July 3, 2025 • 34 mins
Newt talks with Dr. Nolan Williams, M.D., Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and co-author of the Stanford Medicine study, “Magnesium-ibogaine therapy in veterans with traumatic brain injuries.” Stanford Medicine researchers have discovered that ibogaine, a plant-based psychoactive drug, combined with magnesium, can safely and effectively reduce PTSD, anxiety, and depression, while improving functioning in veterans with traumatic brain injury. Published in Nature Medicine, the study included detailed data on 30 U.S. Special Forces veterans who underwent supervised ibogaine treatments. One-month post-treatment, participants showed average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms, and 81% in anxiety symptoms, alongside cognitive improvements. Dr. Williams discusses the potential of ibogaine for neural repair and addiction treatment, highlighting its ability to reestablish critical periods of brain plasticity and unbiased choice in addiction recovery. Despite cardiac risks, mitigated by magnesium, ibogaine offers promising results, with ongoing efforts to gain FDA approval and integrate it into veteran healthcare. The study suggests ibogaine could revolutionize treatment for PTSD, addiction, and traumatic brain injury, offering long-lasting benefits from a single dose.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
On this episode of News World, Stanford Medicine researchers have
discovered that the plant based psychoactive drug ibogain, when combined
with magnesium to protect the heart, safely and effectively, reduced
post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and improved functioning
in veterans with traumatic brain injury. Their study was published
(00:28):
in the journal Nature Medicine on January fifth, twenty twenty four,
and was the first to include detailed data on thirty
veterans of US Special Forces who had undergone supervised ibogain
treatments one month after treatment. Participants experienced average reductions of
eighty eight percent and PTSD symptoms, eighty seven percent in
(00:53):
depression symptoms, and eighty one percent in anxiety symptoms. Formal
cognitive testing also revealed improvements in participants concentration, information processing, memory,
and impulsivity. Here to discuss the Stanford study on IVA Gain,
I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, doctor Nolan Williams.
(01:15):
He is an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. Doctor.
(01:36):
Welcome and thank you for joining me in News world.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I'm excited to be here and really excited to
talk about the work we're doing well.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I just had W Bryan Hubbard on the podcast on Sunday,
and our conversation really convinced me Iva Gain treatments have
great potential, but I want to hear from someone who
has studied the science. So I'm thrilled you would join
me today as the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation
Lab and an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
(02:06):
Can you tell us more about the focus of your
work at Stanford? How did you get involved with doing
the study in Eyba game.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So I'm trained as both a psychiatrist and a neurologist.
I did that in Charleston, South Carolina, and then came
out to Stanford a little more than eleven years ago
with the goal of developing treatments for problems where the
current treatments aren't very good, they have a lot of
side effects, or in conditions where there aren't currently available treatments, right,
(02:35):
and so that's kind of our mandate. I have a
big group that works on that, forty plus people in
my lab, a bunch of junior faculty, and really what
we're trying to do is to find solutions for hard
to treat problems. And so we've developed into a stimulation
approach for treatment resistant depression that can get people out
of severe depression in a couple of days, gotten that
(02:56):
through the FDA, gotten at to a point where now
Medicare Innovation Funds pay for it. First psychiatric treatment ever
to have that happen. And so we were working on
that work since twenty fourteen, and then around twenty eighteen,
I was approached by Amber Marcus Capone. Marcus is a
former seal who went down to Mexico and took this
(03:18):
alkaloid from an African shrub. So it's the root bark
extract of that shrub called the Iboga shrub in Gabon,
which is in central West Africa. You know, I'd been
around for some time and thought to be a potential
anti addiction compound, but hadn't really been studied for much
of anything else. And you know, the way he tells
(03:39):
the story, he couldn't screw a light into a light
fixture when he left to go to Mexico and looked
like quite a normal guy when I met him after
he'd come back and had been doing well for a
while and told me his story, and his wife told
me the story, and it was a very convincing story.
And I've learned over the years to really listen to
patients and listen to their stories and have that kind
(04:01):
of guide the work that we do. And so we
decided with some philanthropic funds that we were going to
go and conduct a trial around this, which at the
time was a little bit edgy, right. We had to
go to the Stanford Institutional Review Board, which is the
research panel that evaluates research protocols, and make a compelling
case that we were going to knowingly study something where
(04:25):
the veterans were knowingly going to go down and take
a compound that's currently illegal in the US but not
illegal in Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand other European countries
and basically evaluate them before after, and then a month after,
and then we kept evaluating them out to a year
of that data coming out shortly and what we found
(04:48):
was quite remarkable. People had a transformative improvement. Their post
traumatic stresses sort of depression, anxiety, all got better. But
what was really striking is there from traumatic brain injury
it took a little while longer. It took out to
the months to get them to a point where you
saw a reversal of a lot of that disability. But
(05:09):
you know, going back to what I said originally finding
treatments where there's no treatment available. There's no drug available
for traumatic brain injury. People call that a permanent neurological injury,
and permanent meaning that there hasn't been anything to date
that's able to reverse it. And what we found was
a really striking reversal and basically nearly everyone at the
(05:32):
one month mark and their levels of disability. And so
what's so fascinating about this drug is that it seems
to be capable of potentially having neural repair effects. And
that's unique. That's not something that we've seen much of before,
and why I think people are so excited about the possibilities.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Do you have any sense of the science of why
it's having this repair effect?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to give some background.
