 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris and I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Rick Doblin. He's the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Rick. Oh, Trevor, thank you for having me. So what is MAPS? MAPS stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. And in its essence, it's a non-profit pharmaceutical company focused on developing psychedelics in marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines. And then also, we're starting to really think globally. And so it'll be about really trying to develop MDMA assistance like that for PTSD first through FDA with our America First Plan, then through the European Medicine Agency, then the rest of the world, then expand to other indications for MDMA and also other psychedelics in marijuana. So what led you to start an organization like this? What led me to start it was that I was totally, as a young man, freaked out by the world and scared of the world being destroyed through, you know, I was almost 10 when we had the Cuban Missile Crisis. I grew up on stories of the Holocaust, you know, Jewish nation, had distant relatives killed. You know, then I was the last year of the lottery for Vietnam. All of that just made me realize that the essence of the psychedelic mystical experience, which has been used for thousands of years in all different cultures, is this sense that we're all connected. We're connected to nature. We're connected to others. And we're essentially, we're more same than different. And I thought that the political implications of that were profound. And we saw that a lot during the sixties, that a lot of the people that were using psychedelics were finding them to be very educational and instructive and also motivated them to get involved in a lot of the social justice causes of the era, which increased, of course, the controversial nature of these drugs, but also for me, really confirms the sense that there were important political implications of having this sense of connection and that knowing it is one thing intellectually, but feeling it experientially is another. So that led me to just focus on psychedelics as what I thought would be a valuable contribution that I could focus my life on to bring them back up from the underground into mainstream acceptance. So I'm curious on the psychedelics approach specifically, because what you're describing, that kind of those mystical experiences and then the benefits of that feeling of connection is popular or comes about in other ways too. Right now, we're going through a period where like mindfulness is on the rise and Buddhism is on the rise. And so the Buddhists do their loving kindness meditation, which gives you similar sorts of effects. So why approach this kind of thing from the pharmaceuticals perspective? Well, I would say that mindfulness has arisen out of a lot of this mystical experience. There's many, many different ways to do it. You can go to a monastery and meditate for 30 years, or you can try to do yoga for a long time, or you could practice mindfulness. There's many ways to do it. And I think that's a really important point is that these are not drug-induced experiences. Essentially, these are human experiences catalyzed by drugs, by psychedelics, but also available in many other ways. And the reason I chose psychedelics is because I think they're more reliable, more consistent, have been used for thousands of years for those reasons. And given the fact that a lot of people are not going to meditate for 20 years, or that mindfulness is hard for people and that yoga is hard, and you can have these experiences just walking in nature. But I just felt like the psychedelics were an efficient tool. That's what we saw during the 60s. That's what influenced me. And so I felt like time is pretty limited. I mean, we've got credible technology that's impacting the climate. We've got nuclear weaponry that could be explosive in a terrible way at any moment. So I just felt for an efficiency point of view, I'd focus on psychedelics. Is it accurate to conclude that if we say that the countercultural movement in the 60s, and a lot of people doing psychedelics, and they became more worldly minded and social justice causes, but is it accurate to conclude that psychedelics caused that? Or that the kind of people who would take psychedelics are the kind of people who might be more open-minded to new experiences and things that actually predict more social justice left wing, to some extent, anti-war. Those attitudes might predict those opinions more than being caused by psychedelics. I think it's both of those things. I think it's both factors. So the psychedelics don't inherently, under any circumstances, produce these kind of experiences. We have all sorts of information about people that take psychedelics at parties or elsewhere for recreational purposes and then end up feeling a lot worse off and scared and panicked and emotional breakdowns. So it's about the context what Timothy Leary and others started calling the set and setting that has a big impact on what's going to happen from the experience. So it's not inherently in the drug, it's this combination of drug set and setting. And so I think that there are suggestions that people that are predisposed these kind of experiences are more questioning, more willing to explore novelty, more open to these kind of experiences and in fact are seeking them. And so I think it's a combination. There was just a study that came out of Imperial College in London that looked at people who were experiencing psilocybin for reasons of depression. And so these are not people that are looking for a mystical experience or anything, but they're willing to volunteer for a study in which psilocybin could be used to help them with their depression. And what the study showed is that those that had a mystical experience and that the depth of the mystical experience was linked to experiences of what they called nature relatedness and openness and anti-authoritarian views that they were correlated between the depth of the mystical experience and these outcomes. So I think it's something that happens in people naturally if