Translator: Alan Thomas Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
So in 1943,
Albert Hofmann, a Swiss chemist,
was developing potential medications for the treatment of migraine
when he's accidentally exposed to one.
He felt a little odd and went home,
but he had a pretty good idea of what he'd been exposed to.
So three days later,
he went back to the lab and took 250 micrograms of LSD.
(Laughter)
In those days, that was seen as a minute amount to be taking.
Drugs and medications were administered
in the milligram range, not the microgram range,
but we know now that was a pretty solid dose.
(Laughter)
So as the effects came on, he realized the lab was not the right place to be,
and so he hopped on his bicycle, and he started riding home.
And he describes the vivid imagery, the beauty in nature.
And he went on to self-experiment with LSD,
noting that it had these profound effects.
But he didn't know what the clinical utility of it was.
So LSD was sent out to researchers around the world,
and it led to thousands of papers being published,
demonstrating that LSD-assisted psychotherapy
was effective in treating a range of psychological disorders.
One of those researchers was Timothy Leary,
professor in psychology at Harvard University.
But unfortunately, Timothy's methodologies got a little loose.
At the end there, he was giving out LSD to anyone that would pretty much take it.
(Laughter)
So he was fired from Harvard, but -
(Laughter)
this was a time of cultural revolution.
Young Americans were taking LSD en masse, and Leary became their figurehead.
He was seen on national television
telling the youth to "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
This was not a good time for a cultural revolution.
The US was at war with Vietnam,
and the authorities noticed that those that were protesting the war
were taking LSD.
So LSD was seen as a threat to the very American institution,
and in 1968 it was banned, and this is the start of the war on drugs.
It was then banned internationally in 1971,
the same year President Nixon said that drugs are public enemy number one.
The drugs he was referring to?
Psychedelics.
Sadly, it also meant the end of psychedelic science.
With prohibition came a propaganda campaign
with myths so powerful they've been perpetuated into the present day.
One myth is that LSD may be contaminated with the poison strychnine.
So powerful is this myth that it's contained in the fourth edition
of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
published by the American Psychiatric Association,
where it states that one of the dangers of taking LSD is exposure to strychnine.
Now, this is the diagnostic manual
that psychologists and psychiatrists around the world use.
Fortunately, in its most recent edition,
published in 2013,
reference to this has been removed,
because there's never been any strychnine detected;
there's no evidence to indicate that strychnine would be contained in LSD.
And yet still it was published in this very distinguished book.
There's the concern that if you take LSD, you're going to lose your mind.
In a literature review of all the clinical studies that were conducted
before the prohibition of LSD,
they found that less that 0.01% of people that participated in the trials
experienced any symptoms of psychosis,
either during or after their psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
And it's important here
that I distinguish between the medical application of psychedelic drugs,
which I'm talking about,
and the recreational use of those drugs, which we've become so familiar with.
Then, in 1990,
Dr Rick Strassman,
a psychiatrist who was trained during the era of psychedelic therapy
and dreamed of being a psychedelic therapist,
was able to re-engage in psychedelic research.
He was encouraged by his supervisor to examine the drug dimethyl-tryptamine
because the university wouldn't know what it was!
(Laughter)
Dimethyl-tryptamine is possibly the most potent psychedelic known to humankind.
It's used by shamans in South America to enter the spirit world.
He was encouraged to do some small-scale blood studies,
just looking at the metabolism of the drug.
But what he found far more profound were the participants' experiences.
They reported being transported to parallel dimensions
where there were entities communicating with them.
Eventually Strassman wrapped up his research
because he felt it was unethical
to be pushing people off this psychological abyss
without knowing where they were going.
But it was too late.
He had opened Pandora's Box.
And we subsequently have seen an explosion of psychedelic research,
what's now being referred to as the "Psychedelic Renaissance."
So what have we learnt?
We've learnt a lot about the brain.
But what really excites me as a clinically-trained psychologist
is mounting evidence that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapies
are effective in the treatment for people who don't respond to current therapies
for a range of mental health conditions.
So let's look at the evidence.
We used to think that psychedelics turned on parts of the mind.
We've now learnt [that] what it actually does
is turn off a part of the brain called the "default mode network."
The default mode network is a series of neural pathways
that connect certain areas of the brain together,
while preventing other parts of the brain cross-talking.
It's active whenever you're in a wakeful state.
It becomes more active when you engage in autobiographical narration,
you know, that little voice in your head.
And it becomes hyperactive when people experience depression and OCD.
So what happens with psychedelics is it turns the default mode network off.
So what does that look like?
The picture you can see here is the brain not on psychedelics
and the brain on psychedelics.
See all the intercommunication and connectivity
that's happening between parts of the brain
that would never normally communicate.
And it's been hypothesized that this is the reason
that people experience creativity and have spiritual experiences
when they take psychedelic drugs.
But more importantly, it's been hypothesized
that this increased communication and increased connectivity in the brain
could help treat people who are treatment-resistant with depression.
Because with all this interconnectivity happening in the brain,
perhaps they can overcome their entrenched beliefs
and see the world from a completely different perspective.