Now you may know that some of your listeners may
know it, but just to kind of get levels, setting
everybody on the same page. And so if a six
month old baby has a neurological injury or has brain
surgery for intractable epilepsy, and they lose one half of
(06:20):
their brain, one hemisphere of their brain, they can actually
adapt and the other hemisphere can take over a lot
or all of the functions, right, And we call that
the critical period. And so there's a critical period where
the brain can really redesignate function, and that critical period
(06:42):
closes in everyone. Right in adulthood, we don't have that.
So if you speaker, or I had a big stroke
right now and it hit one hemisphere or our brain,
we would lose a lot of functions. It'd be very
hard to reassign function, right, But in that baby example,
you could. And so one of the big curiosities of
(07:03):
human neuroscience has been is there a way to develop
a drug that could re establish that critical period, right,
even transiently, they would allow for you to reassign brain
function in the case of brain damage. And so there's
work out of Hopkins and Berkeley suggesting and a lot
(07:28):
of work to confirm this that in fact, these compounds
actually will produce a transient critical period window where functions
could be reassigned where the brain is highly plastic, and
that is one of the ideas of what's going on.
Another idea that's likely related, but just a different way
(07:50):
of thinking about it, is this is a highly neurotrophic drug,
so it produces really high kind of plasticity states.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Let me slay it down for second. What is neurotropic.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So basically there's kind of growth promoting factors in the
brain that are really present early on and then they
kind of wane over time, and so glial derived neurotrophic
factor gets upregulated by I begain and that's pretty specific
to I begin. All the other psychedelic compounds seem to
(08:23):
have an effect on brain derived neurotrophic factor at a
scale that orders the magnitude more than conventional oral antidepressants.
And these are really plasticity kind of agents, right, They
make the brain again more malleable, and that's really what
you want. You know, if the brain's very fixed in
its function, it can't reassign function. It's very hard. I
(08:45):
don't know if you remember back in the nineties you
had to defrag your computer. You remember that absolutely, Yeah,
what you were kind of doing is reassigning function of
those memory units, right, So this is something like that, Right.
It allows for you to reassign function in a different way.
(09:08):
That's really what we think is going on at the
brain level, and then there's this whole kind of psychological
function level that also happens. And so what the veterans
will tell you is it's not like other psychedelic compounds
or other psychoactive compounds, where you may have external things
(09:30):
that you're seeing or whatever. What people typically talk about,
and a lot of the veterans will say this is
that the drug produced as a state where they actually
observe earlier life emotionally salient memories in the case of say,
wartime trauma, earlier memories of wartime events that they've had
(09:51):
a hard time letting go, and it allows them to
finally kind of let it go. And I think that's
an important kind of psych coological function for folks to
understand that really these things kind of get stuck in
people's memory systems and kind of really, you know, in
many ways, mess up their ability to have normal function.
(10:11):
Because if you were shot at so many times, then
you know, you're walking down the street and somebody's car
makes the noise or something, you're behind the mailbox thinking
that there's some enemy or something as You're kind of
transported back to that war experience, right, And that's what
people with wartime PTSD are living with all the time, right.
(10:32):
And so what this drug does psychologically is it allows
the person to go back and look at those events
and kind of let them go and have the brain
kind of not see them as so important to bring
back up. And that's important because when they walk out
of this experience, their life isn't controlled by those events anymore.
(10:54):
And that's really why we think the PTSD, the post
traumatic stress disorder see to get better.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
The percentages that you were showing after a one month
of treatment are pretty staggering.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
They're really staggering. Yeah. I tell people that my postdoc
showed me those percentages and I didn't believe them at
first and told him that he must have made a
calculation error, you know. And so, you know, one of
those times where it was great to be wrong, you know,
he came back a month later and it was all right,
and I was wrong and the numbers were right.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So I know that you had very very good results
in the first month, but did you do a follow
up and what was the effect a year later?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So we continue to follow folks out to a year.
We wanted to publish the one month data to get
it out there. There's always an urgency, and so we
were still following folks out to the year at that point,
and so we followed people at the year where that
data's in review now, and almost all the folks that
were looking good at one month but one month held
it out to a year off of a single dose.
(11:58):
And I think that's really important because if you've got
a drug where there's some cardiac rist and people have
to be monitored and it works, you get to go
in once a month to do it, that would be complicated, right,
But if you've got to go in once a year,
once every couple of years, maybe never again, depending upon
the problem, then that all of a sudden becomes really
(12:18):
quite compelling. And that's what we observe that most people
did end up holding it out to a year, and
there are very few compounds that anybody's observed that can
do that.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And I yeah that it may also have an addition
to traumatic brain injury. There may be other aspects, for
example of being a drug addict, where hypo gain may
actually dramatically shorten the healing time to enable people to
move beyond their addiction. I mean, have you looked at
(12:47):
any of that or is that a different zone.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
No, we've looked at that. So we've looked at trying
to treat alcohol use disorders or alcoholism, and we've seen
great effects with alcohol use disorder in people. They were
pretty heavy drinkers, and that data's going to come out soon.
A lot of them stop drinking, a lot of them
really significantly reduced their drinking. And what people will say,
which is also kind of interesting psychologically, is after this happens,
(13:13):
after they go through all this and it's a couple
weeks out, it re establishes the ability to have kind
of unbiased choice, right, Like, I don't know, are you
a coffee drinker or you gum to or anything speaker.
A lot of us to drink coffee, you know, maybe
we feel highly compelled every morning to drink the coffee.
(13:33):
And it's still a choice, but you're biased towards drinking it, right,
Your brain is kind of more biased to do it
than not do it. That's true for me, maybe true
for you. Most people are coffee drinkers have that experience.