they're open to whatever is about to emerge, whether they come to it for personal political reasons or they come to it for trying to get out of depression or alcoholism or nicotine addiction or other clinical conditions that they might seek out therapy. I'm curious how you go about doing studies of this kind when the materials you're studying are illegal? Yes, well, that's why I got my masters and my PhD from the Kennedy School of Government on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics in marijuana. So the drugs are illegal unless you can have approval from the FDA, the DEA and institutional review boards to conduct scientific research. So they're only legal in research contexts. And although I guess I'll make an exception that some of the psychedelics like ayahuasca and peyote have been approved by the US Supreme Court for legal use in certain religious contexts. So for example, there's roughly half a million members of the Native American Church who can legally use peyote throughout America. And there's also members of the Uniao de Vegetal, the UDV, which is an ayahuasca church, and the Santodime, which are also another ayahuasca church that can use these, the ayahuasca within very specific religious contexts that in one case with the UDV went all the way up to the Supreme Court and with the Santodime, it went up to the Ninth Circuit and they affirm their religious use. But basically, it's very difficult to do research with these drugs because they're illegal. It takes a great deal of negotiations with regulatory authorities, but it's not unknown that drugs that have been in Schedule 1, have been the most illegal, have emerged out of that and then had medical uses accepted. We all, for most people, I think, would be aware of the oral THC pill, marinal, for nausea control, for cancer chemotherapy, and for appetite for AIDS wasting. That's been approved as an extract of marijuana. And then also, more recently, GHB, which was a Schedule 1 drug, sometimes known as the day rape drug, it's been approved as a medicine for narcolepsy for people that fall asleep during the day. So they take GHB at night and then it helps them sleep better through the night so they're not asleep during the day. So it is possible for drugs to move from Schedule 1 into other schedules, meaning that the medical use is approved. And it's also possible to do research with these drugs. When it comes to trying to get permission from the government and the DEA, as you said, and the FDA, do they seem to not want to give you permission? I mean, the DEA is not the drug study administration or whatever the drug education administration. Its job is to stop the use and flow of these drugs, especially Schedule 1 drugs. So I feel like they wouldn't be totally happy about giving people licenses to study these and possibly make people believe that they have beneficial effects and make the DEA's job harder if you discover that marijuana helps cancer patients, then cancer patients are going to try and get marijuana and now we've got to go burn down more fields in Northern California. Well, I think the writers in Congress, when Congress created the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, they did so with a healthy suspicion that police authorities would want to shut down research that produced evidence that was contrary to the propaganda of the drug war, which was now just starting to be escalated at that time by Nixon. And so the members of Congress limited the ability of DEA to block giving Schedule 1 licenses to very specific reasons. And none of those have to do with, oh, they don't like the politics of the study. So if the person applying for a Schedule 1 license has had a criminal record related to drugs, they're not going to get a Schedule 1 license. But if they don't, and if the protocol has been accepted by the FDA and by an institutional review board, and DEA always wants to go last in this process. But if you have the proper approvals, DEA is pretty limited in how they can say no. And so they have said, yes, sometimes we've had to prod them. They've done nothing for a long time as a way to show that they weren't so happy. And so we've had to sometimes get members of the Senate to call the DEA to say what's taking so long to get these approvals. But in the end, the DEA has been giving these approvals. And we just had a meeting with DEA December 19th with DEA headquarters. And it was precisely to talk about the issuing of Schedule 1 licenses to researchers. And it actually was a cordial and collaborative discussion. We now have our first senior retired DEA official working as a consultant for us. And the reason is because his son went off to the military and went to Iraq and he has PTSD and uses marijuana for PTSD, which changed the ideas of his father. And so his father is now working for us as a consultant. And Tony Colson is his name. And we ended up, he arranged these meetings December 19th at DEA headquarters. And there was one moment that was so particularly illustrative, which was we get in the elevator, we're going up to the sixth floor of the DEA building. For whatever reason, the elevator opens up on the second floor. Nobody got in, nobody got out. I don't know if anybody actually pressed the second floor. But the second floor is where the administrative law judge courtroom is. And the last time that I was in the DEA headquarters was 2005, when we were suing the DEA to try to force them to issue licenses to a Professor Craker at UMass Amherst for growing marijuana for drug development purposes. Because there's been this monopoly since 1968 that the federal government has on the production of federally legal DEA licensed marijuana that can only be used in FDA approved trials. So the elevator opened up on the second floor, nobody got in, nobody got out, it closed. And that just reminded us that that was our past experience with DEA had been suing them on that floor. And then we went up to the sixth floor and had our collaborative meeting about schedule and licenses. And I think the other part of this is that the police are among the first responders in our society that most need help with post-traumatic stress disorder. When you think about it, we talk a lot about veterans with PTSD or women and men, even survivors of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape and assault. But I've lately become more sensitized to the difficult job that police have and how often they see horrific things and can be easily traumatized by that. So there was a hint of that, that what we're trying to do is not completely against the best interest of the DEA or police authorities, that we're trying to bring in tools that can help their own members who are suffering from the challenges of the job that they have. When you mentioned the marijuana source, talk a little bit more about that. There's another level for that. It's the NIDA to get this marijuana. And I've heard it's not very good on top of that. Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Does the government grow good pot? The issue is right now, will science, in this case, drug development science for marijuana be blocked by politics? And with psychedelics, because so many manufacturers have DEA schedule one licenses or schedule one licenses from their own countries to produce these drugs for research, we have an independent source of psychedelics and we have an FDA that's willing to put science before politics of the drug war. And that's why we're making so much progress with psychedelic research that we're about to start phase three studies with MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. FDA has declared that a breakthrough therapy, which is absolutely tremendous. But with marijuana, we're way behind, years and years behind. And that's because of this monopoly that the federal government has on the production of marijuana. It's one license at the University of Mississippi. They grow under contract to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The National Institute on Drug Abuse can only provide it for research, not as a prescription medicine. And what that means is that as long as there's only one source, which is NIDA, we can never do phase three studies because the phase three studies, the crucial pivotal studies that are necessary to prove safety and efficacy to get approval by the FDA for marketing, those phase three studies have to be done with the exact same drug that the sponsor is seeking permission to market if the studies prove safe and effective. So the NIDA marijuana is not just bad quality, which it is. It's low potency and it's all ground up and it's dry and it's not at all what you'd want to smoke if you had a choice. The most important problem is that that marijuana can only be used in academic research, not in phase three drug development research. And so this has been a problem since 1968. Starting in 2000, I started working with Professor Lyle Craker to sue the DA to apply for licenses. Then it led to that lawsuit in 2005 where the administrative law judge agreed with us that it would be in the public interest to end the NIDA monopoly, but the administrator of the DA rejected that recommendation. And so we were tied up in the courts. That didn't work. But under Obama in 2016, in the summer of 2016, the DEA agreed that they would end the monopoly. And they put in a couple of paragraphs in a federal register notice that explained how they could do this consistent with U.S. international treaty obligations. And that had been the big argument for decades that U.S. international treaty obligations prevented DEA from licensing anybody other than NIDA. And so in two short paragraphs, they showed how that was a totally bogus argument, how they could do this in accordance with our treaty obligations. And then since then, roughly 26 companies or individuals have filed for licenses to grow marijuana exclusively for federally regulated research. But then what happened is we got Trump and Sessions. And Sessions is now blocking DEA from issuing any of these licenses. And Senator Orrin Hatch in October had Sessions in front of him in a Senate hearing. And he questioned Sessions about this. And Sessions agreed that the monopoly should end, that it would be good to have competition, and that he just didn't want to license all 26 of them. So that was over three months ago, and nothing has happened since. And so what's even the most egregious is that last week, word came out that President Trump called Prime Minister Netanyahu in Israel and said, do not permit the export of medical marijuana. The entire Israeli establishment, political establishment at the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Justice, they had all decided that they would finally permit the Israeli medical marijuana producers to export their product. And we would be interested in importing it into the U.S. for research because their marijuana can be used for prescription sales, and it can be used for phase three. But President Trump called Netanyahu and said, don't permit it. And so he reversed the policy in Israel and blocked the export. So now we have a situation where the Trump administration is blocking importation of medical marijuana from abroad and through Sessions is blocking the DEA from issuing any licenses to domestic producers. Meanwhile, we have a company called GW Pharmaceuticals that was approved by the Home Office in 1998, almost 20 years ago, to produce marijuana for medical research. That company is now worth in excess of $3 billion. We're blocking domestic production. And it's all because it's hard to say why it is, because you've got a majority. Well over 85% of Americans are in favor of medical marijuana, and over 60% of Americans are in favor of marijuana legalization. So this is the last holdout. And we are really focusing, maps is focusing a lot of effort on trying to change this because this is now drug war politics blocking science, and we need to undo that. Well, along those lines then, how much damage to the future of this field can Sessions do? And how worried are you about him taking further steps to inhibit things, make it harder, re-criminalize stuff than he already has? Well, I am not that worried about what Adrenaline General Sessions can do, in terms of trying to slow down the research that we're doing with NDMA Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD. And