that has shown that these drugs are, if used properly, they are safe, they are low to non-toxic, they have very little side effects and they do not lead to addiction. And so after realizing that I had a completely false idea about these substances, I decided to do my homework and I went deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into the scientific literature and I read basically everything that I could find and by the way, if you're interested in that stuff too, like all of the neuroscience stuff that I read and learned, I share that on my blog in an easy to understand way with lots of infographics and cartoons. But that's not my point. My point is that after having done that research myself, I realized that these substances have the potential to fundamentally transform our approach to mental health and the world doesn't know about it yet. And that's why I started the psychedelic society because we really tried to foster an evidence-based dialogue about the true risks and benefits of these substances. First of all, that's really inspiring to hear and the world doesn't fully know about it yet. More and more people are definitely learning and thanks to psychedelic societies, there are now over 90 psychedelic societies around the world which is really such an important and exciting way of growing. Yeah, thank you guys. I think Constanza touched on a very important topic that is actually how the psychedelic society of Vienna and SSDP are kind of fused together in many ways that it's very difficult to differentiate or like separate the topics of policy and any kind of research or scientific work or even talking about psychedelics when it comes to something that is criminalized around the world and just to promote a little bit Malina's work, you guys really should read it if you wanna know a little bit about how your brain works in general and on psychedelics and how it affects, just read it, sepia and zoom. All right, the other thing that we talked about, we mentioned that we talked a lot about healing and how using psychedelics is a new approach to healing ourselves and our clients and I want you guys to expand a little bit on how does that look in practice and how it is different from other traditional ways of healing or treating the symptoms as you said. I think that is an opportunity to explain specifically the maps, like therapy protocol and then maybe speak about how psychedelics, because certainly there are many different ways in which psychedelic healing can work, but I know before I mentioned that we're focused on researching MDMA therapy to treat PTSD. So MDMA therapy in the maps studies involves two therapists with one participant and it's a series of meetings, three sessions without medicine and then the session with medicine, which we call the MDMA assisted psychotherapy session, is actually a six to eight hour long session and the participant is invited to put on a blindfold if they want to listen to music and often at the beginning of the session they're invited after they take the medicine to go inside and just kind of lie there and see what comes up. And one of the amazing things about psychedelic healing is that it's often about you yourself leading this healing process. So in the studies, I've had the privilege of watching videotapes of these MDMA therapy sessions and you'll watch someone will be lying there and maybe moving their body, which is really amazing to watch. There's always kind of a physical, not always, but often a physical element and then maybe something will come up and they'll sit up and take off their blindfolds and their headphones and want to talk to the therapist and process something. And often they're kind of just the right thing will come up that needs to be processed and we tell participants to let your inner healer or your inner intelligence guide the process and the therapists are there to provide a safe container for the participant to guide the experience and it's really not about the therapist trying to force something or lead someone to a certain place. And so that's something that I think is really important, even outside of MDMA therapy, that psychedelics are really about kind of connecting to yourself and to others and that process of healing. I'm sorry, I realized I didn't finish the protocol, just say after the MDMA session with the therapist, you actually spend the night as well in the clinic and then have a meeting again with the therapist in the morning and then have sessions afterward. But so it's really a very comprehensive, long process that we've found is really able to maximize the outcomes of MDMA therapy at least. I'll just give a couple additional details that might help put it in context also. Most of the people that are going through the MDMA therapy process are doing like 12 to 15 therapy sessions. So only two to three of them are actually in hands with the MDMA, but then after what Natalie just described, there's also integration, there's also post-smart eating. So ultimately ends up taking a few months, a couple like two to three months, right? And it's definitely a process that integrates the MDMA into that. And one more piece to add to how the MDMA specifically works is some of you may have had experience with MDMA or XSC or something like that in the past. Many people who have experiences with MDMA or MDMA-containing substances do so in recreational settings and settings that are more open concerts, festivals, clubs. Most people who have contact with it for the first time do them in those contexts. And they often do it because it increases empathy. MDMA is one of the only substances that we know of that's consistent in its process of actually allowing many people to access empathy. And when you do it in public and when you do it with a lot of people, that usually means in like a lot of public, like outside facing direct connection with people, which is why there's a stereotype of people taking XSC and hugging each other. But when you have the therapist around you and you have the amygdala being subdued, so your fear response is literally subdued in your brain, and you have this bloom of empathy, and you have these two therapists, or because of maybe, yeah, maybe, maybe perhaps, it is because the fear comes up totally, and you have these two therapists that see your empathy and they turn it back in your, they're like mirrors. So they, instead of you being like, oh my God, all these things, you're like, oh my God. And you just sit with yourself and you sit with your own ability to like process those things. And that's a good example for how psychedelic healing more generally works. It kind of blurs the line between physical healing and somatic healing and spiritual healing and mental healing because it kind of helps us realize that that holistic nature of the healing, the fact that so many of these things are connected and that disconnect by itself is often what causes a lot of the disorders or problems or dissociations or misalignments that people have. So psychedelic healing more generally, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin or LSD, or even ayahuasca or these other plant medicines, often what they do is they allow your kind of subconscious to release these blocks that allow a lot of things to come up, sometimes really traumatic things. The other big misconception is that psychedelic therapy is really fun because you're tripping the whole time. In reality, when you have this space and openness for that trauma or that experience to come up, it's actually quite challenging a lot of the time and you actually have to sit there and process and deal with it, which is why you have the assisting of the actual people that are with you. It's not uncommon for people in social or public or recreational settings to do that in groups where you have these informal therapy sessions with friends that are dealing with these things that are coming up and maybe it's my relationship or my parents or something, but maybe if it's not as focused, that kind of model of having the container that's safe that allows those things to come up is really kind of the nature of it and it really is kind of an internal, external balancing process with both experiences that are coming up with whatever substance you're