 It's such a pleasure to be here today to see how the float community is really growing, and it gives me a lot of confidence that as a culture we can integrate floating, we can have integrated yoga, we've integrated meditation, and I think psychedelics are right around the corner. What I'm going to talk to you about today is how as a young man growing up when I was 18 I decided to devote my life to psychedelic drugs and to psychedelic psychotherapy, and how my experiences with John Lilly and Stan Groff influenced that decision. I'm going to tell you a bit of a story about doing LSD inside my tank that I had at my house and how important that was to me, and then I'll give you a sense of how we're doing to integrate psychedelics into the culture. Now, I grew up Jewish, born in 1953, and I have relatives in Israel that fought in the War of Independence in 1948, and so I was just raised on the Holocaust and raised on the idea that sometimes cultures and countries go crazy, and so I was focused on how I might avoid that, how this kind of mental illness is a real problem, and it felt more of a problem to me than earning money for food and shelter, kind of trying to be not escape code, trying to be safe, so I was very much focused on mental illness in a way, and also anxiety, this whole fear that if I do nothing, then one day there could be a backlash against me and my relatives and families, and I feel so grateful in a way to have been in America, which does a great job of protecting freedom. So I was also aware that Einstein had said it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. What that means to me is that we have developed incredible intellectual capabilities, but our emotional and spiritual development has lagged behind. We're not that much different from people 2,000 years ago in terms of our passions and our irrationality, but our technology has developed to such a point that we are now affecting the planet with global warming. We're doing all sorts of things that are really endangering us, and so we have to have this accelerated development in emotional and spiritual capabilities. This was, as a young boy, I was involved in school during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I was around 10 years old, and so that was traumatizing in another way, that it wasn't just Jewish people or minorities, it was the whole world we could end up destroying. Einstein said the splitting of the atom has changed everything, save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. So what is this about our mode of thinking? How do we need to change that, and in what ways? And we often look towards spirituality as a way to do that, but when I turned 13, my bar mitzvah was an utter disappointment. I somehow thought I would wake up a different person, and I would have this visitation from God, and I would somehow be, skip all of adolescence, and all of a sudden I'd be grown up, and I remember lying in bed for a whole week, thinking a lot of people must have got bar mitzvah that same day, because God was taking a while to come around to me, and eventually nothing happened, and so I recognized, and many of us have, that the traditional rituals that we have available to us don't work as much as they used to. Then I was in the last year of the lottery, and I had decided what to do about Vietnam, and I was studying Martin Luther King and Tolstoy and Emerson and Thoreau, and about nonviolent resistance, and so I decided that I would become a draft resistor, and anticipated going to jail for doing that. I didn't want to run to Canada, but I ended up inadvertently coming up with an incredible strategy, which was I didn't register, and absolutely nothing happened. Roughly 60,000 people never registered, and nothing happened. I mean the computers weren't so big then, and so what I had then was this moral dilemma, should I turn myself in so that they could put me in jail, so I would be an example, and I decided that rather than being a martyr, I'm much too hedonistic, if I can avoid that, that creating the positive alternative, and I started looking around in the culture, and I saw LSD. Now this is Yoko and John, and Tim Leary's in there. LSD became a symbol of cultural rebellion, and I started thinking why was that? I still believe that LSD made you permanently crazy, that there was something bad that it did to your brain, but what I started to understand was that the mystical experience that people had, it was very interesting for me to see the talk earlier today about the default mode network with flotation, because the latest psychedelic neuroscience research is showing that the classic psychedelics affect the default mode network, and much the similarities between flotation and psychedelics, the degrees are different, but psychedelics really weaken the activity in the default mode network so that our normal ego resting state is weakened and we get a flood of information, and from that, from our not normal filtering systems, people often have these spiritual senses of connection. So I started realizing that LSD had this potential, and when Nixon started saying that Leary was the most dangerous man in America, I started thinking, what is that Leary doing that's working that's got Nixon so scared? And