there's a couple of reasons for that. First off, we have approval from FDA to move forward into phase three, and do have a cooperation from DEA giving the Schedule 1 licenses to the researchers. And that's really the only point of leverage that the Attorney General has. There's also a law that's been passed not too long ago that says that once the FDA decides that a drug has been proven to have safety and efficacy, the DEA must reschedule within 60 days to permit the medical use. Now, whether it goes in Schedule 2 or Schedule 3 or Schedule 4 or Schedule 5, that's a discussion between the DEA and the FDA's controlled substances staff. So there is some influence that the Attorney General could have through the DEA on the schedule that MDMA ends up with if it's approved by the FDA. But if it's approved by the FDA, it must become a medicine within 60 days. The other thing that we've done is we've negotiated with FDA in what's called a special protocol assessment process. That's one of the newer innovations at FDA in terms of regulatory science. And so, once you've been given permission for moving to Phase 3 as a sponsor, you can just go ahead and do your Phase 3 studies. Or if you elect, you can enter into a special protocol assessment process which negotiates every aspect of the Phase 3 design with the FDA. And that delays things sometimes six months to a year. And a lot of pharmaceutical companies don't want those delays because they've got patents that they think are expiring and they think that they know how to design the Phase 3 studies. But in such a controversial issue of MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD, we elected to go through the special protocol assessment process. And on July 28, 2017, we reached an agreement and received an agreement letter from FDA. And what that means is that FDA is now bound legally to approve MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD. If the studies, as we've agreed to design them with FDA, if we get evidence, statistically significant evidence of efficacy and no new safety problems, arise. And so, I'm pretty confident that we're on a really good track that cannot be interrupted. Plus, the other thing is that we have bipartisan support for what we're doing. Just today, we released a press release of a million dollar donation for veterans going through Phase 3 from Rebecca Mercer, the Republican funder. And we've got a lot of support from veterans communities, from the military, from all the military newspapers and media outlets. So, I think we're in good shape. I think the big issue for me with Sessions is how he's blocking drug development research with marijuana. And that is a major concern. Well, he also doesn't like medical marijuana on top of that. I mean anything, right? He would like to go after medical marijuana. Well, he's very interested in, yeah, doing what he can to hinder state medical marijuana laws and also state marijuana legalization laws. But MAPS is focused on federal and trying to do the federal research. So, we have a study right now which is four different kinds of marijuana for post-traumatic stress disorder and 76 U.S. veterans. And this study is taking place in Phoenix, Arizona. And it's being funded with a $2.1 million grant that MAPS has received from the state of Colorado from their marijuana taxes. So, even though this study is not taking place in Colorado, the state of Colorado has funded it. And we're moving forward with that study with marijuana from NIDA. And so, this is a Phase 2 study. It'll take us another year, year and a half to get all the data and then we'll be ready, perhaps depending on the results, to move to Phase 3. And we can't move to Phase 3 with NIDA marijuana. So, hopefully between now and a year and a half from now, we'll be able to break the NIDA monopoly and force sessions to permit the DEA to issue some licenses. But that's really where Attorney General Sessions can impact our work on a federal level. And yeah, he can certainly try to crack down on states. But that just puts a lie to all the states' rights or rhetoric that we've heard from Republicans. And it also is meeting with incredible resistance among various states, even in Republicans. So, Senator Cory Gardner from Colorado has gone on the warpath against Sessions. Now that Sessions has talked about cracking down on marijuana legalization states, and medical marijuana states, which Colorado is. So, Sessions is trying to do what he can to slow down the acceptance of the medical use of marijuana and marijuana legalization. But it's a losing battle that he's got. And he's got a lot of Republican opposition. And I think from a political point of view, it's foolish because they're going to be losing supporters who care about liberty and ending the drug war and freedom to access medical marijuana. They're going to lose support from those voters who might otherwise have voted Republican. You mentioned a few times the MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD. And MDMA, for those listeners who don't know, is ecstasy in the street world. But talk a little bit about those studies because it's quite shocking how effective the preliminary results are for PTSD treatment through ecstasy, which everyone always associates with going to a rave. But even for a very long time before they was even prohibited by the DEA, ecstasy had been used by psychologists, too, to treat these kind of things. Yeah, Trevor, it's very good you mentioned that because most people are not aware that MDMA, which I'd prefer to use it because ecstasy now refers to a street drug that is often impure and adulterated with other things. But it was originally intended to be pure MDMA. And that's what it was in the 80s. But from the middle 70s to the early 80s, MDMA was used under the code name Adam, sort of a scramble of MDMA and sort of reminds one of the Garden of Eden and a certain state of innocence that MDMA can help people feel that around half a million doses were used in therapeutic settings, personal growth settings, private settings, homes. And this was completely out of the view of the DEA. There were no significant problems from this use. It