 This is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. My guest today is Rachel Neuer, author of I Feel Love, MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. It's a history of the drug known as Mollion Ecstasy that's about to be approved by the FDA as an aid in fighting PTSD. Rachel Neuer, thanks for talking to me. Thanks so much for having me. Why did you write I Feel Love? Great question. There's really two answers to that. The first is the sort of common good answer, which is there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon we're probably gonna see, we'll hopefully see it, approved by the FDA for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex nuanced drug together in one place. Just felt like people needed to have that touchstone. And there's just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to spell those, not just for readers, but also for myself. The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting and worries over my career. I had spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cherry topic. We're talking like slaughtered rhinos and elephants and there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge and MDMA turned out to be the answer. And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is? Yes. MDMA and the quest for connection in a fractured world. Yeah. Yes. So this is like your pandemic, baby. Yeah, this is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And in my last book, I went to like 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone and just right here in the good old US of A and a quick hop over the pond to the UK. There was certainly that, I think weirdly if we talk about the psychedelic renaissance at reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in, right? Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise, but the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not at a club, which is my preferred environment with us sitting on my couch at home at like 7 p.m. on a Friday night. Just before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by your saying, this came to me while I was on MDMA. As a broad cultural background, how old are you? I am, let's see, what am I now? 38, it keeps changing. Yes, it does on an almost annual basis, right? It's crazy. But one thing, like have you always felt comfortable saying, hey, you know what, I use drugs that are technically or openly illegal and have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society where people are starting to say, you know what, like these drugs are not sanctioned or they're kind of sketchy or people kind of look at you weird, but let's talk about it. Yeah, I was definitely not always the person who was like, I use drugs, I like drugs. I was a dare kid from the 80s. I grew up just- Another great success story. Indeed. Yeah, I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it's weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them, I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape or their burnouts or they're gonna frazzle their brain. It wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have this stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, sure, I'll try a new thing. I love new experiences and that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation. Is it because MDMA, I suspect in dare, when you were in grammar school, they weren't talking about mushrooms so much, but is it also because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing. I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. So when I was my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my town of Mississippi and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed and he killed himself. So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed at the drug. And I, my dare kid self said, okay, yeah, it must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never gonna touch that. Right. Let's talk about the kind of discovery or rediscovery of MDMA and what, late 60s, early 70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there, you might know it as Molly or ecstasy or Adam, I mean. But what is MDMA and where did it come from? Yeah, that's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA, whether your street bot, Molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question, but they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So the history part of the book, surprising, was actually one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself. And I just really got into it because there were so many unexpected twists and turns. So first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first synthesized, well, it was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve, 1912, by the German pharmaceutical company, Merck, respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent. And MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there. Whether or not, either that or they had a chemist who just liked the way it felt. And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's for blood. Yeah, exactly. Very sadly, that chemist was killed a few years later in World War I. So anyway, so Merck, whether or not anyone there actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There's little hints here and there of chemists being like, hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look. Fast forward to the 1950s, MDMA pops up in the US for the first time. This is during the US government's search for chemical truth serum. So let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on US citizens to see how this goes. So this is part of MKUltra and it's the epiphenomenon of that. It wasn't MKUltra, but yeah. It was the Army's version of the CIA's trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that indeed the US Army did do this. A student named Nicholas Denome, I think he's got in his PhD now, so Dr. Nicholas Denome, tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the Army and MDMA was on their list of drugs, but when Nick asked for the specific document from the US government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, oh, we lost it. So, you know. And there was that weird moment when Richard Nixon after visiting Tulane gave a speech where he said, I don't know, I really love you all. I'm joking. I was like, I didn't know what this, I should have put it in my book. Darn. Yeah, in another reality. So that takes us through the 50s. Yes. So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970, 1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA, which is closely related molecule, and entrepreneurial chemists are probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group on MDMA. So the police even thought that they were seizing MDMA, but we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a PhD student at Berkeley named Carl Resnickoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin, everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist, and they were working on a summer project together. And Carl is... Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics, right? That's the great way of putting it. He just started proliferating all sorts of compounds and testing them out. Incredible chemists, yeah. They invented like 20 molecules, would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. So Carl, young Carl, was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl, he had tried LSD when he was like in eighth grade, he was all about it. And Shulgin said, okay, you need to do a summer project. What do you wanna do? And Carl was a big fan of MDA, as we were talking about earlier, and thought, okay, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens? It's pretty logical. And Shulgin's like, that's a great idea. Let's do it. So they hold up in the summer of 1975, UC Berkeley, and synthesized MDMA together. And Shulgin took most of it home, but he gave Carl a little baggy, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 milligrams, two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day, on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito. And yeah. It's a beautiful recreation. You have him tell that story. And it's really kind of magical. There are moments where MDMA is, it's sometimes it's that drug, where it's like it's something you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you wanna connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. Yeah. And then it becomes kind of the ultimate rave. Well, actually club drug first. And then rave drug. What, how does it start shifting out from that? Right, well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in 76. And he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist's friend of his, who became sort of this, I guess people say the Johnny Apple seed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the US and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized. Just like LSD and they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results. How did they use it in a therapeutic context? Yep. So there's some early studies from the Greers out of New Mexico. And, you know, at first it's kind of funny. They were following the LSD model, but at first they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked, what didn't work. And in those original trials they would actually take MDMA with their clients but they realized, okay, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us. So that stopped. But they would bring people kind of like the trials today, bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through. And the idea is, I mean, it opens people up. It allows them to, you know, be in touch with their feelings and feel connected. Exactly. It's kind of, well, Shulgan used the word window. So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way. So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things from couples counseling to just, you know, I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that. I want to know myself deeper into more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the 70s. But as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And the Greer said to me in one point in the interview, you know, it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community just as there was with LSD years before. You know, some people. And I guess we should point out that LSD, particularly during the 50s and early 60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists to help. Yeah, exactly. You know, just to help treat things like alcoholism, but just to get through things. You know, yesterday, while we're taping this, yesterday was Carrie Grant's birthday. And Carrie Grant is probably the best known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, you know, saying like it made him feel alive again, et cetera. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that. Exactly, yeah. And I mean, it was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into that empty poll that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So there's the therapeutic community and many of them wanted to keep it a secret. And you know, only a thing that, you know, friends tell friends, you can't like just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit from doing so. Also similar to LSD, really. Indeed. So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to, you know, churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of. Like, you know, I'm just gonna like get everyone hooked and make their money. He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to like serve a bigger purpose in the world. Wanting to like help people be saved. You know, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, the US, and that is what attracted the attention of the US government. Right, so then what happened? Then what happened? Well, the DEA moved to schedule MDMA. They, in summer of 85, which was when I was born, coincidentally, MDMA was put on the emergency schedule one list. And that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming, they thought this would just be a normal scheduling, is that there were all these therapists, professors, like at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, hey, this is a drug with medical purpose. So it can't be schedule one, because schedule one is defined as no medical purpose. It should be schedule three, allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but come on. And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be schedule three. But because of whatever bureaucracy, I don't understand the federal system. MDMA was put on schedule one, because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time. Yeah. I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. And one of the things, I have a strong memory of it being before, in the earlier 80s, it was more of a kind of reflective, introspective drug. Oh, interesting. And then after it became illegal. And part of the concerns about it were like it was dangerously antisocial, like you didn't want to go out or talk to people, because you were doing your own thing. Oh, that's fascinating. And then post-prohibition, it was like, it's the biggest thing that was a problem about it is that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself, like you couldn't stop and you were part of a hive mind, et cetera, which is just kind of bizarre. But so talk about maps. The nonprofit that is the group that is bringing, has been working since the 80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD and related indications. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned? Right. So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for maps, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Maps was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life. He's a strange kid apparently to find a solution for that. Kind of a strange adult too. Yeah, just a strange guy. Yeah, it's a very interesting, unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida where he was introduced to drugs and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD, et cetera, was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route but through those connections he found his way to MDMA and at first he thought it was like, oh, how profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it? But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier and he thought, huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human, we all want love, we all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different. Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort, you know, getting the money, getting the lawyer, getting everyone to write letters. After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up and everybody thought like, you're an idiot, like you're wasting your time, you're wasting your money, it's just a matter of time until you too, you know, see the writing on the wall, this is not coming back. But Rick just is like very hard headed, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, look, kid, like there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never gonna get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval, you need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, like that's the way you gotta do it. And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded Maps to see that through and you know, it's taken like 38 plus years, but like, you know, bless his heart. And so part of his, one of the lessons he talks about learning from kind of the LSD experience or the way the war on drugs started playing out when, you know, I mean, it had been around before, but when Nick's in an accident in the early 70s, it's like that outlaw route's not gonna do it. We're gonna try and go through official channels. And where are they now? Do you, like, you know, for FDA approval of MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy, you know, what's the status of that? So clinical trials, you have to have three phases. Phase one is the first just to show like, okay, this isn't gonna kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is kind of more efficacy and safety and then phase three is the more rigorous, like, okay, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken like literally 20 plus years. You know, just in terms of paying for these things. So we'll get to this in a second, but Rick was just doing this all on fundraising, you know, and it costs millions, literally to do clinical trials and also just jumping through all the paperwork and permissions hoops of the government. So the second or the last phase three trials done and MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted a application to the FDA at the end of December, asking for a new drug approval for MDMA's therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has like a certain amount of time to respond, but long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer both by like mid 2024, that's the year we're in now, yes. Parallel to that kind of MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved, what happened, you know, in the 80s and 90s and arts with MDMA, because it, you know, Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped, you know, the CIA labs, you know, et cetera, and went into the mainstream MDMA certainly escaped any kind of, you know, lockdown on it. What was going on there? Yeah, a lot was going on. So in the late 80s, MDMA made its way to the UK, which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multi-billion dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters, warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths, you know, nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or other drugs. But, you know, a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news and... And this is from people kind of taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dance. I mean, they were like, they would be talked about as whirling dervishes, right? They would dance themselves to death. Yeah, I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating, just, you know, getting too hot and like, yeah, overheating. So MDMA became this like hysterical news study or news story, you know, ecstasy is killing our children. It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down, banning MDMA. Joe Biden was involved in the rave. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture, you know. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And at the same time, the US government, especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs, you know, literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't prove it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It of course can be dangerous if you take too much. But the lasting effect of that from the late 80s and through the 90s and even early aughts was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And you know, it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the 80s. But then, you know, it's kind of flipped, right? Because I mean, there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I actually, I feel really good on this where I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away? Because I would say now ecstasy is, you know, it doesn't have those negative connotations that it might have had at the beginning of the 21st century. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when it flipped. So I wrote this book proposal in the pandemic like I told you and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors and we got all nos. People were saying, Michael Pollan already wrote this book because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about MDMA or about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy. This isn't a book project. Then the first maps, phase three study came out. I wrote about it for the New York Times. Suddenly the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest on the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before. What are the benefits of the maps approach of going through FDA approval and showing this is a medicine and it's like other types of drugs you might help to get over depression or anxiety or something like that. Those are the benefits. Are there costs to MDMA kind of being talked about? Oh well, it's a medicine and you go to a doctor and you get prescribed it and things like that. I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene and they're afraid that oh, this is gonna make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or oh, we're sterilizing the industry. But just remembering a comment that Ben Sessa who's a therapist or a psychiatrist in the UK and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool but this is what we have to do to legitimize it to eventually move toward hopefully legality not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people wanna do. And that's gonna make these things safer in the end because then we're gonna know where we're getting our drugs. We're gonna know how to take them. We're gonna have education about how to use them properly. This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs, not even a legal, immoral, not knowing what's in them which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff or checking the Providence but a lot of the times the impurities in a drug are more terrible than whatever the thing is including things like heroin and whatnot. What is the, what's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing or kind of creating, I don't wanna say creating a market for ecstasy but like how does that work? Like what are the cultural manifestations that made people start to say, not just like, oh, I'm gonna stay away from ecstasy but actually that seems pretty interesting. I wanna do it or try it. I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, hey, I tried this thing and not only was it like the most fun night I've ever had it also was like a profoundly beautiful experience. That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a 90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses and when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy and then hearing his stories and he was by no means trying to push me into this. He was done with MDMA. I was finally just like, I wanna try this too. That sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA, millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them from the scientific community. There's just not funding or interest to study them because the government is providing the most of the funding and people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard. And then you have like kind of underground movements that come overgrown. So Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that are the electric daisy carnival. I mean, these are festivals where being part of the throb, right? Yeah, exactly. And as you point out in your subtitle, that question of looking for connection. How is there a quick explanation of how MDMA does that? Because most people would agree that it's like if you're in the right set and setting and you take MDMA, like you have this sense, people talk about an oceanic sense of unity and whatnot. And it is beautiful, it's very deep and moving. Definitely, I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mist able gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today