I believe it's this breakdown of who we think we are. We're not our country, we're not our nationality, our religion, our race, our gender, our sexual orientation. We're part of this human family, we're part of the web of life, and when that's your primary identification, there's a whole set of political implications in the direction of tolerance and compassion. Now this was also the time when we were going to the moon. My daughter in high school actually did a report on the Apollo, and one of her friends, her friend's grandfather was Michael Collins, who was piloting the ship that Neil Armstrong then went to the moon on, but he never got to the moon, but he said that when he traveled around the world afterwards, what impressed him so much is that people were saying, we did this, and that's what they, it wasn't the Americans did this, it wasn't the small group of people, it was we as a human race did this, and that was picked up by the last whole earth catalog, and we've seen a lot of these images of the earth from space, and I think we're now engaged in this globalization effort, and we're finding that there's a lot of fundamentalism that's being threatened by this globalization, and so for me the real understanding was that mysticism is the antidote to fundamentalism, and mysticism through psychedelics, this sense of connection. So I started really looking at the whole earth catalog, and I found an ad in it for a book by John Lilly. This is my copy from Ninth Printed, as you can see, 1970, and I read this, and I read this, and I read this, and this was very hard to read, it's very hard to understand, but it was this combination of LSD being taken inside the tank trying to map out how the brain works as a computer, and this is way before we've made a lot of progress with computers, and so friends and I at college started building our own isolation environments, wearing gloves, wearing goggles, things like that, and we even built a tank out of plywood with plastic liners, and we started doing a fair amount of work inside floatation tanks, and I started thinking the more LSD I took, the faster I would evolve, and it doesn't work that way, so I started having problems, and I went to the guidance counselor at my college, and this was now 1972, and I was lucky enough that he gave me a copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stan Grof before it was even published, a manuscript copy, and what was in this book was the results of incredible work with LSD to map human consciousness and also to use the non-ordinary state of consciousness produced by LSD for psychotherapy with the goal of helping people, and once I read this and put it in context with the work that John Lilly had done and then realized that just as I was waking up to this the crackdown had happened, all the research was shut down all over the world, and so I thought okay this is really worth working on, and I started doing my own trips, I dropped out of college for 10 years, I did a fair amount of LSD but now very intermittently, I worked a lot on the integration process, and I started thinking I need to really talk to some of the experts, and so I decided to get in touch with John Lilly, this is now in the middle 70s, this was Roberta Quist, she was his dolphin trainer, and at a point in time he had Joe and Rosie, two dolphins that he was going to release into the wild, and I was in Sarasota, Florida, and I was able to work with a shark research lab, the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico are the most well-studied pod in the world, and so I engineered this whole system to bring John out to possibly put his dolphins through Mote Marine Lab and release them there, but he was already moving away from science and into ketamine addiction, and it was really kind of sad, and so we ended up doing an MDMA, he was willing to do an MDMA session, but he kind of saw the damage that he was doing but he wasn't really able to respond to it, so I felt that there was a difference between him and Stan Groff, who developed what's called holotropic breath work, which is a way to modify your consciousness through hyperventilation, so both of them had these powerful research careers with LSD, with psychedelics, when the crackdown happened, Stan was able to find a way to go forward, but in a more limited way, they were both people way ahead of their time, and I think that the key difference is that Stan was focused on healing, John was focused on knowledge, and John was very impatient, and once the crackdown came, he didn't want to say, you know, now I've got 20, 30 years or whatever it is to bring back to change the culture, or 50 years, as it might be, he just sort of through kind of frustration escaped into sort of a pseudo-spirituality, where Stan went and started doing the research, and so I felt that that's where this focus on healing, and I see that so much in the flotation community, this idea of how do we actually help people, and to see the talks here about veterans with PTSD, about eating disorders, those are both areas that we're looking at very much with psychedelics, and I think that's really where the heart is, and if you can keep that focus on helping people, then it really will help with the