was only that some people who had used Adam in these settings decided that a larger group of people would benefit from this and that they could make a lot of money and that people would be wanting this drug in other contexts. And they turned it into ecstasy. And then it became sold in bars and taxes, the Stark Club in particular in Dallas and others. And it became known as a party drug. And so when the DEA moved to criminalize MDMA in 1984, I had organized a group of therapists and researchers into psychedelics. And we ended up anticipating the DEA move because this was during Nancy Reagan just say no era. And the fact that ecstasy was being used in a public setting, it meant that it was doomed. And so we ended up filing for a DEA administrative law judge hearing in the summer of 1984 and got that hearing. And then actually similar to the marijuana administrative law judge hearings, we won the case. The administrative law judge said that MDMA should be scheduled three and available still to therapists. And the administrator of the DEA at the time, John Lawn, ignored that recommendation and put it in schedule one. And then I realized that the only way to bring it back was going to be through the FDA. And that's where I created maps in 86. And if you were to design a drug for post-traumatic stress disorder, MDMA would be it. So the results are remarkable. But at the same time, it was well known in the therapeutic circles where Adam was used that MDMA had remarkable potential for post-traumatic stress disorder. And so what it does briefly is that it reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear processing center of the brain. And it increases connectivity between the hippocampus and the amygdala, which is where memories are processed. So what happens with PTSD is people have such scary traumatic experiences that they can't fully process that. And it comes back to them all the time. And they're hyper-vigilant and hypersensitive to fears and anxieties. And so these memories are never really fully processed and turned into long-term memories. They're always sort of hovering there on the surface. They come back in nightmares. They come back in dreams. They come back in triggering events. Somebody sees something or hears a noise that also MDMA enhances activity in the frontal cortex, which is where we put things in context and where we can store memories in long-term memory. And also MDMA stimulates oxytocin and prolactin, which are hormones of nursing mothers and love, oxytocin, the love hormone. So it produces a sense of safety, sense of connection. It enhances the therapeutic alliance between the patient and the therapist. And MDMA stimulates serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine neurotransmitters that end up in this kind of unique way producing a state whereby people are able to process powerful and painful negative emotions in ways that they've not been able to do before. We've actually worked with Vietnam veterans who had been stuck for 40, 50 years with post-traumatic stress disorder. And they're able to heal under the influence of MDMA even after all that much time. Yeah, the clearance rates, I think, in one of them was in the 80 percent, in the sense of five years out having substantial treatment of patients, which is incredible. Yeah, the very first study that we did was mostly women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And 83 percent of them no longer had PTSD after the treatment. And then at the three-and-a-half year follow-up, it actually was increased slightly, not decreased, so that on average, the benefits last over time. Some people do relapse and new things happen to them in their lives, but in general, it lasts. But when we did all of the studies, we did studies in the U.S. and Israel, in Switzerland, and in Canada. And when we put them all together, we had 107 people. And the results were that at the 12-month follow-up after the last MDMA session, two-thirds, no longer had PTSD. And these were people that had chronic treatment-resistant, on average, severe PTSD. And for two-thirds of them a year later, no longer to have PTSD, is pretty remarkable. And the one-third that still had PTSD, many of them had significant reductions in symptoms, but still they still had PTSD. And so the question is, maybe if a fourth session were available to them, that would be they might continue to make progress. Yeah, and that's why the FDA declared it a breakthrough therapy. And that's another, you know, get back to the political question that you asked before about what sessions could do. I was very concerned whether the FDA would give us breakthrough therapy designation, because it's a very public demonstration of FDA support for the research. And they're actually evaluated by Congress on how quickly breakthrough therapy drugs move through the system. And the FDA provides extra meetings with the sponsor and the FDA to try to help that whole process move forward. And so I was concerned. I felt we met the criteria, but now under President Trump and Sessions, I just wasn't sure how it would turn out. But on August 15th, 2017, FDA granted us breakthrough therapy. And that was really, for me, the final point of FDA prioritizing science over politics, being willing to stand behind the evaluation of our phase two data and say that they want to help us. And I really think that we do have bipartisan support. I don't see any significant opposition coming from drug lawyers, because that would put them against the lawyers that we have in the veterans community and others. So I believe we're going to be able to move forward with MDMA secondary for PTSD without encountering major objections from any political sources. And I think this latest $1 million donation from Rebecca Mercer, the Mercer Family Foundation, will help in that regard. Given a drug that seems this effective, that seems to work that astonishingly well for people who are desperate for something that can work that astonishingly well, what's the drive to criminalize drugs like MDMA? Or what are the arguments that, I mean, you said there aren't really any major objections, but there are still obviously objections people make to