Category
πΊ
TVTranscript
00:00:00Transcribed by ESO, translated by β
00:00:30Transcribed by ESO, translated by β
00:01:00Transcribed by ESO, translated by β
00:01:30Transcribed by ESO, translated by β
00:02:00Transcribed by β
00:02:29Transcribed by β
00:02:59Transcribed by ESO, translated by β
00:03:01This is a glass of water.
00:03:04It contains 100 gamma of LSD-25, one-tenth of a milligram.
00:03:11Let us observe the effect some three hours later.
00:03:13I can see everything in color.
00:03:19And the dimensions and all the prisons and the rays and everything coming down through you and moving.
00:03:29There was great hope in the early 50s that LSD was going to revolutionize psychiatry.
00:03:47And in some sense that hope was not misplaced.
00:03:52In the 1960s, drugs like LSD had moved out of mainstream medicine into recreational use.
00:04:00I think the powers that be to some extent felt that things were getting out of control so that in the mid-60s there was a move to try and put the lid back in the bottle, to get the genie back into the bottle, to try and restore social control that appeared to be on the verge of breaking down.
00:04:21Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies, and demonstrations.
00:04:32If we're going to be able to prosecute wars in the future, we can't have too many people taking drugs like LSD.
00:04:40When they would take it, they'd go, wait a minute, why am I supposed to go fight in Vietnam?
00:04:46Exactly, explain to me, what am I doing over there?
00:04:48You're wanting me to kill these other people, but they're just like me.
00:04:51I'm killing a part of me.
00:04:52You do see out of the box with LSD.
00:04:55You do see past culturally imposed values.
00:04:57You know, the whole goal was to sort of crack open the mind, break away from the constraints of a culture that we felt was inhibiting the human potential, that we might embrace a new realm of possibilities.
00:05:10The upshot, though, was quite extraordinary in that in order to ban a drug, you had to paint it as having extreme dangers linked to it.
00:05:20And the biggest and most convenient danger to use was the idea that you would get hooked.
00:05:27In actual fact, you cannot become physically dependent or get addicted to a drug like LSD.
00:05:38To try to deal with something like this in a straightforward scientific manner is really difficult, because you're really dealing with irrational, fear-based reactions that have nothing to do with what the drugs have done in the past and what they can do in the future.
00:05:53It's been 40 years, 50 years, essentially, since all clinical work on psychedelics was shut down.
00:06:03Despite the restrictions on research into LSD, its dramatic effects on the brain had put scientists on the trail of a new and intriguing neurotransmitter called serotonin.
00:06:14Serotonin is referred to as a neurotransmitter system.
00:06:19It's also referred to as a neuromodulatory system because it modulates or regulates not only a lot of different kinds of processes in the brain, but it also regulates the activities of other neurotransmitter systems.
00:06:32Psychedelics have a similar kind of role in the brain, although sometimes what they're doing is releasing the control that serotonin has over certain areas of the brain.
00:06:43So everything that's coming in through your senses, except for smell, comes in the brain and goes through an area called the thalamus, which is kind of like a gateway.
00:06:50The thalamus decides what gets sent to the cortex.
00:06:53And the cortex, these executive areas, is what puts together your whole sort of gestalt.
00:06:59What is your reality?
00:07:01Now, these two parts of the brain, the lower part of the brain that regulates the flow of information and the middle parts of the brain that provide the emotional interpretation of the information, are linked through these serotonin circuits.
00:07:14And so one of the things that these psychedelics do is that they stimulate this serotonin circuitry that enhances the connections between the emotional brain and this lower behavioral and informational brain.
00:07:29So this is why I talk about these psychedelics as really being better characterized as psychointegrators.
00:07:35They function much like serotonin and integrating the activities at the different levels of the brain.
00:07:41But they do so in a way that changes the serotonin's sort of repressive control mechanisms, regulating us from having too much information to saying, you get it all.
00:07:52And this is part of the overwhelming experiences that people have.
00:07:55But it's also why we get these intense insights, these intuitive understandings, the sense that everything is now all connected together.
00:08:04Because the brain really is being connected together by the way these substances interface with the serotonin system.
00:08:10What really got researchers interested in serotonin and its functions was the fact that LSD resembled serotonin chemically.
00:08:21Not only that, but LSD affected all of these various functions of serotonin and was really used as a molecular tool to understand what serotonin was doing.
00:08:33If you had a psychiatric disorder, so you were schizophrenic in the 1940s, the general consensus then was, or the belief was then, that you were schizophrenic because your mother had failed in some way.
00:08:45You had not had a nurturing mother, she had not breastfed you.
00:08:48There was no concept that what happened in your behavior was in any way related to brain neurochemistry.
00:08:54Among these drugs, the hallucinogens, are included mescaline, a chemical taken from the peyote cactus.
00:09:03Sinocybin, extracted from a variety of Mexican mushroom.
00:09:08DMT, synthesized from the compound tryptamine.
00:09:12And of course, LSD-25.
00:09:16Albert Hoffman discovered LSD in 1943.
00:09:18Sandoz began to send it out to psychologists and psychiatrists to say,
00:09:22here's something that produces a state like mental illness.
00:09:26You can use it to learn about it, possibly use it as a tool to study mental illness.
00:09:30So serotonin, which principally occurs in the gut, was isolated and identified in about 1948, about five years later.
00:09:38LSD was, you know, showed tremendous promise and continued to show promise as a tool in neuroscience,
00:09:47as a tool for understanding brain functions.
00:09:51William James, the famous American psychologist, made a distinction between two different kinds of ways behavior change.
00:10:00And he talked about the educational variety of behavior change, where things occur incrementally.
00:10:06We learn things, and that's how we normally think about behavior change.
00:10:10And then he said, you know, there's a different kind of way human behavior changes, and that's an all-or-none type of change.
00:10:18Psychologists have used various terms to describe conversion experiences, or quantum change, or epiphanies,
00:10:27to kind of grab the idea that the human organism is capable of having a profound shift of perceptual awareness.
00:10:36Often in a psychedelic session, there is a sense that there is a process unfolding that's just incredibly well-crafted, incredibly wise.
00:10:47And it's not coming from the person who has ingested the substance or the guide, it's coming from the depths of the unconscious itself.