taking and then also all the things that are happening around. One thing that we do speak a lot about this process of MDMA therapy, but I really feel that we also have to share how many emails we get to maps all the time about people taking MDMA at a rave and healing themselves and that there really are so many, certainly you'll hear more about other ways, but though we talk about the therapy, there really are lots of ways. Thank you, and can we just for a moment talk about the order of magnitude of your work because I don't think it comes across really. What they do there, so they're talking about post-traumatic stress disorder, right? You all know what that is, yeah. That's a condition that's really difficult to heal and it takes a long time. So let's think about their participants. This is the participants that maps work with. The participants are not regular people who are suffering from PTSD. These are people who are, these are war vets, these are rape survivors, these are victims of sexual abuse in their childhood. These are people who have treatment-resistant PTSD, meaning they've tried many different therapies, they've tried psych meds, they've tried therapy, they've tried many things and they've suffered from their condition for on average, what is it, 17 years or something like this, right? So this is not the next best person who goes to a therapist because that person is suffering from trauma, which is bad enough. These are the really bad cases. They've tried everything or they've tried a lot. So after treatment with MDMA, after three sessions, one, two, three, right? With therapy and integration sessions in between. Of these participants who all had PTSD, 61% can no longer be diagnosed with PTSD. That is amazing. And if you think now that, okay, great, yeah, that's three sessions and then fast forwards a couple of weeks, life goes on and old patterns come back, no, 12 months later, 68% cannot be diagnosed with PTSD anymore. This is by far more effective than anything we have as a treatment available right now. And that is why NAPS will be doing the almost impossible, meaning like really legalizing the first psychedelic substance in the US, that's. I'll just say one thing, I really appreciate that context. It is important and we forget because it's like something that's just so kind of in the work that we're doing and it's kind of interesting to be in this place, to be doing drug development, to be attempting to put something like MDMA, the stigmatized demonized substance through a process like the Food and Drug Administration, which has the standards that these expectations that we, our clinical researchers have been working on now for almost 20 years. And I will say that one of the interesting things that comes up around this conversation is what we mean by the population of traumatized people. One of the big things that Natalie and I also do is kind of not only acknowledge that if and when MDMA or psychedelic therapy becomes available, that in order for it to have the truly effective impact on a large segment of society, that we can't limit our understanding of what PTSD or what these traumas are based entirely on certain standards of what society views as people who have PTSD. So the reality is that trauma is the center of a lot of different disorders and a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds experience not just trauma but PTSD and not only from these really extreme examples. So of course it's true that people who go to war, people who are survivors of rape or sexual or physical assault, people who experience childhood abuse, these people are obviously experiencing these extreme traumas. But what's often under looked is that people who experience discrimination, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, extreme poverty, people who experience frameworks of existence that are constantly growing on them, constantly affecting their livelihood, their quality of life. And people who have intergenerational traumas of those that are passed down through families are also often suffering from PTSD, often under treated, often under diagnosed and also in order for us to move forward fairly should have access to psychedelic medicine when it becomes legal and available. So the idea is that these substances are have been demonized, they've been stigmatized, they've been criminalized, the people who use them, the people who have been seeking them for healing even when they didn't know they were doing it have been criminalized for decades and decades now. So the work of legalizing psychedelic medicine, of taking MDMA through the FDA approval process is drug development. It's creating a pharmaceutical that allows us to do that. But it's also fundamentally undermining the original tenets of this war on drugs, which is that these drugs don't have medical value, that they're dangerous, that they're bad, they do all these things. And our question isn't, our statement isn't, we know that they work and we know that all these things are happening. We acknowledge that in order to say that in the way that we want to, the research is a humongous component. But we're also saying that you, amorphous you, the people who created these rules because of these systems that they believed were right and maybe at the time were wrong. And weren't just wrong, they were wrong and have caused a tremendous amount of harm, suffering, violence and oppression because they were wrong. And this idea is like, okay, yeah, let's put it through the system. But we wanna realize that the system itself isn't necessarily the thing that we're trying to follow. You know, in this case it is, but the system itself has caused a lot of harms, has caused a lot of those things. And that system that's connected to that larger oppressive system that then causes a lot of the trauma, that then ideally we hope can be healed really does require us to acknowledge a responsibility on the part of the superstructure, on the part of these large systems that have caused a lot of that damage to actually be involved in the process of healing. Speaking so beautifully, it reminded me that we actually didn't mention why the three of us, one of the reasons that the three of us are in Vienna this week, which is for the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting. So a lot of what we're thinking about right now is very much what Ismael is describing about where these worlds intersect because though we may work at a research organization, as we're discussing politics, they're preventing that research. And it's really important to find, for us to be finding the intersections between our work and so much other work. And in that vein, a lot, unfortunately at UN I can't say there's much being talked about on the psychedelic front yet. However, that really helps us engage and realize how connected where we fit into these other substances. And when we are speaking about the stigma as we face as psychedelic users, there's also really great stigma for users of other substances. And so that's something that's just kind of coming up to think about when we identify psychedelics certainly have really some amazing, unique therapeutic properties. But so do many of these other substances like heroin or cocaine or things we might more readily demonize or stigmatize. So it's really important that psychedelics to me at least help us really question our assumptions about all of these substances. And that's a lot of what we're thinking about this week. So I just want to bring that in. Yeah, thank you for mentioning this. We cannot stress enough how we appreciate your work working within the system to change the system. And this is something else I would like you to expand a little bit on because we've only briefly mentioned plans for 2021 and legalizing MDMA for therapy. And I would just like to know more about the roadmap and what a post-2021 world would look like when people suffering from serious mental illnesses would have legal access to this medicine. The vision that we're building right now, at least for one way of people having access through MDMA therapy would be building kind of psychedelic clinics, therapeutic clinics. And right now there's also a group in USONA sponsoring psilocybin or mushroom-assisted therapy for