legalizing or freeing up in some way these kinds of drugs. So where are those people coming from? What sorts of arguments are they making to you that we should keep something like this off the market that we shouldn't allow people to use it? Well, the main argument that we get is that the medicalization of MDMA quote sends the wrong message end quote to young people. And the message is supposedly that, oh, this drug is safe, therefore go ahead and take it, even if it's impure and take it under any circumstances. So people are not really capable of looking at our data and saying this drug is unsafe under medical supervision or this drug is not helping people tremendously with PTSD. What they're able to only say is, oh, we don't like the messaging and it's going to get in the way of the anti-drug message. And so I think what we really need to acknowledge is that we need honest drug education. When you exaggerate the risks of drugs and deny their benefits, you may be able to persuade fifth graders in the dare program run by police that drugs are bad. But once they get a little bit older and they start learning more, you've lost all credibility because they see that they've been given inaccurate information. And so I think we really need honest drug education. And I think the message anyway that comes to kids with the medicalization of this drug is a different message than people are saying. It's not that, oh, go ahead and do it under any circumstances. What they're hearing is we have a male female co-therapist team. We have two therapists for every one patient. And the drug is only administered under direct supervision in an eight-hour session where the subjects in almost all of our sites end up spending the night at the treatment center and then have more psychotherapy the next day. And we only do the therapy during the day, not at night. And it's only pure drugs and it's only limited doses and people have adequate fluid replacement. So people's temperatures don't have any kind of dangerous rise. People don't have problems with blood pressure increases. And under those circumstances, we're able to demonstrate safety and efficacy. But it's not the same as just saying this drug is safe for people to take under any circumstances in any context. So I really think a lot of times people take these drugs for parties. They're only looking for a good time. And then something emerges from their own unconscious, some prior trauma. And if they know that this drug is a therapy drug, they're more likely to process the trauma, meaning to focus on it, to let out the emotions, to explore, or to try to run away from it, or consider a bad trip, or then start trying to tranquilize themselves or whatever. So I actually think the medicalization is going to have a beneficial effect on non-medical use rather than a harmful effect. But that's the argument. The sending the message is such a frustrating argument too. Because on the one hand, well, if we medicalize it, then it's like saying, if we medicalize chemotherapy, all the kids are going to want to go out and want to do it. But then on the other hand, the sending the wrong message, like here's a thing that they're going to misuse is odd in light of, say, all of the beer commercials I saw during the Super Bowl. Just the complete disconnect we have with we glamorize certain drugs and send the message that all the cool people do it, but then think that if we let a handful of doctors administer something, it's profoundly frustrating. It's not a very logically consistent argument about sending the wrong message. And I also think it's logically inconsistent. In fact, that the message that people get is that under therapeutic controlled circumstances, this can be helpful. And if you look at what's going on in medical marijuana states, they have not seen this dramatic increase in adolescent drug use with marijuana. In fact, in some states, they've seen a decrease. It sort of takes away the rebellious nature of doing these drugs once they're approved as medicines. And we don't see in the Netherlands, for example, young people in the Netherlands where you can get marijuana at coffee houses, they have a lower adolescent use of marijuana than we do here in the U.S. So it sort of takes that as a symbol of rebellion and it kind of reduces the symbolic value of it once you've mainstreamed and medicalized it. Well, there's a strange aspect of psychedelics too, kind of going off of Aaron's question about the drugs that we encourage and legalize. Illegalize have legal and also encourage and commercials and the drugs we don't. But with psychedelics, and you were around in the 60s, as you said, it seems a little bit different of what scares people about them than, say, cocaine or things that are supposed to turn people into stark raving lunatics. Psychedelics, it's like you're messing with your brain. And I always got these ideas. I think maybe you can dare or someone told me on the playground that this rumor of if anyone's ever taken LSD five times, they're declared clinically insane by the government. I put the same thing, yeah. Yeah. And my ideas of people jumping off of roofs and that's why. So we say, why is LSD illegal? Well, it makes people live in a different reality. Well, they said the same thing about Dungeons and Dragons. This is true. Yeah, yeah. So I guess in that regard, why do you think psychedelics, how do you think people, the public in general sort of thinks about psychedelics and what mistakes do they make about that? Well, okay. I think this is a really key point, which is that in the 60s, the psychedelics, because of the turmoil of the times and because this was sort of the first emergence of psychedelics into really widespread public consciousness, they got lumped in as psychedelics produce counterculture rebels who are going to protest everything and drop out of society. And Tim Leary was talking about turn on, tune in, drop out. And I think that now here we are 50 years later and that kind of fear, the fear that psychedelics are going to inherently produce social turmoil, I think is not true anymore. We have to look at all those people from the 60s who did psychedelics at a young age and how