00:10:59People recognize very often the pain that they've been running away from all their lives,
00:11:05but they also recognize that central and indestructible part of themselves that they've never seen before, at least that they've lost touch with.
00:11:15And ultimately, that entailed feeling drawn into this transcendental, mystical realm of the self,
00:11:24beyond the individual historical life, and beyond that to the profound unit of states that the Hindu would call Samadhi,
00:11:33or the Christian might call the beatific vision, a Sufi would call Fana, the profound awareness at the very core of the mystery of what we are.
00:11:44I'm reminded of a slogan or two I saw some students carrying once.
00:11:49One said, all wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.
00:11:55And another one said, there is no they.
00:11:58Right, exactly. And that's one of the components of the LSD experience,
00:12:02the understanding that there is no they, there's no other. It is all one.
00:12:08This member of the mushroom family, this fungus, is for the moment known only as X.
00:12:24It was discovered barely weeks ago growing in a remote rainforest.
00:12:29Science is not yet given it a name, for science knows scarcely anything about it.
00:12:39But it is felt that X might have one remarkable quality.
00:12:44That it stimulates extrasensory perception, enabling the mind to become telepathic and clairvoyant.
00:12:54Now that's a rather large claim. Is it true or false?
00:12:59The answer to that question took us on a unique and distant journey.
00:13:03We suddenly found a way to explore a continent that we didn't know existed and not many other people knew existed either.
00:13:16Just like Marco Polo, you know, in the 14th century he went with his uncle and his father to China
00:13:21and then came back and said stories about China and people said,
00:13:24Oh, you're hallucinating. There's no such thing. There's no such place. You know, you made that up.
00:13:30You're fantasizing.
00:13:32He said, No, you could go for yourself.
00:13:34So we suddenly found that there's a ship that can take you to this other continent that you didn't know existed.
00:13:40And there's all these amazing animals and people and trees and plants and mountains and situations going on that you never heard about before.
00:13:48And, you know, incredibly interesting that all kinds of fascinating relationship to our own selves.
00:13:54And give us insights into who we are in a very interesting way and novel and productive way.
00:14:01So we would take psilocybin and sit around in a group and talk to each other.
00:14:11Now, later on, and nowadays, I wouldn't do that. I mean, that's not a good way to do it.
00:14:16You might sit in a group and take psilocybin, but you'd stop talking, you see.
00:14:20In psychedelic therapy, you put your eye shades on and listen to music and pay attention to what's coming through from within.
00:14:27Of course, then you do external talk in order to integrate and understand your experience and bring back translation.
00:14:33That's like you come back from the undiscovered country and then you talk to other people who've also been there and say,
00:14:39Well, what did you find and what did you find?
00:14:41And maybe some people are specialists in the plants and others in the animals and others in the people and the culture and the geography and so forth like that.
00:14:49And so it's like an expedition.
00:14:51In the 60s, some people used mushrooms for the hallucinogenic effects.
00:14:55Well, now those same so-called magic mushrooms are being used to ease the pain and anxiety of cancer patients.
00:15:02You know, I thought that the people that would come to us would be biased.
00:15:06They would have been children of the 60s.
00:15:08They would have done hallucinogens a lot in their youth.
00:15:11And they would have been like groovy hippies or ex-hippies that came to us.
00:15:15That has not been the case of the people we treated so far.
00:15:19Just sort of brave individuals who have enormous amount of distress associated with having cancer, who weren't biased in any way by these drugs.
00:15:27They just were looking to get out of the suffering they were in.
00:15:30When the individual is told that he or she has a limited life expectancy, it is very common to have a great deal of anxiety about the anticipated pain that might occur.
00:15:43And anxiety about the unknown.
00:15:45What does the passage to death signify?
00:15:48There's also often a great deal of apprehension about what will happen to significant others that will be left behind.
00:15:57I was very skeptical at first.
00:15:59I was very worried about taking people who were dying of cancer and who were already anxious and about making them more anxious.
00:16:06I spent a lot of time looking into the safety literature and speaking to the groups at Johns Hopkins and UCLA.
00:16:13And actually hearing some testimonies of former patients and even speaking to some former patients.
00:16:18And I became more and more reassured that this was safe and that if you screen patients properly, that this was potentially very beneficial.
00:16:26We saw a considerable indication that there was both a short term and a sustained over time alleviation of anxiety.
00:16:36And here we're talking specifically about the anxiety, the existential anxiety associated with their limited life expectancy.
00:16:44A new report in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the key ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin,
00:16:52may be the perfect aid for certain mental disorders.
00:16:56Early research has shown that psilocybin is helpful for terminally ill cancer patients dealing with anxiety and possibly people with severe forms of depression.
00:17:07The Good Friday experiment was an attempt to take the tools of science to look at this question,
00:17:14can psychedelics, in this case psilocybin, catalyze a religious mystical experience?
00:17:21Because these people were divinity students at the time, most of them were ministers after all these years.
00:17:27And many of them reported that they had had non-drug mystical experiences in their life after the Good Friday experiment.
00:17:36And that gave them a point of reference to compare to their drug experience.
00:17:41And these people compared it in a way that it was, again, either identical or very similar to.
00:17:48But they determined in their view that their psilocybin experience was genuinely mystical.
00:17:55The experience that day demonstrated to me the reality of God's presence in all the world and in all experience.
00:18:07If our eyes are opened and we are able to perceive and take that in.
00:18:14And by eyes I mean our spiritual inner awarenesses.
00:18:19I would say, yeah, it did change my life.
00:18:21When they started talking about what the implications of that experience had been for their life,
00:18:27that's when I started understanding what to me felt like one of the keys to the 1960s,
00:18:33to the cultural revolution of the 60s.
00:18:35They felt that they were motivated to be part of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement,
00:18:41the women's rights movement, the environmental movement.
00:18:44The hippies in the 60s, I mean, we had a racial bias a lot of places,
00:18:48but the hippies were black and white and yellow and every other color
00:18:51because those barriers came down in people who took psychedelics.
00:18:54Those cultural barriers were gone and they could see through that.
00:18:57It was a transparency and they said, well, he's just like me.
00:19:00She's just like me. We're all part of this thing.
00:19:03And if they had mystical experiences, it was even more profound
00:19:06because they realized everything is all apart. Everything is all one.