the treatment of depression like in the same process as MAP. So they expect hopefully a few months or maybe a year after MDMA is approved, psilocybin will also be approved in that context, hopefully. So in this dream vision we would see a clinic where people have access to all different kinds of healing modalities. Maybe there's also a body worker or in a yoga class in some kind of a context. Maybe there's beautiful garden outside. Really nature is incredibly healing. We look at the evidence and that's very real. And so I think that's really kind of the vision. And again, you still in order, I think I don't know if I mentioned this, but to be clear MDMA would not be accessible at the pharmacy yet again. But so in these clinics there would have to be doctors that have schedule one licenses and ability to administer, but that's the beginnings of that vision. I can add a little bit for like the framework as well. So although, okay, so if you look at the example of how medical cannabis reform occurred in the United States, one of the biggest factors that changed people's perception of whether or not we was medicine or not was knowing someone and talking to someone and have a relationship with someone that benefited from it. So there were originally a lot of people who were getting it primarily on the underground and as they started to be more open until their family and friends, they realized that like this is real and over time that grew into a movement it actually kind of really started with the AIDS movement in the United States around people who were suffering from AIDS who really knew that it would support their health and then that kind of grew out of that and then you have this medical cannabis movement and from that medical cannabis movement you have people who are seeing them, these people and be like, whoa, this works and two, this really isn't that bad for that many people and then you start to have conversations about adult use and recreational use. And I think similarly the idea around the MDMA research is that there are like once people start to see and recognize that not just MDMA but all of these substances via, or first MDMA and then psilocybin and these other substances are legit that they're okay, that they work, that they're safe by people having them in these legal contexts because I'm sure lots of you have tried to convince your family or at least some of you have tried to convince your family about how they work or don't and they're like that's great when a doctor says I can do it then I'll do it but until then don't even ask me. And a lot of people think that way and for us especially as young people it's like just look at the internet, the internet tells you all the things you need to know. But a lot of people do require that level of framework, that level of safety to move forward and we want them to have access to that healing too. So the idea is like once people start communicating with engaging with people who benefit from that we can have in parallel and must have in parallel a conversation around decriminalization. So the reason I bring that up is because 2021 is a powerful place because it could be the time when MDMA becomes legal in the FDA system. But before then now and ongoing, there's an ongoing effort in the United States and around the world to also decriminalize because these uses aren't just good and unknown. They're good, unknown and criminalized and the fact that there's that additional level that needs to be addressed is something that we can do in tandem and we can do that with evidence about other things, not just the therapy. And I think part of the longer term vision is also to make sure that as we're creating these legal context for them to occur that the change of stigma, the change of perception and ultimately the change of criminalization and access also changes. In the meantime, there's been a lot of change with kind of what Consonzo was saying around access to an interest in plant medicine. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about if you see any change in legitimacy or access or all those questions around plants, around these more traditional systems that do have that context in addition. It's like different because in the case of traditional plants, we, well, the ways that have been pursuing are not necessarily those of like the classical Western medicine channels. So it's more developed for, more developed by individual practitioners and the way this knowledge is transferred to one group or one person to others. So it's like in for personal relations or by contact with groups, with other groups or via internet. So it's not as, let's say institutionalized, if I may use that word as the word you are doing with MDMA in the context of the United States. This said, and coming back to the reason why we are here in Vienna, we have been planning for several months side event. So this meeting of the Commission on Narcotics Grads, this commission is formed by, by, well, 33, 53 still, right? Governments and so it's, the way it works is that there are several spaces where government delegation meets and the upper solutions and PACs or whatever. And also there is a set of what it's called, are called side events in which not only civil society but also other UN institutions or government, they collaborate in putting together thematic events on different topics. So we decided to explore the topic of freedom of research and this is very related to a set of rights, recognizing the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights and it's the rights of freedom of research. And this involves not only the fact of having the possibility to conduct research on the different topics but also to benefit from the results of this research. So we are together with an Italian organization called Asociazione Luka Cotioni which are very focused on civil rights and civil liberties in Italy. We decided to focus or to concentrate that the look of this government delegation in the fact that what's happening with the research with control substances and also what's happening with the enjoyment of the results of this research for the people that may benefit from them. I was also excited that we're both ICERS and MAPS are co-sponsoring but also with the government of Czech Republic is another sponsor for this event called the Science and Freedom of Research with Scheduled Substances and for very explicitly talking about psychedelic substances as well so that I think was actually pretty encouraging and the Czech Republic is definitely uniquely open and progressive on these issues and a really great ally just to add something that well there's one colleague of mine in the public and he's one of the person, his name is Jose Carlos Boso and he's very shy. And he always stress the fact because he's the director of scientific projects at ICERS and he always stress the fact that the barriers to scientific research come not only to because of the fact these substances are under control according to the international drug treaties but also due to the barriers that states pose to people like aiming to conduct research especially independent researchers. So this comes not only from a set from the drug legislations but also to several administrative barriers that we found, we find in our way and for example in the studies we are conducting with Ibogaine, it's a requirement that the Iboga and Ibogaine you provide for these clinical trials is a manufacturer according to what is called the good manufacturer practices and the price of, to provide a very specific example the price of the Ibogaine necessary to conduct this study according to GMPs, it's 40,000 euros. So that's really difficult for a small or medium sized organization aiming to conduct this type of alternative or not necessarily mainstream research that's really difficult to fund. So we have problems in terms of legal barriers, in terms of administrative barriers, in terms of funding. So it's maps, I think maps have been very successful in how they have jumped these obstacles but it's not always a case. So when we think about drug policy reform or drug or psychedelic science or research, it's also, I think it's useful to open the scope of our look and also think about all this non so evident