Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I have been standing in front of audiences
for 30 years talking about drugs.
And I often start my presentations with an apology.
Specifically, I apologise for the lies of past drug educators,
including myself.
And I acknowledge we've told three lies.
We've exaggerated the harms of drugs,
we've never acknowledged the benefits of drugs,
and we've never talked about
the dominant model for controlling drugs in our society,
which is drug prohibition,
which has failed us all so badly.
(Applause) (Cheering)
Now, for much of my career, I've talked about that last point,
the failure of the war on drugs,
but today I'm going to talk about the benefits of drugs.
Specifically, I'm going to talk about psychedelics.
Now, psychedelics have been around in human culture
since before recorded human history.
And we can see at least four communities, cultures today,
that have woven the psychedelic experience into the fabric of their culture:
there's the curandero's use of psilocybin mushrooms,
there's the ayahuasca use in the Amazon basin,
there's the Huichol use of peyote,
and the shamanic use of Amanita muscaria in Siberia.
Now, on the surface,
how the container of safety is created with these cultures
with this psychedelic experience is all different.
But if you look at how the experience is integrated into the culture,
that is actually quite similar.
They're used for healing,
everything from psychological to physical issues.
They're used for a celebration of transitions
everything from seasonal changes to puberty rites.
And they're used for spirituality
to connect the individuals and the culture to the cosmos as a whole.
If I wanted to use one word to describe that,
what I would say is the word would be 'pro-social'.
Psychedelics have always been used to connect
people to their culture and to the universe.
So it was historically unprecedented what happened in the 1960s
when psychedelics got linked to an antisocial message.
It had never happened before.
Tim Leary said, 'tune in, turn on, and drop out',
and the subsequent social backlash has caused immense human suffering,
and it goes on today.
And admittedly, there were some other cultural issues going on at the time,
but certainly, that disconnect message was profound.
And the media participated in the spinning of the web of illusions:
'LSD-Fed Ape Rapes TV Actress';
(Laughter)
'LSD Made Me a Prostitute';
'Girl Gives Birth to Frog'.
(Laughter)
Even the science of the time was suppressed.
For 40 years, scientists couldn't do what they needed to do,
which is measure stuff.
Now, can I think of any other time in human history
when science is either being suppressed or criminalized?
Well, as matter of fact, I can.
In 1616,
and then for the subsequent 143 years,
the science of the telescope was banned.
It was illegal for people to report
what they saw through the lens of the telescope,
specifically that the earth was not the centre of the universe.
LSD is to the study of the mind,
what the telescope is to astronomy and what the microscope is to biology,
according to Stanislav Grof.
Well, psychedelics are back.
(Laughter)
This is the Canadian Medical Association Journal,
the conservative voice of Canadian medicine,
with a number of articles, exploring the psychedelic renaissance,
the explosion of research that has happened in recent years.
That's really what I want to talk to you about.
But to be really clear,
what I'm talking about here is skilled, trained, competent professionals
using pure substances in ways that are well supervised.
I'm not talking about impure street drugs
used by unsupervised, irresponsible adolescents.
So how do researchers think about psychedelics these days?
Because they break them into three categories.
The first are the classics:
LSD,
mescaline,
dimethyltryptamine,
and psilocybin.
And these offer researchers a variety of attributes
that are worthy of investigation.
For example, spirituality.
Now, it's kind of neutral spirituality
because Buddhists find the Buddha,
Christians find Christ,
and atheists and agnostics find the entire universe.
And this particular aspect of these medicines is quite useful
for situations like end-of-life anxiety.
When we are dying, and we're anxious about the experience,
and we take a dosage of psilocybin, and we meet our maker,
and we're told, it's okay, we can relax.
We're just coming home.
It tends to reduce the stress of that transition.
The classical psychedelics also offer a disorientation of the ego,
which can be very helpful in things like treatment for alcoholism.
They also increase the permeability
between the unconscious and the conscious mind;
they allow us to have access to our unconscious
in a way that we don't normally.
Now, if you really think about the human experience,
a lot of our lives are lived unconsciously.
For example, driving a car.
Our conscious mind is thinking about the radio,
and what we're going to have for lunch,
and the conflict we had with our spouse, or whatever.
We don't think about our feet.
Our unconscious mind is driving the car.
We live our lives with lots of tape loops that just happen automatically.
And if something bad happened to us in childhood,
and it's replaying itself consistently in our adult life,
and causing problems for us,
it’s very hard to access because it's unconscious.
Psychedelics can help with that.
Psychedelics also offer - the classic psychedelics offer
what I call 'the portal effect',
which is the 'Wow, that was incredible!' effect.
It's a bit like climbing Mount Everest or graduating high school;
you have a sense of accomplishment and transition.