00:19:10When you have this unitive mystical experience, because it's unitive,
00:19:16you identify with people that you might normally not.
00:19:21So that there's a deeper part of ourselves, deeper than our country,
00:19:25deeper than our nationality, deeper than our religion, deeper than our gender,
00:19:29deeper than our skin color, deeper than our sexual orientation,
00:19:33that there's this core element that binds us together.
00:19:37The hallmark feature to the mystical experience is one in which there's just a sense
00:19:42of the interconnectedness of all people and things, a sense that all is one.
00:19:48And that experience is accompanied by this noetic sense that the experience at its core
00:19:56is more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness.
00:20:01Lucid dreaming is you're dreaming, but you're conscious that you are dreaming.
00:20:08So suddenly you're having a dream and you go, I'm having a dream.
00:20:12And you're aware that you're having a dream within the dream.
00:20:15Psychedelics have been suggested to produce an effect like that.
00:20:19And if you look at the electrical state of the brain in a waking normal person,
00:20:23and you see a lot of activity in the frontal cortex,
00:20:25because that's where all the information is coming in to be processed.
00:20:28So when people take a psychedelic and have that mystical transcendent experience,
00:20:32the brain is still functioning and conscious,
00:20:34but it's getting no data from your feeling, touch, the body.
00:20:38The body's gone.
00:20:39So now you just have this basically pure consciousness.
00:20:42So what happens then?
00:20:44Yeah, I don't know.
00:20:45You know, I think it's incredibly interesting.
00:20:49We still don't know.
00:20:52And these drugs are the tools that will enable us to figure it out.
00:20:59We've asked the question, where does it work in the brain to produce its effects?
00:21:04And how do the changes it produces in the brain lead to these remarkable experiences,
00:21:10both of alterations in sensation, but also alterations in feeling and emotion
00:21:16and the sense of being more at one with the universe?
00:21:20And what we found was completely surprising and exactly the opposite of what we predicted,
00:21:25because we found that psilocybin turned off blood flow in key parts of the brain,
00:21:31such as the prefrontal cortex, such as the posterior cortex and the thalamus.
00:21:36And when you look at those parts of the brain, you realize that they actually are the parts of the brain
00:21:41which control and integrate the way in which the brain processes information.
00:21:48They're the kind of gatekeeper regions, the nodes which regulate what you do and how you feel.
00:21:54And by switching those off, we kind of liberate the rest of the brain so that it can do other things.
00:22:00And that's why you get the expansion of consciousness.
00:22:03The core of what we found in our studies in healthy volunteers at Johns Hopkins is that there is this quantum change,
00:22:14if you will, in terms of perception of life and self and attitudes and moods and behavior.
00:22:20Most people are still endorsing that this experience is among the most personally meaningful
00:22:25and spiritually significant experiences of their entire lives.
00:22:30So we can now actually study the mystical experience, or transcendent experience,
00:22:37is maybe a better term for it, transpersonal experience, with pharmacological tools using scientific tools.
00:22:44I think that's a huge accomplishment and a huge sort of break from the way it's always been.
00:22:51We're just relearning how to let it be okay to call these things real, to call these practices real again.
00:23:03Seeing that these kinds of experiences can be occasioned and that they're producing reports of long-lasting attributions
00:23:11of personal meaning and spiritual significance really got my attention.
00:23:20I was diagnosed to have terminal cancer a few months ago.
00:23:23And naturally there's a lot of fear and anger and pain, emotional pain, that surrounds something like that.
00:23:30It has allowed me to open up and have communication with my family that I have never been able to have before.
00:23:40This morning the Drug Enforcement Administration is announcing its intention
00:23:46to place the drug known as MDMA, or by the street name Ecstasy, under emergency controls in Schedule 1.
00:23:58There were trials where a DEA administrative law judge heard hours and hours of testimony
00:24:04and made the decision that Schedule 3 made the most sense.
00:24:08It would be a prescription medicine and there would be a lot of restrictions on it,
00:24:11but it would be much, much easier to do clinical research with it.
00:24:14But the DEA did not take its own administrative law judge's recommendation
00:24:19and they went ahead and put MDMA in Schedule 1.
00:24:21And, you know, what's interesting is MDMA has been in Schedule 1 for 25 years now
00:24:25and it's, you know, just as easy to get as it's ever been, if not more.
00:24:28I mean, it's become a very popular drug of abuse.
00:24:31Millions of people around the world are taking this drug recreationally.
00:24:34One thing that you see is that when you're taking sort of a known quantity of a known substance
00:24:39in a medical setting or a therapeutic setting, it's very safe.
00:24:42You know, because this drug is illegal, when somebody buys ecstasy, they may be getting MDMA
00:24:47or they could be getting any number of chemicals that are not bad for you or horribly bad for you.
00:24:52Because of prohibition, the issue of drug substitution and counterfeit pills and things like that is very much an issue.
00:24:59That's one of the problems with the way drugs are approached in this society.
00:25:04Kids don't learn about using these things in a safe and wise way.
00:25:14When MDMA first came into public awareness, the government officials were calling it another hallucinogenic amphetamine.
00:25:21And I knew a lot about what the structures of hallucinogenic amphetamines look like.
00:25:25And I thought, that doesn't make sense that that's a hallucinogen.
00:25:28My laboratory actually published the first biochemical work on MDMA in 1982,
00:25:33before anyone even called it ecstasy or knew what it was.
00:25:36We showed that it released serotonin.
00:25:38Amphetamines themselves, amphetamine or methamphetamine, release principally a dopamine,
00:25:43a transmitter called dopamine and also norepinephrine, but also release a certain amount of serotonin.
00:25:48MDMA has mostly its effect on serotonin.
00:25:52It releases serotonin, but also releases norepinephrine and also releases dopamine.
00:25:56So in some respects it's working like methamphetamine, but the profile is somewhat reversed.
00:26:01MDMA is not a hallucinogen.
00:26:03It really is unique in psychiatry.
00:26:05There's no other drug like it.
00:26:07Because it is this massive serotonin agonist,
00:26:11it basically floods the synapse or floods the brain with serotonin.
00:26:14It's almost like an immediate acting antidepressant or an immediate acting anti-anxiety medicine.
00:26:20They're called anxiolytics.