barriers that we face. So I'm glad you mentioned Ibogaine because correct me if I'm wrong, this is somewhat of a gray area in sense of criminality because it's not scheduled under the three 3Ds that kind of govern our national laws and the instant kind of association of people like obviously not the people in the room but general population when you talk about drugs is to addiction and abuse of substances whereas Ibogaine has been proved to very effectively help people get out of this vicious circle of addiction and abuse of substances. So if you could expand a little bit on how Ibogaine is used in these treatments or if you have any specific experiences you would like to share in relation to Ibogaine. Not really but maybe during the round of questions we can ask Jose Carlos to share his studies and his experience regarding Ibogaine. Well thank you, I will be very quick. We are trying to start the study in which we are planning to use Ibogaine in the detoxification of methadone. As you well know in Europe 20 years ago there was a very, the use of heroin was very high and then people started to take methadone in order to combat heroin addiction and now there are lots of people that have a heterogenic dependence to methadone and what we are trying to do is to use Ibogaine in small doses just to detoxify from methadone and this is the project that Costanza talked just the encapsulation of Ibogaine and it costs 40,000 euros just the encapsulation. So there are too many frontiers and barriers to research not always the great international laws but all the bureaucracy and all the different bureaucratic barriers that we have to face not because we are working with psychedelic drugs but it's just the same barriers or frontiers that face every one that wants to work with or that works from independent institutions and are not funded by it. I would like to tell a little bit about our Ibogaine project in Nepal where we will be able to work legally in the mountains in the beautiful mountains of Nepal very soon. We started the legal process a year ago and things in Nepal are a little bit easier than they are in the States because the focus on the world is not too much on it. It's a very small country between China and India and I invite you all if you're interested in the project that come to me and Global Health Village but we didn't name it really by now, we're in the real estate. Yeah, so just to add a couple things about the gray area first off, thank you for sharing, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing, Jose Carlos, also awesome. We sponsored two studies, both of which were released in April and May of last year, one occurred in Mexico, one occurred in New Zealand, looking at, it was an observational study looking at the effects of Ibogaine for opioid use disorder and for drug dependency and there's a lot of weight to the word proved and I think that what's happening now is that there are scientists that are attempting to demonstrate its efficacy in these different contexts. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence and there's a lot of personal experiences that people have had where it has been used for primarily addiction interruption in different contexts and I think that's really led to a lot of interest. However, this legal gray area is really confusing. It's not scheduled at the international level in a few countries it's actually controlled like the United States but in a lot of countries I think the great majority of countries on the world it's actually just not regulated so there's been this move of creating kind of gray area clinics where it's been used and there's again been a lot of not strictly scientific data collected that has gone to that interest so it is definitely the case that there's a lot more interest in it. In the United States there's a lot of barriers in addition and also because it has this additional stigma of being potentially dangerous in certain contexts for certain people when not carefully held that does give it a little bit of a different flavor than the other psychedelics because as you said earlier most of the psychedelics really are not toxic really don't have addictive potential really don't have it nearly any of these like longer term harmful effects if done very carefully and with the right set and setting. But I think with Ibogaine in particular in Iboga there's a little bit more of a fear and stigma associated with it because of the kind of cardio toxicity that's been associated with it in the past so that does kind of add a little wrinkle of complexity which you don't see with something like psilocybin or MDMA or even LSD. Yes, I wanted to touch on one particular topic with you guys. So as I was reading different studies of different treatments like with most of that was treatment of depression with psilocybin but it's kind of also similar to the MDMA studies. One thing that I noticed is that basically after the dosing sessions you always have a very strong effect but then whether that strong effect lasts over time or the people kind of bounce back to how they felt before the treatment what is really important there. I noticed is the role of the therapeutic process that is not the substance but that is actually the integration work. Can you talk a little bit about that? Definitely true and some of our pioneering therapists or such wonderful therapists that even the people who got placebo doses actually improved from the treatment of therapy but they certainly didn't at the same levels. So the first thing that really comes to mind is this concept of integration and how essential that is and really about what is happening after the process. And one of the beautiful benefits of having two therapists present during the session is that a lot can be written down and still a therapist can be present with the participant and someone else can be taking notes and then in sessions fall afterward there's a lot of kind of checking back gently and reminding about what had happened in the session and also providing different tools of helping integrate those realizations into your life. And I love that you gave the example of how people continue to improve because I think that's just some one of the most extraordinary parts of this treatment and I think it has a lot to do with how in this session it's a lot about kind of changing your framework and your understanding of the world and of your space and your experience in it. So in that peeling process I think a big part of the integration is using that new framework in maybe your same life or maybe making some changes and that can take some time and that can be really challenging. So it's really important that in that time you have support whether it's from a therapist from family, from friends. There's a participant in our study who lost his home and didn't have a home during the process in the middle after I think maybe one or two sessions and he didn't have very great results and there was a lot of things going on and he wasn't able to be intentional about that integration. But to be honest, besides that intentionality and support integration can look very different for different people. Before I mentioned things like yoga or journaling or nature and I know we chuckle but truly spending time in nature is a really powerful way of integration and trying to incorporate these different practices into life. So I just want to provide a little bit more context around integration also and by maybe offering a metaphor. So earlier one of the examples that I gave one of the things that I think helps understand what happened in the West when psychedelics came onto the scene in the 1950s, 60s and 70s and that was that Western culture American culture, European culture got access to psilocybin, LSD, these other substances through questionable, sometimes questionable sometimes really incredible means and they kind of just like showed up on the scene and everyone started doing them and then suddenly they got associated with the counterculture and then people started dropping out and then they kind of imploded and everyone was like, wow, that was like really crazy. Do you remember when that happened? So that sends in a pretty sharp contrast to how psychedelic medicines, psychedelic substances