mainstreaming. There was one time that I had this crisis in my life, and it's not a crisis that many of us men are unfamiliar with, and it's where we're in love with someone, and they say we want you to be monogamous, and then we say yes, and then we don't. So I had a woman that I was in love with that I, she was gone out of town for a school for a couple months somewhere else, that I slept with somebody else, and she broke up with me, and I felt that this was the key to, I needed to undo this, and I felt the most powerful way that I could work on that, to try to understand that was to take LSD and go in my flotation tank that I had at my house. So I took a large amount of LSD, and I ended up spending 17 hours in the tank, and it was my tank so I could pee in it. I didn't need to worry about that, and at one point I started thinking that somehow or other that she was in danger, that she was going to be committing suicide, that somehow she was going to hurt herself. There was some phone call that she missed to pick up some of her stuff, and so I kept telling myself that I had to go rescue her. And so you can imagine here, I'm tripping inside the tank, and part of my mind is like, get out of the tank and go try to rescue her. And I felt like this was in a way the closest I've come in my life to psychosis. I knew enough not to get out of the tank and just to sit with that, and it took me a couple hours before I realized that it wasn't really that she couldn't live without me, it was me worried that I couldn't live without her. And once I could sort of go through my projections and accept that, and then acknowledge that I needed to be more willing to say no, or if I don't feel like I could be monogamous, or more willing to follow through if I say yes, I felt at one point that there was these hooks that were in my cell, that like fish hooks, and that was interjected hate, and that they were like cancer, and that I would get cancer. And once I accepted what I had done, I felt that these hooks kind of released, and then I felt these pulses of light through my body, like x-rays almost, like radiation therapy. And then I felt afterwards that I was able to emerge out of the tank and try to start a new life where I could find love and be a more reliable partner. But I attribute a lot of my subsequent growth and development to the opportunity to have that time in the tank, that extended period of time in this altered state to sit through these rationalizations and psychosis. So I have a deep respect for the kind of work that can be done in that flotation tank environment with psychedelics. Now, the year after that is where the DEA started trying to criminalize MDMA. I learned about MDMA when it was still legal, and I learned about LSD, the value of it, right after the crackdown. So here I thought, okay, now I know that MDMA is legal, we can introduce it to a lot of people, but it will eventually be smashed because this was being used as ecstasy, it was the rise of Nancy Reagan and just say no. So we prepared a group of people, we worked on gathering monks and rabbis and various people, psychiatrists at Harvard and others, to start a lawsuit eventually once the DEA moved against MDMA. So here is me, this is 1984, spying on the DEA, this is right before I walk in the door to hand them this request for a hearing with a big DC law firm working pro bono on our behalf. So we had a DEA hearing, we ended up winning, the administrative law judge said MDMA should be scheduled three available to therapists, but the head of the DEA rejected the recommendation. And so it was clear to me then that the only way back is going to be through the FDA. So in 1986 I started MAPS. And what I'm going to share with you now is the results of 30 years of effort to try to legitimize and have mainstream acceptance for psychedelic psychotherapy. Now we're right now at what's called the end of phase two. Within the next two weeks we are going to be submitting data from our phase two pilot studies and sending it to the FDA for a discussion about how to move into phase three. So the first thing that you need is you need medical grade drug. So we're having one kilogram of, this is actually the factory where we're having the MDMA made. In 1985 I had a kilogram of MDMA made for $4,000 by Dave Nichols at Purdue University. It's the MDMA we still use today, 31 years later. It's an incredibly stable molecule, but it's not medical grade. It's just as pure as what we're going to get, but it doesn't have as much documentation. So now it's going to cost $400,000 for a kilogram. So we have 960 grams of the old MDMA left, and if anybody wants to ever do research with MDMA and flotation tanks or anything, we're giving it away. It's DEA licensed, FDA accepted MDMA. But we're working at a place that if we do succeed, you have to think about scaling up. So this place can scale up if we succeed. Now a lot of what you're doing, the research that I've seen today is about safety, particularly with the eating disorders. So we had to do safety studies with MDMA and this is neurocognitive function before and after the placebo, 40 milligrams, 100 milligrams in 125, and you can see before and after people actually either get better or they stay the same. So this was to