00:26:21Something that decreases anxiety is an anxiolytic.
00:26:23And in psychiatry, all the anxiolytics are sedating.
00:26:26So there is no immediate acting, non-sedating anxiolytic in psychiatry.
00:26:32But MDMA is an immediate acting, non-sedating anxiolytic.
00:26:3530, 45 minutes after somebody takes MDMA, most people become very relaxed and happy and content.
00:26:45They're also awake, alert, completely conscious, cognizant of everything that's going on.
00:26:51They have enhanced memory for the experience.
00:26:53And there's also enhanced memory for early repressed traumas.
00:26:57So it's particularly well suited to psychotherapy, to being a catalyst for psychotherapy.
00:27:03We see it right now for post-traumatic stress disorder,
00:27:06for veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:27:09There's a great need for treatments that the current medications,
00:27:13the current psychotherapies only work partially and only work in certain subjects.
00:27:18So the need is growing for the psychedelic medicines.
00:27:22One of the problems with treating PTSD is that people either have too much anxiety
00:27:31or too much emotional numbing in order to be able to revisit the trauma in a therapeutic way.
00:27:37And what MDMA seems to do is to allow people to face their fears without being overwhelmed,
00:27:45but yet have an emotional connection.
00:27:48We just recently completed what's called a Phase II clinical trial of MDMA-assisted therapy, psychotherapy,
00:28:00for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:28:03We would encourage them to spend a good bit of the time focusing inward without talking.
00:28:10And we had headphones with a program of music and eye shades.
00:28:14We had an agreement with everyone that if nothing about their trauma came up,
00:28:19then we could bring it up, but we never had to do that.
00:28:22It always came up spontaneously, but not necessarily right away.
00:28:26We encourage people to be open to the idea that kind of their own inner healing intelligence
00:28:32would bring whatever experience needed to come.
00:28:35It seems that MDMA helps people stay in that what's called an optimal arousal zone.
00:28:41So one other unique thing about MDMA is that it induces, in most people,
00:28:47sort of a heart opening and a sense of connectedness and empathy with other people.
00:28:52That may be because it enhances oxytocin release in the brain,
00:28:57a hormone that is involved with bonding.
00:28:59So I suppose in a world where more people were undergoing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,
00:29:04you would have more people who were happy and relaxed and more trusting of other people
00:29:09and more caring and more empathic.
00:29:12My take on it, in general, is that it somehow allows access to an experience
00:29:19that is a kind of fundamental, inherent capacity that people have.
00:29:25People seem to have more empathy for others and for themselves.
00:29:30It seems as if it removes the obstacles to accessing that sense of empathy.
00:29:36In the old time, you could go for ten years for meditation
00:29:40and then once, if you were lucky on the way, you would realize,
00:29:43ah, that's what Jesus or Buddha meant.
00:29:46Now you can do it in six hours in ecstasy.
00:29:50It will not keep, but you get the insight.
00:29:53And if then you are serious, you can start to work with that insight.
00:29:58But first, the door has to open.
00:30:01It would not be the best use of it if people get the idea
00:30:04that the only way you can feel better is to take the drug again.
00:30:07I think that gets into a pattern that's not useful.
00:30:11Psychedelic is a beautiful help to open the door
00:30:15as long as you are ready to accept it is not the solution.
00:30:20It's an interesting compound, and we need to know more about it.
00:30:22We need to understand the risks and benefits.
00:30:24And the only way you're really going to understand it
00:30:26is to do clinical research.
00:30:37Marijuana, the dried leaves and flowers of the Indian hemp weed,
00:30:41is used in the form of a cigarette.
00:30:44Marijuana smoking, experts point out,
00:30:46can make a helpless addict of its victim within weeks,
00:30:49causing physical and moral ruin and death.
00:30:53Should you ever be confronted with the temptation
00:30:58of taking that first puff of a marijuana cigarette,
00:31:02don't do it.
00:31:05One of the most remarkable aspects about cannabis is that the plant itself contains hundreds and hundreds of different compounds,
00:31:15many of which are likely to have therapeutic value.
00:31:18Now, mostly we focus on THC, which is, of course, the component of cannabis that makes you stoned.
00:31:25But there's another very important component called cannabidiol.
00:31:29But cannabidiol itself is also a relaxant drug.
00:31:32It's recently been shown to reduce anxiety.
00:31:35It may also promote sleep.
00:31:37Early man began to use psychoactive potions.
00:31:43In the cave paintings you can see the signs of an altered state of consciousness.
00:31:48Initially, of course, agent people didn't have any understanding of things like THC,
00:31:54chemical molecules, these types of things or effects on the brain.
00:31:57And the effects of plants like cannabis, opium, coca, mushrooms, cacti,
00:32:02were all generally seen as magical effects that came to them through the gods.
00:32:07So cannabis has a very broad range of actions, and it's been around for 4,000 years,
00:32:12so it's not surprising that its utility has been widely experienced and widely tested.
00:32:17It was very popular with Queen Victoria in England in the 1800s.
00:32:22She used it to treat period pains.
00:32:24She used it to treat the pain of childbirth.
00:32:27And in fact, it was a legal medicine in Britain until 1971.
00:32:31And then when young people started using it, it was banned.
00:32:34I certainly think we have made mistakes in penalising people for medicinal use.
00:32:40We saw some cases that were absolutely ludicrous.
00:32:43People were raising it for those purposes, who've been directed to use it.
00:32:48I think we should open up this whole can of worms.
00:32:51And I would hope that the Justice Department could work with this committee
00:32:54and work with members of Congress and other advocates
00:32:57as to how better to assess the use of marijuana.
00:33:01Can they come up with even one positive thing as a result of prohibition of marijuana?
00:33:07And if they start saying, oh, it's to keep the drugs away from our children, they're wrong.
00:33:11It's easier for our young people to get marijuana than alcohol.
00:33:15If they're going to say, well, we're going to reduce violence,
00:33:17we're going to perpetuate the rule of law.
00:33:20They're wrong. It's doing the absolute opposite.
00:33:22Sixty percent of all of the drug cartels' profits in Mexico come from the sale of marijuana
00:33:28with all of the drug-related violence that goes down there.
00:33:31It isn't the drugs that are causing the harm. It's the drug money.