have been used historically in the way that Consenza has been describing. So you have lots of cultures for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years all over the world on every continent that have had some many of which have had some sort of relationship with some sort of psychoactive plant. It's just the case with a lot of cultures throughout history and most of those cultures which have used a lot of these psychoactive substances for years and years and years and years and yons also have these intercultural, intergenerational rights of passage systems of initiation and integration that are built into the system. So when someone has a powerful experience that totally shakes them up and totally kind of puts them into a new place, they have their grandparents or their parents or their cousins or their family to help kind of hold that. So I think that one of the, and that was really missing, that has been missing in the way that a lot of the West engages with these substances. So if you take that and make it very personal, you're thinking about integration. So in the same way that the Western culture was not ready to integrate the access to psychedelics that showed up in the 50s and 60s, many people because the lives that many of us live are not aligned with a lot of the values that we believe we get access to when we have psychedelic experiences require us to have the experience as this bubble, as the separate experience that we then have to pull out of to get back into our normal life, which kind of like reinforces all these other systems that have caused us all this harm and trauma. So integration on one level is how did that experience affect my feelings, my values? Does it affect my behavior? How can I engage with these behaviors in a way that has long ongoing supportive kind of relation to my life? One, and also it's primarily necessary because when we leave that context, the context of the medicine or the therapist or the ceremony, you're going into the world, the matrix, the place where we're all kind of like trying to survive because of this giant system that exists that keeps us all in all these places. So I think that when we're thinking about integration, it's like partially how can I learn from these things? And also what is the system that I'm in that prevents me from always being able to access that all the time? Because the psychedelic experience that thing is a key, it's one of the wormholes, it's one of the portals to get this access to something, maybe it's trauma, maybe it's our consciousness, maybe it's all these things. But the processing of pulling back and not just pulling back out, but keeping a relationship with this thing that we experience is an integration and that can be done with so many ways, whether it's somatic work or mental work or talking with friends or whatever. And going back to what you were saying, kind of just to bring it back to the therapeutic alliance or therapeutic relationship, the reality is a lot of these cultures that have had experiences with these substances aren't just developing a relationship with the facilitator and themselves, they're also developing a relationship with the substance itself and with the experience and with the culture itself. So part of the alienation that many of us experience in the West comes from not having those systems in the first place. So when you add psychedelics to it, things just get really chaotic. So part of the integration process is also living a life and creating a life day by day, routine slowly, but surely that allows you to easily learn those things and then click in in different ways so you don't have to shift everything in your entire universe every time you eat mushrooms. I think that was a really good point to sort of transition into the reflection of what this, I think we kind of understand that this movement has like a future that we probably cannot comprehend at this moment and I would just like Malina to reflect a little bit if she pays attention. So I would like you to reflect a little bit on what has been said and what it looks like for from here in Austria and what kind of relevance it has to all of us here who showed up today and interested in the topic. I can ask her. So before, yes, I'm looking forward to talking about that, but let's actually first address. So maps will legalize MDMA for therapeutic use in 2021 in the US. How about Europe? Currently fundraising for our EMA research. We're trying to raise $5 million, but we're actually well on our way there and definitely have fully intend to do research in Europe. We will have a site in the UK and then the Netherlands and we're working out the other one or two sites also in the Czech Republic. But that will come a bit after 2021, but it's very much in the works and in our intention. We also have a study, an MDMA therapy study in Canada and in Israel. Yeah, and I also say that there's other research going on in Europe right now. There's different models, a group called a business called Compass that's developing psilocybin in Europe are starting to do some research with that that I think will be starting before our research. Yeah, so thank you very much. Thank you so much for the work that you do, for the political work and for the research work because I mean we've waited now for a lot of years. We've waited for a lot of years and nothing has really happened, but now in 2016, 2017 we see for the first time that there are more scientific articles published again on psychedelics than there were in the 60s. So this is really coming back, the psychedelic renaissance is really happening and that is thanks to the amazing work of maps, of ice years, of a number of other institutions that are almost all of them are funded by donations and like you said, five million, five million is nothing. Like that's really nothing. You just raised how much? Yeah, so they just raised $30 million for the US and a lot of money is coming in from the crypto world. Psychedelics gets a lot of love from the crypto world. We're very grateful for that. Yeah, so I think it's just amazing that we see that with psychedelics we see the rates of some of the most prevalent psychological conditions, plummeting, like post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, treatment-resistant depression, addiction, you name it. And after having researched so much myself as well, I deeply believe that these substances will revolutionize the way we approach mental health and my personal dream is to open a treatment center here in Austria where people can have a safe transformation of their personal psychedelic experience. For their inner healing, for their personal development, for working through the difficulties that they may have. That's a mid to long-term dream. The first thing we have to do is we have to get psychedelic research to Austria and we have to work on the public perception of these substances. We have to spread awareness of the therapeutic use of the beneficial use of these substances and that's why I started the Psychedelic Society here in Vienna because that's exactly what we do. We foster an evidence-based dialogue about the true risks and benefits of psychedelic substances. And the way we do that, now actually I need my notes and my slides because we do so many things, you will be amazed. So something we do regularly is that we hold regular meetups, regular events, we call them meetups, some of you might know the platform meetup.com, we use that to organize these events. And what we do there is that we invite national and international guest speakers to talk about interesting topics. We had a doctor, for example, talking about MDMA assisted therapy. We have speakers talking about the effects of very large doses of psychedelics. We have speakers talk about the effects of very small doses of psychedelics. You know, some biohackers use very small doses of LSD or psilocybin, for example, to replace coffee or to replace segments that they are taking like Adderall or how it's called here, Ritalin. Now we not only look at these practices, but we also try to shed some light on the scientific evidence that is behind these practices or the lack of scientific evidence. What else we have next week? We will have a meetup where we invite an