Your organization has done a few trials looking at treating post traumatic
stress disorder with MDMA. And a few questions, one, why MDMA out of all the
drugs, to use, if you could address that first.
>> Yeah. Actually the, the last surviving person with legal permission to give LSD
was a Doctor Bostians in Holland. And he worked with LSD with concentration
camp survivors. And a lot of the concentration camp survivors, not were only
Jews, but Dutch resistance fighters, and they later became part of the Dutch
Government. And they protected him, and there was a book that was written by an
Isreali holocaust survivor who went to the Netherlands to receive LSD as part
of his treatment. And the book is terrific. It's called Shivitti, A Vision. But
it's very difficult to read. Not only because he's sharing some of the things
that happened to him during the concentration camp, but because LSD itself is
very challenging. And MDMA on the other hand is gentle in a profound way. So,
when they tried to figure out what would be the drug that would be most likely
to make it through the system first and become approved as, as a medicine with
psychedelic drug would make it first. And then also, what clinical conditions
should we pick? And so, I spent a lot of time strategically trying to evaluate
that. the reason why MDMA, I think, is the top choice is because it's not that
fundamentally different from our normal way of processing. That people when
they take MDMA, they don't have the same kind of challenge to their logical
train of thought. So, we felt that MDMA would be something that psychiatrists
and psychotherapists would be more willing to experiment with on their own. So
that they could be more effective therapists. And then, MDMA, because of the
way that it reduces fear reactions, it's got an ideal treatment for post
traumatic stress disorder. It works really well. And also there's not a lot of
effective treatments for PTSD out there. Zoloft and Paxil are the only
medications that are available. And they are marginally effective. Most people
say they're not very effective at all. And then, there's a lot of
psychotherapies that have been developed, like prolonged exposure. And they
work in a significant group of people. But there's a lot of people for whom the
available treatments don't work. So, all of that came together. And the other
thing about MDMA, we, we call it our aikido strategy of research, which is that
there are hundreds of millions of dollars, about $300 million. We estimate have
been spent on scientific studies about what's bad with MDMA. And they're all in
the public domain, and they've been funded by governments in the world since
the middle 80s to try to justify prohibition. And, because of that, we're a
small non-profit. If we had to think about making a drug into a medicine and we
had to spend 300 million on safety studies, we, we'd never get it. So, we're
taking all of this energy to demonize MDMA and turning it around, and saying we
have an incredible information about the safety profile. So, in a way, we
want to focus on demonized drugs that have been used by tens of millions of
people illegally. Because the FDA, when they approve a drug, it's been approved
on the basis of several thousand people, at the most. But the 100,000 risk that
happens, somebody dies from this or that. Or like allergies to penicillin, or
aspirin. People die from those things. But you don't find it in the context of
working with a few thousand people. So, with MDMA, where it's been used by
millions and millions of people, we know the risk profile. So, it was a
combination of the gentleness and the profound nature of MDMA and it's effect
on fear. And there's a disease, PTSD, that's accepted by FDA, and there's an
excellent measure, the CAPS, the clinician administered PTSD scale. And what's
really good is that the progress that people make therapeutically is mapped
very carefully by the CAPS, in contrast to work with end of life. So that we
have people so the whole work was psychedelics with LSD and Psilocybin and
MDMA, for end of life, it's more difficult to make that into a medicine.
Because when people become ready to die, that's not so clearly captured on the
state trade anxiety inventory or measures that have been used by the FDA to
approve drugs for anxiety. So, it's, it's a combination of all these factors
that lead us to think about MDMA as our drug and PTSD as our condition. So,
that's our basic model and people, because of what we're trying to do, meaning
making this drug into a prescription medicine and because there's such concerns
about the risks of MDMA, we've decided to work with the hardest cases. So, we
work with people that are chronic PTSD, which means they've had it for at least
six months. And once somebody has had PTSD for six months, they're not likely
to get better on their own. And we work only with people that have failed on
other treatments, so we were with chronic treatment resistant, people with
PTSD. Our first study mostly women, survivors of childhood sexual abuse, had
PTSD an average of over 19 years. >> Wow.
