- Yeah, I’m misplaced because it's not heretic anymore.
If your mom is talking about it, it's not heretic anymore.
My name is Christian, I used to be a heretic because
I believe that psychedelics can have a place
in medicine to treat various mental health disorders.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But, what if they're right?
- The fact that psychedelics have been criminalized
and shunned over the last, around about 50 years,
is crazy to me because they have a place
in human history for actually, maybe even as long
as humans exist.
People were consuming psychedelics
for enlightenment and for spiritual insights.
Jesus definitely took psychedelics,
most likely, either DMT
because there is a bush which was referred to
or seen as the 'Holy Bush,' which contains DMT.
And so psychedelics definitely have played
a vital role in human history.
The 'hippie generation' kind of instinctively
took the good stuff.
And we can totally imagine now, like how
sort of love, peace, and happiness came together,
because that's the positivity nurtured by psychedelics.
And I think it would've positively trickled
down in society, if the hippie generation
hadn't become political.
The government back then was like,
"How can we discredit them?”
"Oh look, they're taking LSD,
they're taking mushrooms.
Let's say this stuff is really, really bad for you,
because you must be crazy
if you're going against the government."
Unfortunately, that stick.
It was the right time for me to do my own
first psychedelic trip in 2014.
So you have a part in your brain,
which is called the 'default mode network,'
and this part of your brain defines who you are.
It's your ego.
At the same time, that's the part where the problem start.
That's where your pain is stored, your trauma.
And what psychedelics do, they shut it down.
In the moment you shut the ego down,
something else, you can call it your 'inner voice,' emerges.
Where you start working
on dissolving your trauma,
working through your problems.
The weeks and months after a psychedelic trip,
your brain is growing
and your brain is building new connections.
So the strong trip combined with the neuroplasticity,
this combination together is sort of the
beauty and the power of psychedelics.
Psychedelics are about— or the belief in psychedelics—
is about to become mainstream, which I'm very happy about.
We are doing clinical trials, FDA-regulated
to once and for all, prove, scientifically
that these drugs have a place in the medical world.
That means if all goes well,
we're talking about a few years 'til psilocybin
in that case, can be approved as a medical treatment.
More than one billion people at the moment
have a diagnosed mental health issue globally.
And I deeply believe psychedelics
are not the only solution,
but it's definitely one of the most promising group
of therapeutics to help the world stay mentally healthy
in a very crazy time.
If you look throughout human history,
like, ultimately, sort of truth
and the good ideas actually prevail.
It can take time, you can be burned for it.
There are people who worked on it,
in times when it was really shitty to be in psychedelics;
when you were the outsider.
But sometimes it's worth fighting for
if you really believe in it.
Yeah, we're gonna sit here maybe in 10 years
and many of the ideas will be complete mainstream
and there will be new heretic beliefs
because we're an evolving species,
and that's maybe the way we're learning
as an entire organism.
- What is one change people can make
to the way they think about psychedelics?
- That's a good question.
I would say try it out, but like, umm...