Austrian lawyer who is specialized on drug law to talk about the legal situation of psychedelics in Austria. I invite you to come, this is a great opportunity to have a free consultation with a lawyer. Another thing that I'm very proud of what we're doing is that we are building a community here in Austria. What you might not know is that people who have had a psychedelic experience often feel isolated afterwards. I want to explain to you why that is. So a 2008 study at Johns Hopkins showed that about two-thirds of the participants who took a psychedelic substance rated this experience amongst the five most meaningful events of their lives. Next to the birth of a child or the loss of a parent. Now imagine you've just experienced something that big and then you cannot talk to anybody about it because of how stigmatized and how misunderstood these substances are. This is why the community aspect of the psychedelic society really matters because with us people can talk openly about their psychedelic experiences. And some even say that the psychedelic society feels a little bit like coming home to them, which personally makes me very happy. So what you have to understand though is that we're not a secret club or a bunch of new age hippies. We are common people with common lives. We're students and professionals. We're activists and reformers. We have families. We have careers. There's so many things beyond our interest in psychedelics. And yet our fascination for these substances brings us together and makes us want to change something about the status quo. And just in case you wondered like, do I need to have had my own psychedelic experience in order to go and attend their events? No, you don't. You can just come with whatever background you have. Actually a lot of people who come to our events, they've never had their own experience, their own personal experience with these substances. They just come because they're interested in the topic and that's totally fine. What else do we do? We do different workshops. We do regular integration circles. So we just touch on the topic of integration because we're well aware that if you criminalize a substance, not only the substance goes away, but also the whole ritual and the whole culture around the substance. Like something that's deeply integrated into a culture. It's now on us kind of to bring that part back and to offer this integration work, to help one another to bring back the culture of integration. And this is what we do in this integration circles. And then what's interesting you mentioned before, there are 90 different psychedelic societies. So there are really a lot of psychedelic societies popping up all over the world. There is no headquarters or something. But we're all pretty well connected with one another. And we're also connected to the universities and we're connected to local nonprofits. So overall we could build a pretty good network of international experts. So if you're interested in the topic and you can imagine to pursue this topic as a future career, then we're thrilled. And we will also try our best to support you. Good. So if you're interested in what you've heard so far, then I invite you to simply come and check out our next events. Our next meetup will be next week, Wednesday, on the 21st. That's where we will invite the drug lawyer for the open Q&A session, for an extended Q&A session. So make sure you bring your questions. Like, if I go for a walk in the Vienna wood and I find something on the ground, may I pick it up? Like, something like this. Yeah, I mean it's an interesting question, right? I mean we want our members to be safe. Physically and legally. And even if you're not interested in that particular topic, it's still worth coming because after the talks there's always time to come and talk to me and the rest of the team. So I invite you to come. Generally the psychedelic society, how can you find us? Our website is psychedelicsociety.at. My email address is malena at psychedelicsociety.at. We're also on Facebook. On Facebook are all of our events, our meetups, our community meetings, our integration circles, events like this one today. And as an alternative you can also check out Meetup. We're there as well. But Facebook is certainly, but on Facebook there's certainly everything. Yes, and Sapiensup, this is my blog again. If you want to dig a little bit deeper, do it. I published a seven-part series. There's really a lot to read there. And yeah, I'm interested to know what you think about it. So let me know. Thank you so much. And with this I would like to open the floor for questions. But before that if some of you are shy or have more complex questions regarding the psychedelic society or have contributions, we are always welcoming new members. We are an ever-expanding team. Some of our members are here in the audience wearing map stickers. So just approach them with your craziest questions. And there are more stickers if you want to become a member and wear them yourself. So if anybody has any questions for our panelists, this is your time to shine. Just raise your hand. And one of our members, team members, will rush to you. I'm co-founder of Sloach Psychedelic Society. I'm also a member of Czech Psychedelic Society. And I do have maybe two notes. First, I want to congratulate ECRS to start to get the funding from European Commission and start their website, Psychedelic Plans. It's a big thing. I don't know if you know something, but you can say something more about it. Another question or note is about the maps and your MDMA research. You were mentioning that you are now trying to raise the money for European part of the research, and you are planning to start it after 21, not before, or because when I was in US May last year, there were initial meetings about European part of MDMA research and it looks like they will start and finish at the same time. Just change a little bit. Right. Thanks for clarifying that they will be starting before 2021, but they won't be finished by 2021. So it's just kind of at us a little back of the timeline. Maybe one year delayed, but the parallel is starting. Yeah. So your question about Psychedelic Plans. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of a project, a European Union project. We are in collaboration with three European organizations and basically it's what the page provides is information about different psychoactive plants that many of them are not under control, but you can find a lot of information available online, but it's usually not always accurate or it's some point contradictory. So we are providing this service of information on the, well, the historical background, scientific information, legal status and also on the effects and the therapeutic potential of some of them. And also there is in this website, it's called CK Plans. We also provide a service of integration. So you can make an appointment with Mark Aishala, which is our therapist at ICRS. So you can have a face-to-face interview well via Skype or videoconference and he provides support, guidance and advice on the different uses or the different experiences you may have with this treadmill with these plants. I also want to say, Martin, because you mentioned, we're talking about all these different psychedelic societies and there are actually many people in the room who are involved in their psychedelic societies in their countries, including Brune from Mexico and Ava from Czech Republic who are over there. And a lot more in town this week so I just wanted to draw attention to that. There's some amazing people here. Yeah, perfect. More questions. My question is about the UN and the kind of counter reasoning that you experience. So what do people say, what are the arguments, especially given there's Portugal and the Czech Republic, all those places where clearly they haven't kind of fallen into chaos after legalizing such drugs. So what are the arguments that you face at the UN, for example? What would people say when you're like hinting at the benefits? What are the arguments of, you know, that there's no numbers that speak against legalization and stuff, you know what I mean? So what's their point? We're all laughing a bit because what you say is so real that we have