>> And had failed on multiple courses of drugs and therapy. And over 80% of them
no longer had PTSD at the end of the, two months after their last MDMA session.
So, the setting, we call it our psychedelic bed and breakfast. It's [LAUGH]. >> [LAUGH].
>> It's a really beautiful, it's actually, it's an office that used to be a home.
So, it's, and it's an area of Charleston, South Carolina that's been renovated,
so it's all commercial. But it has a kitchen in it. It has a place for a night
attendant to spend the night. we let people bring in some of their family
members, if they want to at night. we tend to let people at the end of the day
bring their family members in also, if they wanted a the therapy session. And
it's a male-female co-therapist team. So, the essence of their model is this
two person team because they're there for eight hours. And the other, you know,
they can take breaks a little bit to go eat or go to the bathroom. But we want
one person there always with the subject. And then, the idea of the male female
team is that if we can sort of model successful communication lot of people
have not had you know, supportive parents or their relationships haven't been
so good. And also, for safety. Some women have been raped or something, to have
just one person there. You know, a man therapist is kind of risky also. So, for
all these different reasons, we have a male female team. We're experimenting
now, where one of the team would need to be a licensed psychiatrist or
therapist. And the other could be a student learning to be a social worker or
learning to be a psychologist or psychotherapist. And so, that accomplishes two
things. It reduces our costs, so that, because we're able to fund this only
through donations. But it also provides a way to train the next generation of
therapists.
>> Can you talk a little bit about the properties and how you can use that
therapeutically and why kids say it's a psychedelic, what they're trying to
experience?
>> Yeah. I think there's a, maybe it will help to describe the difference between
LSD and MDMA. And so, there's a way in which LSD dissolves the ego, dissolves
the, the control structures of our brain. And then, people are sort of flooded
with more material that they've been trying to suppress. And then, also they
can have the sense of connection, where a lot of information that they've
suppressed. Once the things come to the surface, they can feel more connected
and the sense of unity is what then is the epitome, sort of the mystical
experience. So, the classic psychedelics lead more towards this kind of
psychedelic mystical experience. MDMA, on the other hand, strengthens the ego,
it strengthens self acceptance. And it doesn't challenge the ego. But you
become so comfortable in yourself that you can become less self-centered in a
way and see the wider world. there was a linguist at Harvard that was looking
for reading the transcripts of our sessions. And she did an analysis. And she
figured out how to tell who got the placebo and who got the MDMA, in a way that
none of us noticed. And what she figured out is at one point or another the
people who got the MDMA asked the therapists how they were feeling.
>> Oh. [LAUGH].
>> So that you, you're more attenuated to the other, which is why its so good for
couples therapy or couples for relationships. The other thing is that MDMA
stimulates oxytocin and prolactin. So, the hormones of nursing of bonding of
love, of relationships are stimulated by MDMA, so people feel more related and
more connected. Which is why we're starting a new project for MDMA for autistic
adults.
>> Wow.
>> And it's not, I mean logically, it makes sense. >> Mm-hm.
>> But what really started us is that they're in the age of the Internet, there's
all of these people who are doing all these different drugs and posting
reports. And there's a large number of reports on the internet of people who
are Asperger's or autism who took MDMA on their own and could understand
emotions and could communicate better.
>> Fascinating.
>> And there's a woman Alicia Danforth, who's speaking at the conference, who did
her PHD dissertation on contacting all those people as many where she could
identify and ask them how MDMA was useful to them. And on the basis of that,
we've designed a protocol and we've submitted to the FDA we should be hearing
any day now or next week whether the FDA will accept this protocol or whether
they want us to make some changes. But we feel pretty good that the FDA will
say yes.
>> But I think the application of MDMA to Autism to people that don't know how to
read emotions in others and don't really understand their own emotions. Its a
tremendous opportunity, and I think a lot of it has to do with this hormonal
release aspect of MDMA.
>> Right, excellent. Well, fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for your time we
really appreciate it.