What happens with these guys in the case of whether
it's alcohol or drug, uses are highly biased towards using it.
You know, in some cases they cannot use it, but
(13:55):
the probability that they're not going to use it's truly
low because their brain's so biased to use it. And
so what they'll say is that when they get out
of this, it feels like a completely neutral choice. They
get presented with alcohol and they say, you know what,
I'd rather just go take a job, or I'd rather
go spend some time with my kids, or I'd rather
(14:17):
go and drink a diet coke or whatever, you know.
And that's what's so interesting about this is it allows
people to have that choice, and when you give people
that choice, they tend to take the choice that's actually
a much more healthy one. And so what's really interesting
is most of the guys that did this, in addition
to stopping drinking alcohol, that actually we found they stopped
(14:40):
drinking caffeine drinks, They stop doing a lot of things,
and they just kind of did the sorts of things
that they kind of wanted to do, and so it
really unbiases people's decision making.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
When you were doing your study, you were very aware
of the potential danger of cardiac problems. And as I
understand it, the ibogain was administered in combination with magnesium.
Now why magnesium and why does that reduce the cardiac risk?
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah, that's a great question. So if you go into
the American Heart Association guidelines for something called torsades, which
is this fatal arrhythmia that can be the result of
a lot of things. Drugs that are approved by the FDA,
like a drug called tikasin, and there's also chemo agents
that can interact to this herd potassium channel, and I
(15:51):
begain interacts with this herd potassium channel, so they all
do it. Tikosan, for instance, is monitored in a cardiac
monitoring unit because of this. And so you go in
the American Heart Association guidelines for treating torsodes, what you
see is that the American Heart Association recommends to give
magnesium in the case of torsades once you already have it.
(16:15):
And magnesium is not completely without risk, but it's pretty
low risk. Like as a neurologist, I gave magnesium to
people of various headache conditions in the er, women that
are preeclamptic at magnesium and that kind of period peri childbirth,
and so giving magnesium at these levels, you know, has
some minor minor risk, but really is pretty safe. We
(16:38):
know a lot about it, and so there was this
view that we took on around that if you can
treat the problem with magnesium, then you probably can prophylacts
against it ever happening with giving magnesium before the person
got the drug, and we thought that was a kind
of a unique kind of strategy, right where we're going
(17:00):
to give magnesium before you get the drug and then
we think significantly lower your risk of that arrhythmia. And
we didn't see any torsades in any of our samples,
and we think we have some early data to suggest
that that may be the ticket for dealing with that
particular risk. Now it's an interesting problem, right because, as
(17:24):
I said a minute ago, the FDA has already approved
drugs that actually have more risk for this arrhythmia than
I begame does, but ibans had a harder time getting
through the FDA. And the reason I think that that
has historically happened, although this FDA seems to have a
different kind of positive stance on it, is the risk
benefit assessment of a cardiac drug that also has a
(17:45):
cardiac risk ends up being different than an addiction drug
that has a cardiac risk. And I think that the
veteran's story is an important one for really pushing the
FDA and the government in the field and to seeing, okay,
veterans are killing themselves every year than are dying on
the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It seems to me that one of the and I'm
hoping this is going to change, but that historically one
of the FDA problems has been that they measure the
cost of saying yes, but they don't measure the cost
of saying no. You know, there are people out here
committing suicide, and this has a reasonable chance of minimizing that.
You have to figure out what are the total lives
(18:26):
saved annually versus what's the risk And I don't think
the FDA has any kind of measurement. It's all based
on risk only on the usage side, not based on
the cost of not doing it.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
One hundred percent, You're completely spot on the the risk
is only evaluated in the yes position, not in the
no position. And maybe that's a regulatory change that could
be seen where there was an additional evaluation point on
saying no. From the standpoint of the FDA, but absolutely,
(19:00):
and that's what hurdles you have to kind of get over.
And to your point, whether it be veterans suicide or
opioid overdoses, this is a drug that can actually decrease
the symptoms of detox for opiates right and reduce people's
discomforting going through opia detoks in addition of reducing craving,
(19:23):
the opioid crisis, the veterans suicide crisis. We think this
has great potential for doing that. And the hope is
is that there is a bias and it appears to
be going away around taking on some of this risk
and more of an openness in this FDA around evaluating
in that more holistic way. And so you know, our
(19:44):
fingers are crossed. You know, we have an I ind
and trying to see if the FDA will let us
do our first phase one trial now, and we're optimistic
we can get over that hurdle.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
What percent of the folks who got that dosage never
had any more interest in suicide and what percent found
that they were still depression and in a mode to
potentially commit suicide?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, I mean, you know, greater than eighty plus percent
of people lost their kind of suicidal thinking and they
held that out through the end of the year. We
had no one in our follow up that actually had
a suicide attempt or died of suicide. In the few
folks that didn't hold it or had a transient improvement,
(20:31):
we're hoping there are other either dozing strategies or other
technologies that can take care of those folks. But just
as a contrast the current treatments that are out there
for PTSD and depression and whatnot, you're talking about at
best twenty percent sort of numbers. It goes down over
time to really take care of these problems, and then
it's not very fast. In contrast, this is kind of
(20:54):
a striking number, But you know, we have more work
to do to really fully answer that question in hundreds
of people and have conclusive kind of final FDA level data.