00:33:35The federal government officials say this all the time.
00:33:37There's no study showing that marijuana is an effective medicine.
00:33:40And you know something? They're right.
00:33:43However, it's beyond hypocrisy for them because it's the federal government that controls the marijuana
00:33:48and numbers of reputable groups, the Centers for Disease Control,
00:33:52the University of California and others have requested to conduct the studies
00:33:56and they've been deprived of that authorization.
00:33:58So there's no research because the government hasn't allowed the research?
00:34:01The government affirmatively does not allow this research to take place.
00:34:05And then they sanctimoniously say, well, there's no research that shows it.
00:34:09It's beyond hypocrisy. I view it as chutzpah.
00:34:12Cannabis is less harmful to the health than alcohol or tobacco.
00:34:18And therefore, it is completely out of order that it should be in this high prohibited category.
00:34:28Tobacco, to the best of my knowledge, is the only substance that we sell in the United States
00:34:32that when used as directed causes death.
00:34:35Right. Absolutely.
00:34:36Shouldn't we be incorporating tobacco into our drug policies?
00:34:39Oh, certainly. Certainly.
00:34:40And that argues more and more for it being a public health issue rather than a criminal issue.
00:34:45I think the ultimate threat of these substances when it comes to modern society
00:34:50is their ability to break consensus trance
00:34:53and throw people into looking at things in a novel new way.
00:34:57Society went through a massive upheaval. There was a sexual revolution.
00:35:00People started protesting wars. And the government themselves directly sought a relation
00:35:05between this and drug use, particularly cannabis use.
00:35:07This is one of them. I went on damn drugs with marijuana. Can I get that out of this son of a bitchy?
00:35:13Yeah, domestic counsel. Sure. I did one on marijuana with his tears.
00:35:17Yes, I might see another thing in the news summary this morning.
00:35:20But that's funny to hear me. One of the bastards that are out for the people that's marijuana was Jewish.
00:35:27What is the crisis the matter of the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them?
00:35:30I suppose because most of them are psychiatrists, you understand, all the great psychiatrists are Jewish.
00:35:37By God, we are going to get the marijuana thing. And I want to get it right in the square and the puss.
00:35:53I want to put someone on my way. I put more on that. I want somebody else to do that.
00:35:59I want to get it against legalizing and all that sort of thing.
00:36:03We must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States,
00:36:09the problem of dangerous drugs.
00:36:11Drugs are menacing our society. They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions.
00:36:17Ronald Reagan, for instance, and his son Ronald Reagan, Jr., in an interview,
00:36:21when questioned about his mother Nancy's Just Say No campaign and his father's support for the war on drugs,
00:36:27said in relation to marijuana, it's not marijuana the mildly mind-altering substance.
00:36:32It's marijuana, the antithesis of the state.
00:36:34At the time, I had no reason to believe that there was anything sinister going on.
00:36:38This estate looks like a nice place to raise a family.
00:36:42But this seemingly safe suburb was hiding a dangerous secret.
00:36:47Police finding five cannabis grow houses on two neighboring streets.
00:36:52I'm a bit scared.
00:36:53Chelsea and her family live in the area, but are now moving out solely because of the drug raid.
00:37:00I've got rental agreements. I'm going to find another place to live.
00:37:03Yeah, cannabis has had a rough time over the last century or so.
00:37:07And one of the real problems I think we have now is that medicinal cannabis is only available in some countries,
00:37:13still not available in the United Kingdom.
00:37:15And that's a serious loss and it's a detriment to many of our patients.
00:37:20We've done research on the different constituents of cannabis.
00:37:24TXC, which gets you high, CBD, which is an amazing compound, which is anti-psychotic, anti-axiolytic, anti-diabetic.
00:37:34It's a very good compound.
00:37:35It's been grown out of the crop because the crop has been modified and grown so that it has as high TXC as possible.
00:37:43It's a tragedy that our youth can only get that type of cannabis, more or less.
00:37:48There's a lot to be learned about that and I think it can be a real problem for kids using it in a way that doesn't have that kind of set and setting.
00:37:59There's a lot of learned knowledge which can more easily be passed on in a regulated system.
00:38:06On one hand, we decry the scourge of drug abuse.
00:38:09On the other hand, we say that, you know, you should take drugs instead of dealing with a behavioral problem,
00:38:17instead of implementing novel things such as parenting.
00:38:22Kids are a behavioral problem so they can be medicated so that they're no longer a problem.
00:38:28As a result, we have a whole generation that is grown up to rely on drugs.
00:38:33And so then they find out that the drugs that are prohibited actually work much better than the pharmaceutical drugs.
00:38:42They're often more effective.
00:38:44And so they can see no reason not to use those substances.
00:38:50While autism is not a qualifying medical condition like cancer or severe pain, in Alex's case the seizures are.
00:38:57His parents give him a liquid form of the drug.
00:38:59And after a few months of treatment, the Eccles say they saw a dramatic improvement.
00:39:03He went from hitting himself, blooding his face, within an hour, hour and a half,
00:39:09he would be playing with toys, using his hands, something that at that time was almost unheard of.
00:39:15They're not advocating the use of medical marijuana for all autistic children,
00:39:20but they say walk a mile in their shoes and the treatment might not seem so extreme.
00:39:27Seniors are the fastest growing group taking up pot.
00:39:32A warning, this report does contain drug references.
00:39:35I don't believe in drugs, but then I've also never been someone who suffered from pain.
00:39:43Marijuana kept me alive.
00:39:47I've talked to so many people, elders, who said I never thought I would do anything illegal in my entire life.
00:39:55I'm a little old lady who's followed every rule I've ever heard of.
00:39:59But when my husband was suffering from chemotherapy, I found myself hunting for marijuana.
00:40:05And I had to go across that line to find it.
00:40:09It made me realize that not all the rules are here to protect us.
00:40:14And that sometimes we have to look beyond those boundaries to find what we're actually entitled to have.
00:40:20And CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins me now.
00:40:24Sanjay, welcome to you.
00:40:25Thank you. Thanks for having me.
00:40:26So come on, you've been looking at this for a year.
00:40:28And I want to remind you that in 2009, you wrote a Time magazine article entitled,
00:40:33Why I Would Vote No on Pot. You've changed your mind.