many of them have gone on to have families, to have careers, to make positive contributions in America. I mean, one of the ones that we all love to point to is Steve Jobs, who talked about LSD as being among the three most important experiences of his whole life. And he produced the most financially wealthy company in the entire world from Apple Computer. So that the association of psychedelics with the counterculture is still alive in the mind of Attorney General Sessions and a few others. But it's not really true, nor is it produced by the evidence of what people have done in the last 50 years. And so our whole message now is about mainstreaming psychedelics and making them something that people can have access to and they don't drop out of society. In fact, it enhances their life. It enhances their participation in society. It can address PTSD, depression, anxiety, fear of dying, alcoholism, nicotine addiction. These psychedelics, when combined with psychotherapy, can be tremendously helpful for treating substance abuse. And so I think what's mostly now concerning people is this idea of parents worrying about their children. And this idea that you take it five times and you're clinically insane, or you take MDMA and you get holes in your brain or any number of these fears that have no basis in reality. But I think we've now got this point where it is about sending the wrong message to kids or how do we protect the kids as the issue. And I think that the current system of prohibition endangers children and adolescents more than it protects them. And I think we're making that message. We're seeing that happen with marijuana as we move towards legalization in multiple states. And I think the thing that's been surprising to me, and this is where I've been very much appreciative of Cato, is this idea of personal freedom and human rights to explore consciousness that many, many Democrats and Republicans don't really value as highly as they should. But the Cato Institute has been one of the pioneers in really talking about the infringement of liberty represented by prohibition and that we should have a whole different approach towards drug abuse and that it should involve honest drug education, open access to treatment, de-stigmatized people that run into problems. That's what we're trying to see with alcoholism and drug abuse where people talk about it at night and elsewhere as a brain disease. It's not a moral failing necessarily completely. It's a, in some sense, a brain disease. People are trying to de-stigmatize it and help offer treatment to people, particularly now we see with the opiate epidemic. These are people that used opiates a lot of times for pain and then got addicted to it. And now that it's more of a white kind of a problem, they're not demonized as much. And so I really think that we're at a transition point in our culture and that the Cato Institute and others that really believe in personal liberty are leading the way to trying to come up with a more effective and less costly and more humane and more pro-freedom, pro-liberty drug policy. It is interesting how much the stigma affects this view of what psychedelics do when you have this question. I always tell students that it's more profound than they usually think, which is what's the difference between a drug, like an illegal drug, and a medicine sort of affects your brain. You know, they say, oh, LSD is really bad. It's a drug. But then there are so many psychotropic drugs out there, Xanax and all the antidepressants and things that radically affect your brain. And that's medicine. But these things that have been used for thousands of years are people use in different ways to solve all these problems in their life or have spiritual experiences. That's a drug and that's not okay. It seems that sort of like not a very fair way to classify these things. And that's of course what you're trying to fix. Well, yeah, it's completely unfair. And the ultimate irony is that what we're talking about when we talk about therapy with psychedelic drugs is an administration of these drugs only a few times in a therapeutic context to help people be drug-free and to have sort of addressed their emotional issues and be drug-free in contrast to all these pharmaceutical drugs, which are many times meant to be taken on a daily basis for years or decades. And then if you stop taking them, your problems come back. That we're actually talking in some ways about an anti-drug strategy through the use of psychedelics to go deep into people's unconscious and their psyche with support, with therapeutic surrounds, and try to make it so people become independent of drugs and also free of the psychological burdens that they've carried before. Here's something that strikes me just now. I hadn't thought about this, but MDMA is, I think it was discovered in 1913 or something. It's not patentable. So if you get FDA approval, will any drug company want to produce it? Well, MDMA was invented in 1912 by Merck Pharmaceutical Companies and the patents have long since expired. And then in the 80s, I actually hired a patent attorney to develop an anti-patent strategy for use patents so nobody could ever patent the use of MDMA, which basically meant putting potential uses in the public domain so nobody could say they discovered them. But what we're really trying to communicate to people is that once it becomes a medicine, maps is in an unusual circumstance. And to this we have to thank Ronald Reagan so that in the 1980s, under 84, there was a law that was passed that provided incentives for the development of drugs that were off patents. So once MDMA becomes a medicine, the FDA has a policy that they automatically give sponsors of drugs that have no patent protection what's called data exclusivity. And what that means is that nobody can use your data for five years to market a generic. It's less than a patent because if some other sponsor wanted to make MDMA into a medicine for PTSD, they could do so. And we'd be glad if they did because that's just further part of mainstreaming. Or if somebody wanted to make MDMA into a medicine for something else, other than PTSD, they could do that. So there's