But the signal that we have now is that it
really holds for a while and reduces that risk for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So there could be a spectrum effect where some people
once is enough for their lifetime and other people need
to come back in three months or six months.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
That's kind of what we're seeing, is that a lot
of veterans will tell me they'll go back once a
year kind of thing for a couple of years, and
then they don't need to do it anymore. There may
be a few folks, to your point, that need to
come back more frequently, but the bulk of folks tend
to hold it to a year, which is great.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Your participants actually went to a clinic in Baja California
run by Ambio Life Sciences. What is Ambio Life Sciences.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
There's a number of I Begain clinics that exist outside
of the US, so Ambo is one of them. There
are others that's specialized in administering I begain. Because I
Began doesn't hold an illegal status in Mexico, you know,
it can be administered as a medical treatment in Mexico. Historically,
that's been true for Canada, it's true for Australia and
(22:12):
New Zealand and I think half of the European countries. Right,
the definition of a controlled substance requires that there's an
abuse liability risk, and that's an important part of understanding
I Began is that there's not a single case report
in the literature of anybody with an I Began adviction,
right and that's really important to understand is that this
(22:33):
drug itself. You don't start taking this and stop taking
another drug. But when you start taking this, now, all
of a sudden, you have a new addiction. Right, That's
not what this does. Like you take this. Once people
get off of the compound, they don't really tend to
take I began again. It's not that pleasurable to do so.
And so because of that, you've got scenarios where people
(22:55):
will come into clinics in Mexico or wherever it is,
do a single administration I began, get off of opiates
or better from their PTSD or whatever it is, and
go back home. And our data that we haven't published
yet we've published SIN shows that they get a year
of benefit from a single dose. And so people typically
for Ambia will fly into San Diego, take a van
(23:18):
to Tijuana, go to a nice kind of treatment facility
there and get treated and go back to San Diego.
So Brett Favre, the NFL player, as I understand it,
just did this and has come out and said publicly
that he's had this experience. And so there's a number
of people that have gone down and done this sort
of trip. The real tragedy. I think of all of
(23:40):
this is just that we have these veterans. So we're
trying to rectify that by having at least studies and
hopefully eventually treatment if everything works out and the studies
are positive. In the US, do you have.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Any sense from Congress of a willingness to put pressure
on the FDA about this.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
I've met with a number of people, some of whom
are currently sitting Congressmen, many of whom are Republican House
representative members in Texas for instance, who are very supportive
of this, as well as former folks, and I think
there's definitely support. What I've heard, and you know better
(24:20):
than anybody around this question is like modifying the Controlled
Substances Act. It's going to be very hard to do.
And part of what has to happen, because it's a
DEA issue, is around how do you get to somebody
like Pambondi and have the conversation around downscheduling these compounds right,
(24:41):
Because there's an approval process that has to happen, there's
also a downscheduling process that has to happen because as
it stands right now, I began as a schedule one
substance like all the other psychedelics, and as you know,
the definition of that is abuse liability, which isn't true
no medicinal u use. And so in order for it
(25:02):
to become a treatment, it has to be down scheduled
off of one, so that we're now saying this does
have medicinal use. As you know, even cocaine is an
unscheduled one. Cocaine's considered schedule two because the dentists will
use it the nts, and so I began sits like
(25:22):
a more restricted status than cocaine.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
I think your study is going to be a major
step towards people like Secretary Kennedy putting real pressure to
make it available in this country. Let me ask you
one of the questions about the risk side. When you
think about the number of people who might be helped
by hypergain, how serious, in your judgment, is the cardiac challenge,
(25:48):
and to what degree does the magnesium eliminate or minimize
that risk.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I'm not aware of anybody that's had full blown torsades
when they got prophylactic magnesium. I'm always asking, but that
seems to be something that really risk mitigates. When I
went to the head of cardiac electric physiology at Stanford
and others, and people that ran that in the University
of Colorado and others. What they told me is they said, hey, look,
(26:14):
we have this drug, Tikisan, we use it all the time.
It's got more risks than I begain. We give it
in a cardiac monitoring unit. A lot of these deaths
that happened in these arrhythm as, it happened early twenty
years ago and whatnot. It all happened when people were
getting this administered to them in hotel rooms, you know,
(26:35):
in various places because people are really addicted. There wasn't
another way to do this. You couldn't get it in
the US. This is the only way to kind of
get off of heroin or whatever it was. So they
were willing to take that risk. But the reality is
is that we're not going to be doing that in
the US, right We're going to be giving this in
a cardiac monitoring unit, and we're going to have a
(26:55):
lot of tools on our tool belt, just like cardiologists
do for tikasan to be able to deal with it.
And because of that, it's really not any more of
a risk than the FDA approved drugs for cardiac rhythmias,
and the cardiologists would be heavily involved in these administrations.
When you talk to them about it, they're like, yeah,
you know, there's a risk, but you know, we would
(27:16):
just put people in our unit and we would monitor
and manage the risk. And we needed to do something,
we would do something about it, you know. And so
I think it's about medicalizing this and within a legitimate
medical setting and really thinking about this as a medical
intervention within the US healthcare system. And if you think
(27:36):
in those terms, and we get to that point, and
I think it's a consideration when you're talking to a patient,
and it's always a consideration as the doctor, but it's
the like healthcare policy level. It shouldn't be something that
gets in the way. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
If EYB again turns out to have the variety of
capabilities that we have some at least glimmerings of its
effect both on the quality of life, the relative health
of patients, and the fiscal impact is going to be staggering.
This could be one of the great breakthroughs of the
next ten or fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
That's what we feel. I mean, I don't think, you know,
I've said this publicly before. I'm not aware of a
brain acting compound that is this sophisticated or this broad spectrum.