00:40:36If you're looking at all the papers that are written in the United States about marijuana,
00:40:40the vast majority of them are about the harm.
00:40:43We fund studies on harm.
00:40:45We don't fund studies on benefit nearly as much.
00:40:47So it gives a distorted picture.
00:40:49But you know, I didn't look far enough.
00:40:51I didn't look deep enough.
00:40:52I didn't look at labs in other countries that are doing some incredible research.
00:40:55I didn't listen to the chorus of patients who said,
00:40:57not only does marijuana work for me, it's the only thing that works for me.
00:41:00I took the DEA at their word when they said it is a schedule one substance and has no medical applications.
00:41:06There was no scientific basis for them to say that.
00:41:09The science is there.
00:41:11This isn't anecdotal.
00:41:12This isn't in the realm of conjecture anymore.
00:41:15I mean, for a long time, we've just ignored these papers.
00:41:17But this was a drug, you know, that was used for thousands of years.
00:41:30Ayahuasca and yahe are Indian words for banisteria coffee.
00:41:36The literal meaning of ayahuasca is vine of the soul.
00:41:41This powerful hallucinogen has been credited with the ability to transport human beings to realms of consciousness where telepathy and clairvoyance are commonplace.
00:41:55The ayahuasca ritual is about to begin.
00:42:02What I was into was looking at how Amazonian Indians think about their resources and use them to be able to argue against the World Bank and other international development agencies that were enacting these big deforestation projects that would take land away from people.
00:42:20This was about human rights and ecological destruction and trying to make the world a better place.
00:42:27Thank you to the land that allowed us to sit and that this message will reach the border of the land.
00:42:32So I had a vested interest in showing that these people were rational.
00:42:36But the problem was, when asked, they said that their knowledge about the plants came from the hallucinations of their shamans.
00:42:43Well, after circling around this question of the origin of their knowledge, finally, one guy said,
00:42:55Brother Jeremy, if you want to know the answer to that question, you have to drink ayahuasca.
00:43:00He said it's a television of the forest and you can see images and learn things.
00:43:05So, you know, I decided to check it out. Pasteur tried it and all the great scientists, they try it on themselves.
00:43:14That's one of the beautiful things about science.
00:43:26It's not such a radical proposition to see plants as being teachers.
00:43:30In fact, it's only the alienation of Western science from our roots that creates that apparent split.
00:43:35I mean, for thousands of years around the world, medicine was based on plants.
00:43:40These psychoactive chemicals, in some way, are a co-evolutionary mechanism.
00:43:47A way that, you know, and here's where we get away from science and into speculation,
00:43:52but a co-evolutionary mechanism by which the community of species, or at least the community of sentient species,
00:44:01has evolved to talk to this primate, if you want to put it that way.
00:44:08A way to share the gnosis, to share the knowledge.
00:44:13A famous botanist once said,
00:44:16plants have substituted biosynthesis for behavior.
00:44:21Animals interact with their environment and deal with their environment primarily through behavior.
00:44:27You know, the flight or fight reaction, all of this stuff.
00:44:31We move around. If we're threatened, you know, we get up and run away.
00:44:36Plants can't do that. They're stuck in one place.
00:44:39So they mediate their relationships with the environment through chemistry.
00:44:44That's why they're such great chemists.
00:44:46And if you are an animist, a person who sees the spirit of plants at work with agency,
00:44:52meaning the ability to choose to interact with another species.
00:44:56Suddenly the whole relationship becomes much more complicated,
00:45:00because now they can be used as an agent essentially to form a symbiosis with this hypertrophy-brained primate.
00:45:12And so suddenly the whole evolutionary relationship, the co-evolutionary equation, has changed.
00:45:18The plant has an incentive to form a relationship with human beings.
00:45:23I think it's very significant that we talk about the shaman's experiences as an out-of-body experience.
00:45:32That the experiential self, what we may call the soul or the spirit or just our cognitive point of reference,
00:45:40becomes detached from the body.
00:45:42And so now we have the capability to look at the world in a way that is more than just the body-based limitations
00:45:49that we originally evolved to use to understand the physical world.
00:45:53There is a sense in which, in your mind, you rise above yourself or outside of yourself,
00:45:59and you can see. You see films about yourself.
00:46:05Once you drink, you see. And once you see, then you can't unsee.
00:46:11Just like they say, you can take this stuff and it shows you these spectacular images that teach you things.
00:46:17There's a wisdom in the psyche that becomes more and more apparent of just what a particular person most needs to experience
00:46:26in order to mature psychologically and spiritually.
00:46:32It is often like, that is just what I needed to know, perhaps not what I wanted to know,
00:46:37but just what I needed to know at that moment.
00:46:40Nuestra identidad como nativos es que somos hijos de plantas sagradas
00:46:47que venimos trabajando en favor de la humanidad, de que todos somos uno.
00:46:53Those cultures where ayahuasca is part of the culture, no one uses it frivolously.
00:47:05The kids don't go off and party with it.
00:47:08It's used in a very respectful way with elders, shamans, people that know how to use it,
00:47:14guiding and having a safe setting.
00:47:17The mindset of the subject and the therapist and the setting in which it occurs makes a huge difference.
00:47:24So I think that's very, very hopeful because you're seeing a sort of a migration together again of shamanism,
00:47:32which has always essentially been a form of psychotherapy in which the use of these substances is an integral part.
00:47:43And now that's coming together with clinical psychiatry and clinical neuroscience.
00:47:49So I think that's very encouraging because it forces us to acknowledge that mind and spirit and soul are all part of this equation.
00:48:00It's true that ayahuasca has become surprisingly popular in the Western world.
00:48:08What's surprising about it is it's not necessarily an enjoyable experience.
00:48:11It's a purge. It can make you vomit and so on.
00:48:14I mean, you know, it's not exactly a party drug.
00:48:17I must say you wouldn't drink ayahuasca out of ceremony.
00:48:21It's not anything that you do lightly.
00:48:23And you want to be doing it with people who have been there before, who are helping you and who know what they're doing.
00:48:29But I remember after one of these sessions kind of innocently saying to the men who I had been up all night with,
00:48:35I said, my God, this stuff is really incredible.
00:48:38I mean, it just seems just, you know, it's terrifying.