And that's very helpful in many conditions.
The second group of psychedelics are the empathogens;
3-MMC, MDA, MDMA are examples.
And what they do is they bond people and increase empathy.
That's really useful to bond a therapist to somebody who wants some help.
That connection is really important.
It could be facilitated with these medicines.
They also take away fear.
So if a soldier who's been in battle in Afghanistan
comes back to North America
and is replaying that trauma again and again,
normal therapy can't access it,
partly because it's unconscious,
but partly because anything it gets close to,
it has a huge fear response.
And MDMA specifically takes away that fear and allows the tape to be reworked.
It appears MDMA-assisted psychotherapy maybe the best treatment for PTSD,
post-traumatic stress disorder, that exists.
And then there's everything else.
Things like ibogaine,
which appear to be incredibly helpful
for heroin withdrawals,
opiate addiction,
this 2C-B, this salvia, and this ketamine that seems to be helpful for depression.
Now, my own area of academic interest is articulating post-prohibition models
for the regulation and control of all currently illegal drugs,
based on public health principles.
You might have noticed,
drug prohibition is slowly crumbling
under the weight of its own ineffectiveness.
It does not protect our communities.
It does not protect our families.
And it does not protect our children.
So it will end.
And I ask the question, 'What are we going to replace it with?'
peering through the lens of public health.
So the goal of a public health approach
is to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.
I've already talked about some benefits, so I'd like to talk about harms.
The harms from all drugs can be broken into three categories:
dependency, toxicity, and behaviour.
Dependency -
I worked for the addiction services for 30 years.
Nobody ever walked in my office saying, 'I can't stop taking LSD'.
(Laughter)
It never happened!
So the dependency potential for psychedelics is really low.
Toxicity -
The last time you took a prescription drug,
if you took six times the dosage, you probably did yourself harm.
That one to six ratio is very common for most drugs.
With LSD, it's in the thousands.
In fact, Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD,
said it was one of the least toxic substances on the planet.
So dependency is very low, toxicity is very low,
so all of the harms from psychedelics come from one thing,
which is the behaviour,
which is essentially lack of supervision.
Now, indigenous communities have known this for years.
They've always provided the experience in a very tight container of safety,
where they're highly supervised experiences.
How researchers are thinking about this today
is they think about the words, or they talk about the words:
'set', which is expectations;
'setting', which is the environment;
'dosage', which is what you take and how much;
and 'safety', which is the umbrella term.
So set, setting, safety, and dosage
are carefully structured by the research community today.
So in a post-prohibition world,
if the goal is to maximize the benefits and minimize the harms of psychedelics,
people would have access to the psychedelic experience.
So long as they were supervised,
there was a container of safety built around the experience,
and somebody was in charge.
A trained competent, skilled professional,
who is licensed, would be allowed to offer the experiences to others
so long as set, setting, dosage, and safety were managed.
And it wouldn't matter what the environment was:
It could be indigenous healing circles;
it could be psychedelic psychotherapy;
it could be multi-day dance festivals.
It doesn't matter, as long as somebody is in charge.
I would like to reflect on the human predicament today.
We're in trouble as a species.
Global climate change is affecting all of us.
There's a concentration of wealth at the top of the pile
that is unprecedented in any society, so few people control so much wealth.
There's a huge amount of violence and religious extremism.
And we live in these really strange societies
where somehow we've equated happiness with buying stuff.
So if I really think about those problems, they're problems of disconnection:
we are disconnected from the earth;
we are disconnected from each other;
we are disconnected from a true sense of meaning and purpose in our lives;
and we're disconnected from healthy spiritual experiences.
The good news is psychedelics are all about connections.
These two images are very powerful.
They're depictions of the human brain based on neuroscience.
The one on the left is the normal human brain.
The parts of the outside of the circle are the different parts of the human brain,
the visual cortex, for example.
Notice that the visual cortex talks a lot to the visual cortex,
and not a lot to the other parts of the brain.
The image on the right is the human brain under the influence of psilocybin.
Notice the rich range of new connections that are formed.
Psychedelics are all about connections:
connections with self -
we have access to our unconscious minds
in a way we do not normally have access to;
connections with each other -
that's the empathogen research;
connections with a sense of meaning and purpose to life -
there's a lot of research done on that;
and connections with a sense of true spirituality -
indigenous communities have known that for centuries.
Isaac Asimov said,
'One of the saddest aspects of life now
is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom'.
We as a human species need to grow up.
We need to take advantage of
and learn and work with the knowledge that we already have.
And perhaps, just perhaps -
something that could help us mature as a species
and maybe even assist with our survival
is mature, skillful, wise use of psychedelic medicines.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)