And you know, you think about antibiotics and you have
these broad spectrum antibiotics that can take care of all
sorts of different bacteria or whatever. I mean, this is
a really broad spectrum. The data that we have right
(28:54):
now suggests it's a really broad brain drug, kind of
brain plasticity drug.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Let me go back for a second because it hit me.
Governor Habit of Texas signed a law just in June
of this year, June eleventh of twenty twenty five to
establish serious clinical trials to what excent are they going
to be hampered by? The degree to which I begin
is currently a Schedule one status.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
You can do Schedule one studies in the US right now.
There have been a number of them with other psychedelics
like psilocybin and whatnot, and so there's a lot of hurles.
You have to have a safe and weigh it every
day and all that stuff. But people can do that.
That's fine. You can still get there. And that's our
current investigation in new drug application sitting in the FDA
(29:43):
right now, takes all that into account. But to your point,
to really study this and to get researchers more enthused
to do it, if it could be down scheduled down
to two or three, then you don't need to safe
pharmacies can administer it and it would make research a
whole heck of a lot easier. Now, if that didn't happen,
(30:06):
would you still be able to do the research? Absolutely,
that fifty million is going to go towards good work
and all that good stuff. What you have to do
to do a schedule one study is you have to
install a safe and a key card reader, all this stuff.
You have to have a DEA agent come out and
look at your safe. It's quite a journey, but you know,
we're on board for that.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I think we need a much higher sense of urgency
about certain kinds of breakthroughs. And I'm thinking, like from
the Veterans Administration, the scale of what they deal with
in areas that are potentially directly affected and improved by
IBA game, it really should be a national project to
make sure how to use it, to make sure that
(30:46):
it's safe, but then to get it very widely available
throughout the entire Veterans administration program.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh absolutely. We've been trying to have those initial conversations
and really try to find inroads into talking with folks
in the current VA. I've had some discussions with former
administration kind of officials from the VA with enthusiasm, you know.
I think that there's a certain hot potato that happens
(31:15):
with some of this stuff where somebody has to hold it,
you know, and so we're happy to kind of hold
it and get enough of the ball rolling so that
there's some momentum. And then my senses is that once
there's enough of a snowball effect, to your point, then
the VA is going to really pick this up and
run with it. That's really my hope. I met with
folks early on at the VA and showed them the
(31:36):
data a couple of years ago, some of the senior
doctors there, and they all seem very enthused. And so
it's just in my view of matter of time but
continuing to do the good work.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Where are the major veterans organizations on ibogame.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
They're very positive, you know, and I've talked to some
folks from DD two and so they're very positive. But
I think everybody is in the kind of wait and see.
And that's why I think what Governor Perry's you know,
work in Texas and now in other states, why that's
so important, Because I think that getting some momentum going
(32:12):
and then being able to go back once we have
a big completed trial where we can go and say,
look like, we do this in two hundred veterans, and
it separates really nicely from hopefully I'm speculating right now,
but if everything goes well, it separates really nice from
the placebo pill and it looks like it's very real.
We want to get this through the FDA, and we
(32:33):
want the VA to take it up and run with
it as soon as we do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What you're doing is really really important for literally millions
of people.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I'm very impressed. Frankly, this was exactly the conversation I
was hoping we were going to have after our introductory
conversation about IBA game. I want to thank you for
joining me and giving us your medical assessment on ibgame treatments.
And I want to let our listeners know they can
find the study you conducted, which was published in Nature
(33:03):
Medicine at Nature dot com, and they can also read
more about it by visiting med dot Stanford dot edu.
And you're really doing very important work, doctor Williams. And
I'm very grateful that you would take this time to
share with us.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, thank you so much, speaker, and happy to chat anytime,
and thank you for your interests. So have a great tek.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Thank you to my guest, doctor Nolan Williams. You can
learn more about the Stanford Study and ibigain on our
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Gagish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(33:47):
at Gingerish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can say for my three free weekly columns at
gingrishpe sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
is Nutsworld.
On this episode of News World, Stanford Medicine researchers have
discovered that the plant based psychoactive drug ibogain, when combined
with magnesium to protect the heart, safely and effectively, reduced
post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and improved functioning
in veterans with traumatic brain injury. Their study was published
(00:28):
in the journal Nature Medicine on January fifth, twenty twenty four,
and was the first to include detailed data on thirty
veterans of US Special Forces who had undergone supervised ibogain
treatments one month after treatment. Participants experienced average reductions of
eighty eight percent and PTSD symptoms, eighty seven percent in
(00:53):
depression symptoms, and eighty one percent in anxiety symptoms. Formal
cognitive testing also revealed improvements in participants concentration, information processing, memory,
and impulsivity. Here to discuss the Stanford study on IVA Gain,
I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, doctor Nolan Williams.
(01:15):
He is an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. Doctor.
(01:36):
Welcome and thank you for joining me in News world.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I'm excited to be here and really excited to
talk about the work we're doing well.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
I just had W Bryan Hubbard on the podcast on Sunday,
and our conversation really convinced me Iva Gain treatments have
great potential, but I want to hear from someone who
has studied the science. So I'm thrilled you would join
me today as the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation
Lab and an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
(02:06):
Can you tell us more about the focus of your
work at Stanford? How did you get involved with doing
the study in Eyba game.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
So I'm trained as both a psychiatrist and a neurologist.