and people are seeking that out. I mean, I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin, it not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack of all trades. Neurotransmitter does all kinds of things but your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin, something like 80% of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling. New. How do different generations view or use MDMA differently? And I'm thinking, you know, there's somebody who we interviewed years ago who I know, Charlie Winninger, and I know you know him and a, you know, a therapist, a psychotherapist in his 70s who wrote a book called Listening to Ecstasy, Echoing, Listening to Prozac. You know, do people like that use MDMA in a different way than you know, people your age or Gen Z? Great question. I honestly, I think it more just comes down to an individual preference. So I was gonna bring up Charlie, you beat me to it. You know, Charlie and his community oftentimes use MDMA and a way to, they dance, they have a great time, but they also connect on this, you know, with spoken word. They share their traumas. They find group healing through talking. I tried that and I cannot talk. Like I just wanna dance. That's just me, but I know people my age or younger who also, you know, prefer to be at home and just like chat and put on some nice music. So I really think it just, it's who you are and it might be, you know, what you're in the mood for. How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics? Yeah. Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So, you know, that is absolutely major. You know, I think MDMA in a way, it hasn't held things back, but you know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the 90s and 2000s. And I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same like negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD, hardly at all. MDMA, you know, I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. Like I was reading UC Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose and it's like, oh, Indiana's moving to, you know, invest dollars in psilocybin research. I mean, for DSD and this and that, but you don't, the states aren't as eager to do MDMA, which, you know, I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades and also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, you know, for some reason, people are more comfortable with, you know, a natural substance than one that was made in the lab. Yeah, legalizing nature, meaning, I mean, there's a lot of movements to just say, plant-based ethyngogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's their harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere, but yeah, we have this, I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. But at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy, just because it's such an easier medicine to work with or substance, I guess. I mean, it's like, I would assume I've never actually done it in a strictly therapeutic setting, but it's, I don't know, it's like having novocaine before a filling or something like it just, it primes you to have the work done, right? That's perfect, yeah, exactly. It's just this catalyst to make everything work better. Why in the kind of broad psychedelic space, and you know, some people will be pedantic and say, well, MDMA is not quite, you know, is not really a psychedelic, et cetera, but there seems to be an appreciation for a bunch of substances which realistically very few people use. You know, the number of people who report using, you know, LSD or MDMA or mushrooms in the past year are, I mean, in the very low single digits of people over the age of 18. Why are we, why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing these things. The laws seem to be changing. And there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this, a lot of creative people are talking about this. Cultural, you know, kind of artifacts of this stuff are coming out all over the place. What's going on? Definitely, I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize like just how idiotic it was that there's no way to, you know, win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and, you know, environment, you know, the list goes on. I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working, you know? There's more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma, you know, the list goes on. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this like magic wand cure all and they're just like, oh gosh, you know, psychedelics are gonna like ready all my problems. Yeah, they're gonna do what Prozac failed to do. Exactly. And people want, you know, to believe in these magic cures. And, you know, it's not gonna be that for most people. Do you, you know, a parallel with maps, they're a bit behind it, but Compass Pathways Pharmaceutical Company has gotten, they're pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is there, is that a good sign or a bad sign? That, you know, that big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this and be like, okay, there's a real opportunity here. Yeah, I mean, I think unfortunately it was just inevitable. You know, if it's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people, you know, the monetization of it isn't great, but it's just, this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever gonna be able to reform the system. You know, Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with Charity Alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised 140 million plus dollars on donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through maps, suddenly we have these companies like Compass Pump popping up that are for profit. And then donors are like, well, why would I give you free money that I'm not gonna see a return on when I could make an investment over here? So maps isn't gonna make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for profit. They have a board, they have investors, you know, they tried really hard not to, but this is just the system that we live in. It's also fascinating because, and I know maps is doing this by tying it with therapy, but most of these substances, and I guess this is true of some pharmaceuticals, not all, but like the actual pills, you know, cost pennies to make, but then it's hard to actually kind of monetize it. And that's, you know, there's ketamine therapy, which is kind of related to this, where the ketamine is effectively zero dollars. And then the other stuff is where the money is gonna be. And that presents challenges for the existing structure because pharmaceutical companies make money selling pills, not selling pills attached to the six week therapy session or something like that. Do you see any big obstacles in, you know, the next couple of years to the medicalization and or legalization of these substances? I mean, I'm sure there's gonna be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this, you know, Biden released some memo about it. There's language and a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But, you know, I just, the government is very, very conservative so I can see there being all kinds of like hitches that, you know, delay this like years. But hopefully not. I think we need to bring it all full circle and who knows who's gonna be president next year, but if, you know, it's Nixon who started the current war on drugs, went to China as a, you know, an anti-communist, Biden as the drug warrior, he needs to go to the electric daisy carnival, right? And end it. I endorse this. Very something. Yeah, okay. Everyone, you heard it here, yeah. All right, well, we're gonna stop there. The book is I Feel Love. The author is Rachel Newer. Thanks for talking. Thanks so much for having me. It was delightful.