science and rational, logical arguments. If you look from financial, economic perspective, if you look from compassionate humanitarian perspective, there's really, from my perspective, every single way. You know, it's a rational argument that does not land. And, you know, the drug control system is not in any way based in science or in that type of logic. So it is a very difficult push back and forth. And I think the stigma is one thing that we've been speaking about and I think it really shows and there's often a very reactionary response, you know, the drugs are a bad kind of response that doesn't necessarily allow people to, you know, why would you give heroin users needles? That's in the U.S. still finally unfortunately because there's such a crisis, people have been forced to be more open to that. But for so long, people were absolutely uninterested that it helps reduce contraction of HIV, hep C, never mind overdose and problematic use. But American politicians, I am not giving drug users needles. Why would I enable them? Like that's really, it could really end just there. I just want to give a little extra context. So Portugal and Singapore and the Philippines and the United States all say that their drug policies work. So that's one problem because everyone has their, there are different standards by which certain people in certain countries just determine whether or not they've been successful. So which again may or may not, often not be grounded in actual statistics, facts, amount of life saved on any of these kind of measures that we would use. And it's interesting because when you're trying to convince people where the diversity of opinion is on one hand, you have an example like in Portugal or Czech Republic where you have more liberal, more open drug laws where you are seeing that stigma slowly start to change. Even in Portugal, although there have been a lot of good, a tremendous amount of positive feedback and a lot of good outcomes from that shift, there is still stigma within Portugal of drug users. That takes more than 10, 15 years to change. So I think when you're talking about countries that are still and there are many countries that still defend executing people who use drugs, much less drug dealers, much less people who are kind of part of huge international criminal networks, that issue of stigma and the associations that come with that are so strong that for a lot of people, even for very conservative people, especially maybe in the United States, the idea that there are these positive outcomes doesn't even really enter that universe. And it's like, it's part of that issue where it's kind of an esoteric stigma because it's based on things that were never true but that over time, in part because of lack of research, not only, have become true in the public image. So we're not trying to convince them that their facts are wrong because they were never using facts. We're trying to convince them that the ideology, that their fundamental understanding of crime and punishment is wrong, and it's hard because it's not... And the feeling is it's a very emotional, it's a very emotional engagement for us, I mean, for some people, but even though, you know, I'll give the example of the United States, all this is true of a lot of countries, although they'll sound like we're doing a rational no-on drugs, if you just say no, then they'll prevent it, whatever framework, even though that's clearly and obviously wrong, and they think that it's coming out of logic and reason and like the way that things work. What I think that ideology is hiding is like this deep emotional response that's very based in stigma, often based in racism, often based in these biases that are super baked into people's understanding of drugs and drug users that they don't even know because that's not what gets talked about in public anymore. Now you just have the, well, they're bad, so we're there. And I think that, you know, I don't know the answer to your question because that's part of why so many of us are here because we're trying to, and people have been trying to for decades now, even just suggest not necessarily, not only that their frameworks are wrong, but that they're causing these harms that are preventable by look at all this evidence and even that isn't necessarily moving things. Did you want to say something? Yeah, please. Can you hear me? In Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example, the high-rank government people, please don't, that's it all my life. High-ranked government people are earning from that and they would do shit to change that. And then there is another thing, the pharmaceutical industry. Your maps is a competition for them. So they have a lot of influence and they have 50 million as a joke for them. Just in this state, but yes, I mean, on the cannabis policy level, pharmaceutical companies are literally donating to the politicians who are opposing cannabis reform. You know, in the U.S. states with medical cannabis have a 25% reduction in opiate overdoses and have a dramatic reduction in pharmaceutical use. So that is a huge piece of this. Who is served by these current systems? After Trump was elected in the U.S. and, you know, he appointed sessions who was very tough on drugs, the stocks for all the prison companies, private prisons went through the roof, right? It's serving certain industries very well. And I do think that's something we really need to think about. And, you know, as we're like, oh, the stigma, people just say no, no, there's definitely very entrenched interests in protecting what's going on. And as Ismael said, what were these systems designed for? In the U.S., the drug control scheme was designed to marginalize and incarcerate people of color. And it's doing a very good job of that. So, you know, it's working for a lot of people, unfortunately. So the pharma industry is not interested in the psychedelic research because, I think, MDMA, the patent inspired. And how can you convince the pharma industry for these calls? First of all, that is a really interesting question. And, yes, it's both that MDMA, the patent, has expired. But on top of that, Rick Doblin, who is the BAPS founder, actually has an anti-patent strategy to try to encourage anyone who has any kind of healing experience with MDMA to write it online in some public sphere so no one can patent and try to use that. Pharmaceutical companies are also not interested because you could heal from one session. So they're not a very productive customer for them, right? So, in that way, I mean, I don't know that I want personally, you know, I don't speak for all of the maps in this, that I want pharmaceutical companies engaging. Maps itself is a nonprofit and we've spawned a public benefit corporation for when we do start to sell MDMA, but that entity allows us to not prioritize maximizing profit. So we prioritize instead public benefit and that makes me feel a lot better about our approach because I see a lot of harms coming from the pharmaceutical industry and impacting our whole approach to mental health based on profit, profiting from individuals taking medicine consistently. So I think that whole framework is really a huge problem and yes, we are using that framework, you know, we're using the system to try to change the system, but we're very conscious of that. And I do have, you know, the fears that pharmaceutical companies may start wising up the way they are with cannabis, they've been doing, I mean, not enough of a good job, but they have been stopped really slowing cannabis reform down the best that they can and I don't know what they'll do when they really realize that psychedelic therapy could take away a lot of their business, but I will, as I'm saying all of that, I do also have to say that many people will find tremendous life-saving relief from pharmaceuticals as well and so this isn't like, we don't want any pharmaceuticals ever and there are places for different things, but my personal issues are with the whole systems and of incentives for creating that and that's why I would not necessarily personally want MDMA to go through that process. Not only the patients who are suffering from severe problems, but generally anyone who uses psychedelics, their attention draws or