I did that in Charleston, South Carolina, and then came
out to Stanford a little more than eleven years ago
with the goal of developing treatments for problems where the
current treatments aren't very good, they have a lot of
side effects, or in conditions where there aren't currently available treatments, right,
(02:35):
and so that's kind of our mandate. I have a
big group that works on that, forty plus people in
my lab, a bunch of junior faculty, and really what
we're trying to do is to find solutions for hard
to treat problems. And so we've developed into a stimulation
approach for treatment resistant depression that can get people out
of severe depression in a couple of days, gotten that
(02:56):
through the FDA, gotten at to a point where now
Medicare Innovation Funds pay for it. First psychiatric treatment ever
to have that happen. And so we were working on
that work since twenty fourteen, and then around twenty eighteen,
I was approached by Amber Marcus Capone. Marcus is a
former seal who went down to Mexico and took this
(03:18):
alkaloid from an African shrub. So it's the root bark
extract of that shrub called the Iboga shrub in Gabon,
which is in central West Africa. You know, I'd been
around for some time and thought to be a potential
anti addiction compound, but hadn't really been studied for much
of anything else. And you know, the way he tells
(03:39):
the story, he couldn't screw a light into a light
fixture when he left to go to Mexico and looked
like quite a normal guy when I met him after
he'd come back and had been doing well for a
while and told me his story, and his wife told
me the story, and it was a very convincing story.
And I've learned over the years to really listen to
patients and listen to their stories and have that kind
(04:01):
of guide the work that we do. And so we
decided with some philanthropic funds that we were going to
go and conduct a trial around this, which at the
time was a little bit edgy, right. We had to
go to the Stanford Institutional Review Board, which is the
research panel that evaluates research protocols, and make a compelling
case that we were going to knowingly study something where
(04:25):
the veterans were knowingly going to go down and take
a compound that's currently illegal in the US but not
illegal in Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand other European countries
and basically evaluate them before after, and then a month after,
and then we kept evaluating them out to a year
of that data coming out shortly and what we found
(04:48):
was quite remarkable. People had a transformative improvement. Their post
traumatic stresses sort of depression, anxiety, all got better. But
what was really striking is there from traumatic brain injury
it took a little while longer. It took out to
the months to get them to a point where you
saw a reversal of a lot of that disability. But
(05:09):
you know, going back to what I said originally finding
treatments where there's no treatment available. There's no drug available
for traumatic brain injury. People call that a permanent neurological injury,
and permanent meaning that there hasn't been anything to date
that's able to reverse it. And what we found was
a really striking reversal and basically nearly everyone at the
(05:32):
one month mark and their levels of disability. And so
what's so fascinating about this drug is that it seems
to be capable of potentially having neural repair effects. And
that's unique. That's not something that we've seen much of before,
and why I think people are so excited about the possibilities.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Do you have any sense of the science of why
it's having this repair effect?
Speaker 2 (05:59):
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to give some background.
Now you may know that some of your listeners may
know it, but just to kind of get levels, setting
everybody on the same page. And so if a six
month old baby has a neurological injury or has brain
surgery for intractable epilepsy, and they lose one half of
(06:20):
their brain, one hemisphere of their brain, they can actually
adapt and the other hemisphere can take over a lot
or all of the functions, right, And we call that
the critical period. And so there's a critical period where
the brain can really redesignate function, and that critical period
(06:42):
closes in everyone. Right in adulthood, we don't have that.
So if you speaker, or I had a big stroke
right now and it hit one hemisphere or our brain,
we would lose a lot of functions. It'd be very
hard to reassign function, right, But in that baby example,
you could. And so one of the big curiosities of
(07:03):
human neuroscience has been is there a way to develop
a drug that could re establish that critical period, right,
even transiently, they would allow for you to reassign brain
function in the case of brain damage. And so there's
work out of Hopkins and Berkeley suggesting and a lot
(07:28):
of work to confirm this that in fact, these compounds
actually will produce a transient critical period window where functions
could be reassigned where the brain is highly plastic, and
that is one of the ideas of what's going on.
Another idea that's likely related, but just a different way
(07:50):
of thinking about it, is this is a highly neurotrophic drug,
so it produces really high kind of plasticity states.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Let me slay it down for second. What is neurotropic.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So basically there's kind of growth promoting factors in the
brain that are really present early on and then they
kind of wane over time, and so glial derived neurotrophic
factor gets upregulated by I begain and that's pretty specific
to I begin. All the other psychedelic compounds seem to
(08:23):
have an effect on brain derived neurotrophic factor at a
scale that orders the magnitude more than conventional oral antidepressants.
And these are really plasticity kind of agents, right, They
make the brain again more malleable, and that's really what
you want. You know, if the brain's very fixed in
its function, it can't reassign function. It's very hard. I
(08:45):
don't know if you remember back in the nineties you
had to defrag your computer. You remember that absolutely, Yeah,
what you were kind of doing is reassigning function of
those memory units, right, So this is something like that, Right.
It allows for you to reassign function in a different way.
(09:08):
That's really what we think is going on at the
brain level, and then there's this whole kind of psychological
function level that also happens. And so what the veterans
will tell you is it's not like other psychedelic compounds
or other psychoactive compounds, where you may have external things
(09:30):
that you're seeing or whatever. What people typically talk about,
and a lot of the veterans will say this is
that the drug produced as a state where they actually
observe earlier life emotionally salient memories in the case of say,
wartime trauma, earlier memories of wartime events that they've had
(09:51):
a hard time letting go, and it allows them to
finally kind of let it go. And I think that's
an important kind of psych coological function for folks to
understand that really these things kind of get stuck in
people's memory systems and kind of really, you know, in
many ways, mess up their ability to have normal function.
(10:11):
Because if you were shot at so many times, then
you know, you're walking down the street and somebody's car
makes the noise or something, you're behind the mailbox thinking
that there's some enemy or something as You're kind of
transported back to that war experience, right, And that's what
people with wartime PTSD are living with all the time, right.