00:48:40I mean, there's some of the visions just, you know, and don't you guys get scared?
00:48:44And they just said, you know, yeah, you know, it scares the heck out of us.
00:48:48The idea is sort of ripped through the placenta of ordinary consciousness to achieve some kind of illumination.
00:48:54But nobody said the journey was supposed to be pleasant.
00:48:57It's nothing I particularly either look forward to or enjoy very much when it happens.
00:49:02But after it happens, there's a kind of clarity and a lightness that's powerful.
00:49:08Because what's being purged actually is psychic contents that you've been holding on to.
00:49:13You're purging anger, you're purging pain, you're purging some false story about the self.
00:49:20What faster way, if you're a Westerner, to sort of find an antidote to shopping, materialism and lack of meaning by having this experience?
00:49:31What we have witnessed here is the survival of a tradition almost as old as man himself.
00:50:01What we had done, Lieutenant, was to establish definitely, for the first time, through careful experiments,
00:50:19that man at present is using only a fraction of his brain capacity, especially in the field of awareness,
00:50:27and that certain drugs are powerful devices for expanding this awareness toward its real possibilities.
00:50:34Brother and sister together we'll make it through. Oh, yeah.
00:50:45Someday a spirit will take you and guide you there.
00:50:54And I'll be there just helping you out whenever I can.
00:51:05Everybody's free. Everybody's free. Oh, yeah. Oh, to feel good.
00:51:19The successfully marketed serotonin antidepressants which came into consumer use in the 1980s were sold as mechanical fix-its.
00:51:28In the marketer's dream, the complex system of self and environment was distilled into a pill to be cheerfully swallowed on a daily basis,
00:51:37offering the promise that you would return to the persona of a productive and contented citizen.
00:51:43This idea that we can somehow medicate ourselves into a state of happiness, this encourages drug dependence,
00:51:52and it encourages people to not really examine the foundations of the problem that make them feel bad in the first place,
00:52:00because you can simply mask the symptoms.
00:52:02It's not like any individual is wrong to do that. It's the picture that's wrong.
00:52:06The individuals are suffering, clearly, you know.
00:52:08We have to have compassion for people looking for solutions to their personal problems in whatever way they can.
00:52:14But it doesn't seem that medicines that dampen your desires and dampen your identity
00:52:19and dampen your caring about this world are good medicines for the individual or for the planet.
00:52:26Overburdened by their HMO schedules, doctors no longer have the time to work through serious issues with their patients.
00:52:35Their only recourse is to issue a quick prescription.
00:52:38That's one of the problems why it's difficult for drugs like LSD or other psychedelics to be integrated into the medical model.
00:52:47It's an experience. A therapist has to actually sit down with the person and talk with them.
00:52:52Depression and other types of mental illnesses are understood to be chemical imbalances in the brain.
00:53:02It's very rare that when an SSRI is prescribed that actually measurements are taken to establish that there are chemical imbalances.
00:53:15I don't think that chemistry explains depression.
00:53:17So the idea that depression can be related simply to some biochemical changes, I think it's a very inadequate theory.
00:53:26Beneath depression are basically traumatic experiences.
00:53:30From our perspective, that's a symptom that we have seen most frequently changed very profoundly.
00:53:38We have seen people coming out of deep depression, lasting several years, sometimes after one session.
00:53:44The companies are not interested to hear about a treatment that may need just to be given once or twice that could make a huge difference to people.
00:53:53As far as the dominating culture, the pharmaceutical industrial government complex, it's not that they don't want you to be on drugs.
00:54:03They want you to be on drugs. They just want you to be on corporate drugs.
00:54:08But what about the pharmaceutical companies? Couldn't they make a lot of money by turning all these substances into pharmaceutical products?
00:54:17All of these drugs are off patent. MDMA patented in 1914. It's in the public domain. LSD first synthesized in 1938. It's in the public domain.
00:54:27Psilocybin was first synthesized in the 50s. It's in the public domain. Marijuana as a plant. These things are in the public domain.
00:54:34The corporate government approach is, if we can't patent it, let's prohibit it. All you do by banning these things preemptively is you create a black market.
00:54:46You create an opportunity for somebody to get very rich by dealing in what is now a prohibited substance.
00:54:53And you motivate intrepid psychonauts to experiment even more.
00:55:00There are many people who are using substances, all kinds of different substances, legal and illegal.
00:55:06Just give me something. Let's just forget who I am and what's going on.
00:55:11And medicine is the opposite. Let's explore who I am and let's understand it.
00:55:17Psychedelics open up the door to our inner psyche. So we have human experiences under the influence of a psychedelic rather than a psychedelic experience that's somehow or other intrinsic to the drug.
00:55:29A flood of findings with drug addicts and convicted felons showed that these substances could recondition behavior, enabling them to make dramatic changes in their lives.
00:55:40After participating in one of these experiments himself, Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson became convinced that LSD could cure chronic alcoholism.
00:55:51In a series of studies conducted between 1954 and 1960, Dr. Humphrey Osman proved him right, treating 2,000 alcoholics with LSD under carefully controlled conditions and achieving a success rate that had never been duplicated by any other means.
00:56:09We've turned the corner on drug addiction in the United States. Drug addiction in the United States is under control.
00:56:17First of all, the word addiction itself comes from a Latin word, addictus. And addictus was somebody who owed somebody money, couldn't pay it back and had to become a slave to them.
00:56:25So addiction always implies slavery. That, of course, includes drugs, but also includes shopping, sex to homelessness, addiction to power, addiction to wealth, addiction to violence, addiction to work,
00:56:38anything that we try and use to fill the internal void can become addictive.
00:56:45On top of that, of course, we live in a society that values externals. Everybody gets the message that they're not adequate because those perceptions of not being adequate is what drive a lot of consumerism.
00:56:57So this society automatically and unconsciously generates insecurity in almost everybody, which, of course, is an alienation from the self, which, of course, is a source of internal distress and pain, which again leads to addictive behaviors.
00:57:12The serotonergic hallucinogens in particular, they're classified as drugs of addiction, but they don't induce addictive syndromes in any way that we can measure them, either in animal models or in human models.
00:57:26And in fact, in a way, they're misclassified as having high addictive potential. And the reality is, when used under the right kind of constructs, they can actually be used to treat addictive spectrum disorders.