falls upon things which are part of their lives, never actually focus really on it tightly enough so that they can make a positive change. There's even one very interesting case, there's a mycologist named Paul Stamets, basically healed his stuttering after just one use of a very high dose of psilocybin mushrooms and that phenomenon is actually then not physiologically healed, but rather with the attention. His attention simply fell on the way he speaks and then just something clear point is I think a bit frightening to the general western mind which is always kind of focused on the ego and the person and this is who I am and like the rigidity, the psychedelics kind of there as Terence McKenna would say are nonspecific amplifiers. I just wanted to say two quick responses to that. One which is that there's a book that came out about a year ago by Joe Tufour called Fellowship of the River, he's a medical doctor from the United States, he's Colombian who went to Peru instead with the ship he boasts for six years and now gives ayahuasca, he pours ayahuasca as a shaman and it's really interesting because he speaks a lot to that issue which is like there's a lot of people in psycho-cultural constructions of disease and how that's affected by the kind of spiritual experience whether in this case it's ayahuasca but the idea that a lot of people who have many different disorders or effects or whatever are often very quickly and sometimes it takes time, it's not always one session, often it takes a long time especially for deep traumas but there are links slowly being built over that weird esoteric psycho-spiritual boundary of healing and the other which you almost got to but you kind of reminded me of is that when you're talking about the benefit of the individual that it actually kind of radiates out and one of the studies for psilocybin that's occurring in the United States is psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety and last year, at the end of last year I went to a conference about psychedelics and end-of-life care and one of the big themes was that for people who are near the end of their life whether it's because they have a terminal illness that the psychedelic experience does frequently benefit them a lot because it helps manage their fear of death that's a huge part of it and their mortality, their relationship with mortality little questions like that but that the other big impact and what they were talking about a lot was the people around the people who are suffering so for example, when you have someone who's dying, who's at the center of some system they're not the only ones who are experiencing the fact that these things are changing it's also happening to all the people around them so that kind of boundary-dissolving not just literally in your own minds but like literally boundary-dissolving between you and your family and these other people and kind of realizing that the value is in so many ways like that kind of shift in perception or like outside kind of symbolic perception of your own experience which then allows you to look at it in all these ways that do shift that so yeah, thank you for bringing that up as reminded when you were talking about how it impacts everyone around you you got the first approval to give MDMA to couples where one person in the couple has PTSD and not necessarily romantic couples actually so there's some other, just kind of a partnership and I just think that I'm really excited for that study to progress because really so many of these things impact more than the individual so I think we have time for one more question because I know all of you guys have a very long day behind you and ahead of you so um that was someone else before you unfortunately and he's really close to the mic so go for it definitely and the farther along that we get in the research the more support we have from like right now they're actually we're working with researchers who work at VA's or veterans like spaces where veterans in the US can go to get medical care so we're already working on an individual level but you're right right now the US government is unfortunately not funding our MDMA research though they did give us $2 million for our marijuana study from the state of Colorado not from the US government it's a little different but I do see that as we progress I hope we will have more funding from veterans and we certainly are finding funding right now actually from sources from unlikely sources who are passionate about healing veterans and we recently received a million dollars from a very traditionally conservative donor who you know politically made donate to certain things that people might not have expected that she would have supported this work but her dedication to American military veterans inspired that gift and bring that up that it is something that's really interesting with this work because it connects to actually such a wide range of people though it does have this association with hippies and the left and certainly there's a reason for that but I think that it's easy for us to ignore that there's actually in the US a big libertarian movement that many are quite interested in psychedelics and even we're reading more about really far right groups that use psychedelics so I think that's something interesting for us to kind of keep in mind that psychedelics definitely make us question things and connect and open up to different things but I think when you're talking about this non-specific amplifier that yeah they can exist in lots of different contexts and it really has a lot to do with this setting that you use them in how they will impact you I'll just say two things regarding very literally speaking regarding funding because our phase 3 process is essentially funded in the United States it actually doesn't matter it could give us a ton of money that would be great but there's no kind of motivation at this point for any US organization whether it's the VA or the Department of Defense like there seems to be pretty clear implications for the amount of money that it could save healthcare systems that are dealing with those people that's true and I just want to add a little bit to that point about psychedelics being non-specific amplifiers and how that kind of ties into this because the idea that when we've joked about it a lot we've kind of implied it a lot is that psychedelics are these blooming things that give us access to all these amazing pieces and although that's often true because they're used and can be used to help optimize experiences and not weaponize, that's a pretty strong word but at least kind of use in those frameworks that are within the system in a much larger way it certainly exists and the idea is that once it's legal we will not necessarily be able to control who uses it and how it's used so that's kind of part of the reason why it's actually really important to engage at the psychedelic society level at the level of individual people and communities that could benefit from it because if we as a collective don't actually build into the movement of the process then they like everything else that becomes available can easily be co-opted maybe not as easily as some things but certainly can be co-opted by the military system by the prison industrial complex by these huge complexes that cause a lot of oppression so if we want to be really vigilant and be aware of the potential benefits in a real way benefit for individual people and for families and for those systems we have to be aware of that fact that they can be the way that they're used and the framework within which they're used does matter a lot and if we want them to be used in a way that's really that shepherds in a new world instead of create some sort of like esoteric gatekeeper that some people get access to because they deserve it and some people don't then we have to build in those systems of like human rights and social justice and criminal reform and all of these things that really need to be built in to this conversation around decriminalization and eventual access which that was a perfect ending to our event today. Thank you very much Natalie Uzi, Constanza Malina and thanks for all of you for coming out today and listening to us. Have a good night!