(10:32):
And so what this drug does psychologically is it allows
the person to go back and look at those events
and kind of let them go and have the brain
kind of not see them as so important to bring
back up. And that's important because when they walk out
of this experience, their life isn't controlled by those events anymore.
(10:54):
And that's really why we think the PTSD, the post
traumatic stress disorder see to get better.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
The percentages that you were showing after a one month
of treatment are pretty staggering.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
They're really staggering. Yeah. I tell people that my postdoc
showed me those percentages and I didn't believe them at
first and told him that he must have made a
calculation error, you know. And so, you know, one of
those times where it was great to be wrong, you know,
he came back a month later and it was all right,
and I was wrong and the numbers were right.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So I know that you had very very good results
in the first month, but did you do a follow
up and what was the effect a year later?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So we continue to follow folks out to a year.
We wanted to publish the one month data to get
it out there. There's always an urgency, and so we
were still following folks out to the year at that point,
and so we followed people at the year where that
data's in review now, and almost all the folks that
were looking good at one month but one month held
it out to a year off of a single dose.
(11:58):
And I think that's really important because if you've got
a drug where there's some cardiac rist and people have
to be monitored and it works, you get to go
in once a month to do it, that would be complicated, right,
But if you've got to go in once a year,
once every couple of years, maybe never again, depending upon
the problem, then that all of a sudden becomes really
(12:18):
quite compelling. And that's what we observe that most people
did end up holding it out to a year, and
there are very few compounds that anybody's observed that can
do that.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
And I yeah that it may also have an addition
to traumatic brain injury. There may be other aspects, for
example of being a drug addict, where hypo gain may
actually dramatically shorten the healing time to enable people to
move beyond their addiction. I mean, have you looked at
(12:47):
any of that or is that a different zone.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
No, we've looked at that. So we've looked at trying
to treat alcohol use disorders or alcoholism, and we've seen
great effects with alcohol use disorder in people. They were
pretty heavy drinkers, and that data's going to come out soon.
A lot of them stop drinking, a lot of them
really significantly reduced their drinking. And what people will say,
which is also kind of interesting psychologically, is after this happens,
(13:13):
after they go through all this and it's a couple
weeks out, it re establishes the ability to have kind
of unbiased choice, right, Like, I don't know, are you
a coffee drinker or you gum to or anything speaker.
A lot of us to drink coffee, you know, maybe
we feel highly compelled every morning to drink the coffee.
(13:33):
And it's still a choice, but you're biased towards drinking it, right,
Your brain is kind of more biased to do it
than not do it. That's true for me, maybe true
for you. Most people are coffee drinkers have that experience.
What happens with these guys in the case of whether
it's alcohol or drug, uses are highly biased towards using it.
You know, in some cases they cannot use it, but
(13:55):
the probability that they're not going to use it's truly
low because their brain's so biased to use it. And
so what they'll say is that when they get out
of this, it feels like a completely neutral choice. They
get presented with alcohol and they say, you know what,
I'd rather just go take a job, or I'd rather
go spend some time with my kids, or I'd rather
(14:17):
go and drink a diet coke or whatever, you know.
And that's what's so interesting about this is it allows
people to have that choice, and when you give people
that choice, they tend to take the choice that's actually
a much more healthy one. And so what's really interesting
is most of the guys that did this, in addition
to stopping drinking alcohol, that actually we found they stopped
(14:40):
drinking caffeine drinks, They stop doing a lot of things,
and they just kind of did the sorts of things
that they kind of wanted to do, and so it
really unbiases people's decision making.
Speaker 1 (15:11):
When you were doing your study, you were very aware
of the potential danger of cardiac problems. And as I
understand it, the ibogain was administered in combination with magnesium.
Now why magnesium and why does that reduce the cardiac risk?
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Yeah, that's a great question. So if you go into
the American Heart Association guidelines for something called torsades, which
is this fatal arrhythmia that can be the result of
a lot of things. Drugs that are approved by the FDA,
like a drug called tikasin, and there's also chemo agents
that can interact to this herd potassium channel, and I
(15:51):
begain interacts with this herd potassium channel, so they all
do it. Tikosan, for instance, is monitored in a cardiac
monitoring unit because of this. And so you go in
the American Heart Association guidelines for treating torsodes, what you
see is that the American Heart Association recommends to give
magnesium in the case of torsades once you already have it.
(16:15):
And magnesium is not completely without risk, but it's pretty
low risk. Like as a neurologist, I gave magnesium to
people of various headache conditions in the er, women that
are preeclamptic at magnesium and that kind of period peri childbirth,
and so giving magnesium at these levels, you know, has
some minor minor risk, but really is pretty safe. We
(16:38):
know a lot about it, and so there was this
view that we took on around that if you can
treat the problem with magnesium, then you probably can prophylacts
against it ever happening with giving magnesium before the person
got the drug, and we thought that was a kind
of a unique kind of strategy, right where we're going
(17:00):
to give magnesium before you get the drug and then
we think significantly lower your risk of that arrhythmia. And
we didn't see any torsades in any of our samples,
and we think we have some early data to suggest
that that may be the ticket for dealing with that
particular risk. Now it's an interesting problem, right because, as
(17:24):
I said a minute ago, the FDA has already approved
drugs that actually have more risk for this arrhythmia than
I begame does, but ibans had a harder time getting
through the FDA. And the reason I think that that
has historically happened, although this FDA seems to have a
different kind of positive stance on it, is the risk
benefit assessment of a cardiac drug that also has a
(17:45):
cardiac risk ends up being different than an addiction drug
that has a cardiac risk. And I think that the
veteran's story is an important one for really pushing the
FDA and the government in the field and to seeing, okay,
veterans are killing themselves every year than are dying on
the battlefield.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
It seems to me that one of the and I'm
hoping this is going to change, but that historically one
of the FDA problems has been that they measure the
cost of saying yes, but they don't measure the cost
of saying no. You know, there are people out here
committing suicide, and this has a reasonable chance of minimizing that.