counter propaganda like this. This is supposedly, this was on MTV and Oprah. This was spec scans. This is supposedly what happens to your brain from MDMA. But this is a graphically manipulated, completely fraudulent image. But a lot of people really believed it. They just put every area that had activity below a certain amount as a whole. But it was very effective in scaring people. We've now treated 107 PTSD patients, PTSD from any cause. Veterans, firefighters, police officers, women and men, survivors of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape. This is the overall data to show you. This is the line of 50 on the caps, the clinician administered PTSD scale. Everything above this is moderate to severe. They started out severe and at 12 month follow up, they're well below and most of them are about over two thirds of them no longer even qualify for PTSD. Now this is showing everybody got MDMA. Either the people get it initially in the double blind portion of the study or those that are the placebo get it what's called open label after they've completed their primary outcome measure. So this disaggregates it a little bit. This is after the two blinded sessions and this is the difference between the people that get therapy with placebo and this is therapy plus MDMA. This is after the third session. So we're going to actually as our model for phase three, we're going to have three MDMA sessions in a three and a half month process. The MDMA sessions are about three to five weeks apart and there's more or less weekly non-drug psychotherapy to prepare and to integrate the experience. And then this here is after the people who are in the placebo group get the MDMA and they all end up more or less the same. So based on this data, we believe we'll be able to make it into a medicine and we've been able to reach out to the VA. This is the highest ranking. She was Brigadier General Laurie Sutton was the highest ranking psychiatrist in the military. She called me from a plane in 2010 and she said, what's going on with this MDMA? We need help with veterans. Right now there's 868,000 veterans receiving disability for PTSD. That's as of June 30th, 2016. And it costs the US government the VA about $10 billion a year just for disability payments. So she says, when it comes to the health and well-being of those who serve, we should leave our politics at the door and not be afraid to follow the data. There's now an evidence base for this MDMA therapy and a plausible story about what may be going on in the brain to account for the effects. Now, many of you may have heard about the early work with LSD or the current work with psilocybin, with alcoholics, with nicotine addicts, and with people who are anxious about dying. And the one finding from the early research and the current research with the major psychedelics is that the depth of the mystical experience is correlated with therapeutic outcome. So we use the same measure of mystical experience in our work with MDMA. This is the placebo doses, the low doses. These are the active doses. Mean is 0.46. 0.6 means anything above that is a full mystical experience. So even with MDMA, on average, people are having not exactly full mystical experience, but pretty substantial. And many people have had full mystical experiences. And it's sort of like peering out into the universe. The blinds are off. The default mode network activity is reduced, and you're seeing more. But what we've found is that there is no correlation between the mystical experience. This is the PTSD score, and this is the mystical experience, almost perfectly flat. So that guides our therapy. Our therapy is not aimed at helping people have this mystical experience. It's non-directive, helping them cope with whatever is emerging. And the way that we're going to propose to do phase three is basically about 460 people. Half of them will be randomized, and they'll have three MDMA sessions. The first is 75 milligrams. Then they can choose to stay the same or go up. They won't know the exact doses. And then there's this intervening integrative psychotherapy here, and then two-month follow-up. And then the others will get the same therapy with placebo. So basically we're testing therapy plus placebo with therapy plus MDMA. And we have to show that it's worth it for whatever risks there are to add the drug. And we believe we'll be able to do that. It's going to cost about $25 million. We have already about half of it raised. I'd like to encourage you to use Dr. Bronner's soaps. David Bronner has pledged a million a year for five years from... And then Shauna Haley was a transgender, brilliant software person who left us 5.5 million actually in his will after he died. We used $200,000 for a study of autistic adults with social anxiety. And we're getting good results from that. And then one of the early Facebook people has pledged a million. And of course, I'm hoping they'll end up donating a lot more. This is our goal is sales of prescription MDMA. We're trying to create a new model for how drugs are marketed. One of the things that you hear, and maybe you hear a lot of it here in Oregon about how marijuana legalization, the problem is that we're going to have big alcohol, big tobacco, marketing