And this has been tested recently
by a research group at Imperial College London.
They gave people psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms,
to twelve people
who were treatment-resistant in the context of psychotherapy.
The results?
When given the psilocybin,
there was a significant reduction in depression symptoms.
And this was maintained for many people at a three-month follow-up.
What's more interesting is
[that] because they were doing brain scans at the time,
the people that had the most significant reductions in depressive symptoms
were those whose default mode network was turned off the most.
Addiction is another area where we see poor outcomes.
A group at Johns Hopkins University
conducted a trial of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy
for the treatment of tobacco addiction.
The results were astonishing -
they found that 80% had quit smoking at a six-month follow-up -
when you consider the leading pharmaceutical today
for the treatment of tobacco cessation is only effective for 25% of people.
This group is now recruiting more participants
and conducting clinical trials to gather further evidence for this treatment.
Meanwhile, at New York University, they're recruiting 140 people
to conduct a clinical trial to evaluate whether psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy
is effective for people with alcohol dependence.
We've also found that psychedelics can help people die with dignity.
Numerous studies have been published now.
Clinical trials, showing that when psychedelic-assisted therapy
is provided to people who are experiencing end-stage cancer,
they see a significant reduction in anxiety symptoms,
an increase in the quality of their life,
and their relationships with their significant others improve.
Another disorder that's extremely debilitating
is post-traumatic stress disorder.
The current treatments we have are only effective for 30% of people.
Those that don't respond to treatment
are at risk of addiction, of relationship breakdown, and suicide.
In the first clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
for people who are treatment-resistant with post-traumatic stress disorder,
[they] found that there was a significant improvement.
In fact,
83% of participants no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD
after receiving MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
And this was sustained for three-and-a-half years follow-up.
This study has now been replicated
in Israel, Colorado, Canada, Switzerland,
and the sponsor of the trial,
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,
has been able to pull that data,
they have approached the US Food and Drug Administration
and now have approval to conduct Phase 3 clinical trials.
Why is this significant?
Phase 3 clinical trials are the final stage before a drug becomes a medicine.
And so in the next few years, we will see MDMA as a medicine
for the treatment of PTSD, in the US.
So, I've mentioned a number of countries: Israel, Canada, UK.
There's other countries engaged in the psychedelic renaissance as well:
Brazil, the Czech Republic, even New Zealand,
but there's one country I've not mentioned.
What is it?
Why is there no psychedelic research in Australia?
(Laughter)
Well, I can tell you it's not through a lack of effort.
In 2011, given that I believe that these compounds, these psychedelic drugs,
could assist in the suffering of hundreds of thousands of Australians,
I helped form Psychedelic Research in Science and Medicine,
Australia's first and only not-for-profit incorporated organization
that has a mission
to initiate, fund and facilitate psychedelic research in Australia.
We've developed a strong collaboration with MAPS,
and so our first attempt was to conduct, basically, the same trial
that they've been doing in the US, in Israel, in Colorado, in Switzerland;
except we wanted to focus on war veterans.
The reason being was strategic.
What kills more Australian soldiers than anything else?
You beat me to the punch!
It's not bombs; it's not bullets;
it's suicide.
This is an epidemic.
We thought this would gain public support,
and we submitted the research protocol to an independent ethics committee.
They had no problem with the methodology;
they didn't have a problem with administering MDMA to war veterans
with post-traumatic stress disorder that had not responded to treatment,
but they were concerned
that it wasn't being conducted in an academic environment.
So we sought out a professor
who would come on board as the Chief Investigator.
He was based at a Victorian university,
and last year we submitted the protocol
to that Victorian university's ethics committee.
Before it reached the ethics committee,
the Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor stepped in and vetoed it.
She said, "We're not conducting this sort of research at our university."
And we believe this is the result of academic conservatism.
So what do I mean by that?
Well, when you think of people who use illicit drugs,
most people don't experience harm.
Yet all the research we conduct
is focused on this small group who do experience harm.
It's been described by Mugford as the pathological paradigm of drug use.
(Laughter)
Drugs are not illegal because they're harmful;
they're perceived as harmful because they're illegal,
and only research that perceptuates that perception
is funded by the government.
And this is a major barrier to conducting psychedelic science in Australia,
because we want to demonstrate
the therapeutic benefit of these illicit substances.
Further, there's vested interests
in people who are delivering and investigating the conventional treatments.
They say they work.
Meanwhile, institutions are getting significant government funding
to perpetuate the idea that illicit drugs, including psychedelics, are harmful.
This has not led us to give up.
In the past six months, we've published the first two papers
on psychedelic science in the Australian scientific literature.
We hope that this will increase the awareness of academics,
increase the awareness of healthcare providers
so that we can have another go
and get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and other psychedelic research
underway in Australia.
Because if we don't act now,
and if we don't start a psychedelic science program in Australia,
hundreds of thousands of Australians will continue to suffer.
War veterans will continue to commit suicide,
or MDMA becomes a medicine in the US,
so they fly to the US to get treatment.
How long will it take
before Australia joins the international psychedelic renaissance?
Thank you.
(Applause)