no composition of matter patent, there's no use patents, but there is this data exclusivity. And so what Maps has done is we've created a public benefit corporation that will market MDMA during this period of data exclusivity and beyond once MDMA becomes a medicine. And that whatever profits are made from the sale of MDMA by the Maps Benefit Corporation will be used for the mission of Maps. So the Maps Public Benefit Corporation is a for-profit company, but it has only one investor in it, which is the nonprofit. And so what we're trying to demonstrate is a new mechanism, a new corporate mechanism for marketing drugs. And one could argue that probably the whole pharmaceutical industry should be transformed into public benefit corporations instead of profit maximizing corporations. And you have a lot of people who say, I'm against the legalization of marijuana, not because I think marijuana is so terrible, but because we're going to have big alcohol and big tobacco and they're going to get involved in marketing marijuana and they're going to market to kids and they're going to market to heavy users and they're going to advertise just the way you describe these beer commercials. And that's going to have a pernicious effect on society. And we don't like that unbridled corporate capitalism maximizing profits to disregard public health. And so that's where the Public Benefit Corporation, and there's thousands of them now, approved in Delaware and also California, that you maximize public benefit, not profit. And I think we're trying to demonstrate also to regulators, to DEA, to people concerned about abuse that once maps obtains approval from FDA, for marketing MDMA, we're not going to be just trying to get it out there to as many people as we can as quickly as we can regardless of the outcomes that we're going to be focused on maximizing public benefit. And I think that's a really incredible opportunity that this data exclusivity process has created. We have spent most of the last hour talking about the ways that these drugs could be used in specific therapeutic situations, people suffering from particular ailments that can be solved with them. But I want to bring it all the way back to the beginning because we started the conversation by you saying that you founded maps in part because you thought that there was something that had come out of the psychedelic experiences of the 60s, a connection, a feeling of oneness, a feeling of a shared humanity, a spiritualism that you saw as necessary for protecting us against a lot of the great horrors that might come down. And that's a very different thing from specific therapeutic contexts. And so going forward, do you think that we should be taking these drugs and moving them into a broader usage, that people should simply be taking them in order to establish that shared humanity that you saw back in the 60s? I'm so glad you raised that point. That's a really important point. The medicalization of these drugs is a stepping stone to, I think, broader drug policy reform. And I do believe that we need to have legal access for people to these drugs for those spiritual purposes without them having a clinical condition that's being treated. But if we look at the history of marijuana regulation in America, what I like to point out is there's a Gallup poll, a chart that looks at the attitudes of American voters towards the legalization of marijuana from 1970 to around 2014. And what you see is an increase in support for legalization through the 70s. This was the Jimmy Carter era, then around 78 or so, where we started having the rise of the parents movements, and then in 80 where we get Ronald Reagan, that the things flanned for about 20 years. And it was somewhere around 20, 22% or so that were in favor of legalization. And starting around 96, 97, 98, there was a gradual increase until around 2012 when it crossed the 50% mark in favor of legalization of marijuana. And what happened during that time of increasing attitudes towards legalization was the medicalization of marijuana. So medicalization leads to legalization. Medicalization is the only and the best way that we have to educate people honestly about the actual risks and benefits of these drugs under certain conditions. And that is what helps people try to sort through all the propaganda and exaggerated information they've seen about and been given about the risks that have been put out there to justify prohibition. So strategically making psychedelics into medicines is it has to be looked at in and of itself on its own merits through the most rigorous science possible, proving safety and efficacy to the satisfaction of the most rigorous regulatory agency in the world for this, the FDA. It has to make sense in and of itself as a medicine. But that process, I think, will change public attitudes so that we can have broad-based legal access. I'm anticipating that'll be 2035, that we're going to medicalize MDMA, other groups are working to medicalize psilocybin by 2021. And then we'll have a 15-year, 10-15-year rollout of psychedelic clinics. Right now, there's 14,500 drug abuse treatment centers in America. And you can imagine every one of them could have somebody that's able to work with psychedelics to help people deal with the trauma and deal with the problems that addiction have caused. There's 6,000 hospice centers now in America where people go when they're facing death to have a more humane approach to death instead of dying super medicalized on the hospital bed. And every one of these hospice centers could have a psychedelic therapist or two associated with them. So I think we're going to have, through the 2021, through 2031, 2035, we're going to have broad-based distribution of medical use of psychedelics. Eventually, we'll have family members be able to join in. And then eventually, I think people will go to these clinics for initiation experiences, and then they'll have the ability to buy them on their own and use them in whatever settings they want. But I think your point of your question is exactly right, is that the kind of broad-based spirituality that I think the world needs has to go beyond just mathematical applications.