marijuana, and they're going to market to kids and do all sorts of stuff. And that's what's causing people to be reluctant about moving to marijuana legalization. But there's a new modification for capitalism called the benefit corporation. And it's incorporated in Delaware also in California. If you have a regular corporation, you have to maximize profits. Minority shareholders could sue the management and saying you're not maximizing profits. But with a benefit corporation, you maximize social benefits. And so that's what we've created, a benefit corporation 100% owned by the nonprofit. People make tax deductible donations to the nonprofit. We invested in the benefit corp. And the benefit corp will be one day selling MDMA. Because that's not a charitable thing. That's something that we should be paying taxes on. But it is helping people to see that we're trying to not just maximize profits and roll it out as quickly as we can. We want to avoid a backlash. Now, there are no third party standards for pharmaceutical companies operating in public benefit. Not surprisingly. So we are now developing our own third party standards with some ethicists at University of Pennsylvania. And then what we're going to be doing is having therapy training programs. The only people that will be able to prescribe MDMA will be people that have been trained by the sponsor, by maps, and only in certain kind of facilities. I was very interested, these are the future facilities, I was very interested to see about the franchising of flotation centers. So you guys are ahead of us in that regard. We're anticipating MDMA would be approved in 2021 if all goes as planned. And we want to be operating multiple centers to sort of set up a standard of care. But other people will be running centers and you can have all sorts of centers. And the goal is not just a center that does MDMA and a center that does psilocybin. The goal would be centers that would perhaps be like this in beautiful locations and they would be using multiple different drugs and they would also be flotation tanks, massage. These would be sort of global kind of healing centers with both the integrative approach. So the first hospice center in America was 1974 and 30 years later in 2004 there was 3,500. So now we're speaking about maybe a 25 year rollout from now to where every community would have and you could do a Google search on psychedelic clinics at Google maps and this would be what you would find all these clinics. Now just to give you a sense of how we're doing with integrating psychedelics, the keep LSD is the quintessential symbol of the 60s, the symbol of Timothy Leary. And so we have completed a study with LSD, assisted psychotherapy. It was the first one in over 35 years with LSD in patients for people who were anxious with life-threatening illnesses. And one of things I'm most proud of is that we were able to get this study started in late 2007 which was just a few months before Albert Hoffman died at the age of 102. So Albert was able to see with his own eyes that his problem child was back again becoming a wonder child. This is the LSD actually that we administered. This was the paper that we wrote. Now we don't have enough resources to continue this research. We're focusing on the MDMA for PTSD but this sort of removed a taboo and really helped with the psychedelic renaissance. Now we've heard earlier today about how marijuana can be helpful for PTSD and it's kind of shocking to realize that it's easier to do research with psychedelics than it is with marijuana through the FDA. And the reason is because there has been a government monopoly on the supply of marijuana. Now being here in Oregon, the idea of a government monopoly on marijuana kind of sounds silly because you can go multiple different places and get it. But the monopoly is on federally legal marijuana and it's been in 1968 at the University of Mississippi and it's been used by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. They have that supply and they would give it to you if you want to study the risks but not the benefits. So we've tried since 1992 to do studies with marijuana and we felt if we focused on PTSD and veterans that it would be enough political pressure that we could get it approved. It took us over six and a half years. We're getting the marijuana from NIDA next week. Half of it is going to be at Johns Hopkins. The other half is going to be in Phoenix, Arizona. It was featured by Sanjay Gupta on weed three and what we're looking at is four different kinds of marijuana. High THC, well, high 12%. That's the highest you get from the government right now. But it's pretty laughable for high THC. But high THC, low CBD, low THC, high CBD, mixture, and then the placebo. And then we'll see how the different varieties affect people. And we were able to get a $2.1 million grant from the state of Colorado for this study. Now, this is a picture from 2005 when we had a lawsuit against the DEA to try to break the federal monopoly on marijuana. This is Professor Lyle Kraker at UMass Amherst. We started talking in 1999 about ending the monopoly. Here we are protesting. We won the lawsuit but just like MDMA, the DEA administrative law judge lawsuits, they make recommendations