00:57:38Now, these drugs are illegal and one remembers Professor David Nutt. I mean, it got so many headlines at the time he was sacked by the former Home Secretary for his advice, saying that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.
00:57:53Should perhaps people view this in the context that there is someone perhaps who just generally wants less regulation of some of these drugs?
00:58:03Well, this is a very specific application of the drugs. It's a medical application and these are preliminary results. And so we're interested in the potential of the drug.
00:58:13So really, it doesn't directly implicate the policy issues. We're more interested in being able to research these drugs for their potential benefits.
00:58:24No theory of neuroscience, no theory of the brain and how the brain is related to consciousness will ever be complete if it doesn't take these phenomena into account.
00:58:51I went to London a couple of years ago where there are some psychiatrists really trying to open up just even looking at what the old research with LSD has shown, what the old and current research on MDMA has shown.
00:59:04And they're just trying at that level. No one's doing any research.
00:59:07They're just trying to reintroduce the fact that these drugs were used, had great therapeutic results.
00:59:14And for some reason, the whole thing was shut down and squashed.
00:59:18For various complicated and misplaced reasons, these substances, which historically have always been totally sacred at the center of the cultural evolution of man, they've been shoved in the bag of illegality.
00:59:40The powers that be have held that these things should not be allowed.
00:59:46They're still illegal generally, not all of them, but many of them.
00:59:49They're held outside, not in other countries necessarily, not in every country.
00:59:53The countries where their traditions know that part of their innate character of their people and their relationship to the land comes through these medicines.
01:00:02Why would they make them illegal? They would tear the people away from their own history, from their own land, from their own sense of nature, from their own health.
01:00:11Our decisions that our governments make about the applicability of these substances for the treatment of very important medical problems are not based upon scientific evidence.
01:00:21They're based upon a prohibitionist attitude that says these are dangerous drugs without any medical uses whatsoever.
01:00:28In spite of the fact that we have evidence that these substances have been used for medical purposes for tens of thousands of years.
01:00:36But because of government regulations, we're denying major aspects of our population access to medicines that they dearly need.
01:00:43One day if these drugs are rescheduled, of course it would have to be used in carefully controlled settings by trained and skilled people who had undergone, let's say, psychedelic psychotherapy training programs and there had to be oversight and regulation.
01:01:00If it becomes approved for medical use, that's going to involve a societal change in the medical profession, learning how to use these properly.
01:01:09The future of psychedelics on the immediate front is getting them accepted into clinical use, maybe establishing centers or training clinicians who can use them in psychotherapy and having places where people can go and have these experiences, whether they have specific mental or physical problems or whether they just want to go for spiritual exploration of consciousness.
01:01:34And it's possible and I think it would be very interesting to use them not just for disease states, but to enhance human growth, spiritual growth and being more empathic and connected and perhaps better human beings.
01:01:46If we look at our world, we are intellectually, technologically vastly overdeveloped with very primitive emotions. And that's why the world is at risk.
01:01:57That seems to be the message that one gets from psychedelics is, you know, wake up. We're potentially the salvation of the planet and also potentially the destruction of the planet.
01:02:11And it may be that messenger molecules are a way to try to initiate this dialogue.
01:02:17Well, I think the people who would benefit most of all are professors. I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas and with a great certainty about what's what.
01:02:30You know, to realize that the world he is constructed is by no means the only world, that there are these extraordinary other types of universe which we may inhabit and which we should be very grateful for inhabiting, I think.
01:02:45Psychedelics, they help people become aware of the multidimensional nature of the universe and of themselves.
01:02:52We're talking about transformation at every level, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.
01:02:57This rediscovery of the scientific study of psychedelics is opening the door to the study of many aspects of spirit.
01:03:09And I think science will be much richer for it.
01:03:13In order to use these medicines, you have to be rabble enough against a taboo to look at the taboo.
01:03:21And the whole nature of a taboo is that it's an area of culture where we're told, don't look there, it's not good to even look there.
01:03:28We have no real clear idea of all the different people that have been influenced by psychedelics.
01:03:35Cary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction for which he run the Nobel Prize.
01:03:40Steve Jobs has written in his autobiography about how LSD was one of the most important experiences of his life.
01:03:46Psychedelics have catalyzed in many people a creative process that has led them to make major profound discoveries that have changed the face of the world.
01:03:58There always seems to be one ingredient in the recipe of social change that our generation has tried to expunge from the record.
01:04:06And that's the fact that millions of us lay prostrate before the gates of awe, having taken some psychedelic substance.
01:04:13The critics would always say, don't take these drugs because they're going to change your life forever.
01:04:18What they didn't understand is that was the entire point.
01:04:21I think it's unwise to be so scared of the possible risks of these drugs, which there are possible risks.
01:04:27There's risks in anything.
01:04:28I mean, there's risks in driving a car.
01:04:29There's risks in crossing the street.
01:04:31But to be so scared of them as to make them illegal and inaccessible to anyone and not even want to research them or not even want to think about them.
01:04:38Why would we do that?
01:04:39Are we so sure that we can solve all the problems that confront us, that we want to throw away a possible tool that can expand consciousness,
01:04:47that could possibly, you know, give us some more insights and some more possibilities of how to resolve the difficulties that we're facing?
01:04:54I think not.
01:04:56We had this conflict in the 60s when psychedelics went wrong.
01:05:00What I think is even deeper is when psychedelics go right, not only would these drugs have the potential to be useful in psychotherapy,
01:05:08they had the potential to be useful in the evolution of the human species and that they could make a major contribution to the survival of the planet.
01:05:16Eternity in an hour.
01:05:29It's almost impossible, of course, as all the patients say to describe it.
01:05:35There are the colors and the beauties, the designs, the beautiful way things appear.
01:05:41People themselves, dull people, but I thought dull, appear fascinating, interesting, mysterious, wonderful, but that's only the beginning.
01:05:51Suddenly you'll notice that there aren't these separations, that we're not on a separate island shouting across to somebody else and trying to hear what they're saying and misunderstanding them.
01:06:03This thing's flowing underneath. We're parts of a single continent. It meets underneath the water. And with that goes such delight, the sober certainty of waking bliss.
01:06:17That's fantastic.
01:06:35ByΧ¨ΠΎΡ SBA