but they don't compel the head of the agency to do one thing or another. So we won the lawsuit but the DEA rejected the recommendation and just last week the DEA announced that it was going to end the monopoly on marijuana. It was going to license other providers. It's been since 1968. So the work that we are all doing, this main streaming of flotation centers, the main streaming of yoga, meditation, all of this is really changing consciousness in a lot of ways. And to give you an example, I'm leaving in a few days for Burning Man. One of the things that we've tried to do is how do we create a post-prohibition world? And it used to be that the resistance was because of the counterculture, that politicians, the powers that be, were worried that people take these drugs, they drop out, they move to farms, they won't go fight the wars, and they'll protest on all sorts of ways. And that was obviously what Nixon had in mind when he ramped up the drug war. Now it's faded. We've had all these aging baby boomers that have made great contributions, they're still living in society. Now it's parents worried about their kids. And one of the main places that young people do psychedelics is at places like Burning Man and elsewhere. So we've decided to, since 2003, we've been trying to do a project there called the Zendo, well, the Zendo came later, but it was a psychedelic harm reduction project where we will work with people who are having difficult trips and help them through them. It's like an inadvertent therapeutic opportunity, and that way they can avoid being arrested or tranquilized. And there's been a law though, the perversity of the drug war called the rave act, reducing America's vulnerability to ecstasy. And that criminalizes harm reduction methods, because that means you know drugs are being used and that's a crime, you know illegal drugs are being, it was created initially for crack houses, and they applied it to MDMA and rave. So Burning Man and other groups are scared about doing harm reduction, but the breakthrough this year and for the last several years is the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, finally said to the organization, we don't want to take all these people that are tripping and having difficult trips. We don't know what to do with them, we don't want to arrest them, and we'd like you to take better care of them. So that's given the Burning Man organization some courage. So this is the first year that they've let us use this word, psychedelic harm reduction. And not only that, but they are putting an announcement about it in the Greeter package for all 70,000 people. So we are moving towards post prohibition work. Now the next image I'm going to show you is about, it took 10 years to do, but it's about trying to bring our Burning Man self, my Burning Man self, to Washington DC, into the political system. It took 10 years to figure out, but we've had Burning Man on the Mall. This was last November. And it's the first time in over 100 years that we're aware of that they permitted a fire on the National Mall. And this was absolutely fantastic. My favorite moment of this was 4.30 in the morning dancing with David Bronner. The DJs, we had to do cathartic dancing to protest the drug war. You can't just have a party on the Mall. It's political. You have to protest something. So this was the Drug Policy Alliance, a biannual conference in Washington. That's how we timed it. And we ended up having cathartic dancing. And at 4.30 in the morning, the DJs, now keep in mind, we're between the White House and the Washington Monument. The DJs were so loud. You could hear it in the White House. You could hear it all over. And they started playing Jimi Hendrix, the National Anthem from Woodstock. And I finally felt like it's taken almost 50 years, but now we have permission on the Mall to have Jimi Hendrix play in the National Anthem. And what we were burning was actually a small temple, but it was really a jail cell. And the outside collapsed, and then you saw the jail cell. And then it collapsed as well. So I think this idea of mainstreaming flotation tanks, mainstreaming psychedelics, we are in a tremendous opportunity to bring into our culture things that emerged 50 years ago, but in some ways too early. And I think for John Lilly it was frustrating and he sort of escaped. For Stan Groff it was frustrating, but he tried to do the small work to little by little to make it happen. And I see the fruits of that is now really coming about. And it's been very inspiring for me to be here and see how this community itself is growing. And so I'd like to invite you all to a conference we're going to have in April in Oakland, psychedelic science. We're bringing the psychedelic researchers from all over the world and are going to be updating people on what's the latest status of the research. And the ending slide I just want to show you is this is the flotation tank that John Lilly gave to Tim Leary. And this is at Tim Leary's house. So when I look at these flotation tanks and see some of the pictures of the technology, I am just astonished. We have come a long way. We've got a long way to go, but I think we can really do it. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Thank you.