You have to figure out what are the total lives
(18:26):
saved annually versus what's the risk And I don't think
the FDA has any kind of measurement. It's all based
on risk only on the usage side, not based on
the cost of not doing it.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
One hundred percent, You're completely spot on the the risk
is only evaluated in the yes position, not in the
no position. And maybe that's a regulatory change that could
be seen where there was an additional evaluation point on
saying no. From the standpoint of the FDA, but absolutely,
(19:00):
and that's what hurdles you have to kind of get over.
And to your point, whether it be veterans suicide or
opioid overdoses, this is a drug that can actually decrease
the symptoms of detox for opiates right and reduce people's
discomforting going through opia detoks in addition of reducing craving,
(19:23):
the opioid crisis, the veterans suicide crisis. We think this
has great potential for doing that. And the hope is
is that there is a bias and it appears to
be going away around taking on some of this risk
and more of an openness in this FDA around evaluating
in that more holistic way. And so you know, our
(19:44):
fingers are crossed. You know, we have an I ind
and trying to see if the FDA will let us
do our first phase one trial now, and we're optimistic
we can get over that hurdle.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
What percent of the folks who got that dosage never
had any more interest in suicide and what percent found
that they were still depression and in a mode to
potentially commit suicide?
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, I mean, you know, greater than eighty plus percent
of people lost their kind of suicidal thinking and they
held that out through the end of the year. We
had no one in our follow up that actually had
a suicide attempt or died of suicide. In the few
folks that didn't hold it or had a transient improvement,
(20:31):
we're hoping there are other either dozing strategies or other
technologies that can take care of those folks. But just
as a contrast the current treatments that are out there
for PTSD and depression and whatnot, you're talking about at
best twenty percent sort of numbers. It goes down over
time to really take care of these problems, and then
it's not very fast. In contrast, this is kind of
(20:54):
a striking number, But you know, we have more work
to do to really fully answer that question in hundreds
of people and have conclusive kind of final FDA level data.
But the signal that we have now is that it
really holds for a while and reduces that risk for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
So there could be a spectrum effect where some people
once is enough for their lifetime and other people need
to come back in three months or six months.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
That's kind of what we're seeing, is that a lot
of veterans will tell me they'll go back once a
year kind of thing for a couple of years, and
then they don't need to do it anymore. There may
be a few folks, to your point, that need to
come back more frequently, but the bulk of folks tend
to hold it to a year, which is great.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Your participants actually went to a clinic in Baja California
run by Ambio Life Sciences. What is Ambio Life Sciences.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
There's a number of I Begain clinics that exist outside
of the US, so Ambo is one of them. There
are others that's specialized in administering I begain. Because I
Began doesn't hold an illegal status in Mexico, you know,
it can be administered as a medical treatment in Mexico. Historically,
that's been true for Canada, it's true for Australia and
(22:12):
New Zealand and I think half of the European countries. Right,
the definition of a controlled substance requires that there's an
abuse liability risk, and that's an important part of understanding
I Began is that there's not a single case report
in the literature of anybody with an I Began adviction,
right and that's really important to understand is that this
(22:33):
drug itself. You don't start taking this and stop taking
another drug. But when you start taking this, now, all
of a sudden, you have a new addiction. Right, That's
not what this does. Like you take this. Once people
get off of the compound, they don't really tend to
take I began again. It's not that pleasurable to do so.
And so because of that, you've got scenarios where people
(22:55):
will come into clinics in Mexico or wherever it is,
do a single administration I began, get off of opiates
or better from their PTSD or whatever it is, and
go back home. And our data that we haven't published
yet we've published SIN shows that they get a year
of benefit from a single dose. And so people typically
for Ambia will fly into San Diego, take a van
(23:18):
to Tijuana, go to a nice kind of treatment facility
there and get treated and go back to San Diego.
So Brett Favre, the NFL player, as I understand it,
just did this and has come out and said publicly
that he's had this experience. And so there's a number
of people that have gone down and done this sort
of trip. The real tragedy. I think of all of
(23:40):
this is just that we have these veterans. So we're
trying to rectify that by having at least studies and
hopefully eventually treatment if everything works out and the studies
are positive. In the US, do you have.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Any sense from Congress of a willingness to put pressure
on the FDA about this.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
I've met with a number of people, some of whom
are currently sitting Congressmen, many of whom are Republican House
representative members in Texas for instance, who are very supportive
of this, as well as former folks, and I think
there's definitely support. What I've heard, and you know better
(24:20):
than anybody around this question is like modifying the Controlled
Substances Act. It's going to be very hard to do.
And part of what has to happen, because it's a
DEA issue, is around how do you get to somebody
like Pambondi and have the conversation around downscheduling these compounds right,
(24:41):
Because there's an approval process that has to happen, there's
also a downscheduling process that has to happen because as
it stands right now, I began as a schedule one
substance like all the other psychedelics, and as you know,
the definition of that is abuse liability, which isn't true
no medicinal u use. And so in order for it
(25:02):
to become a treatment, it has to be down scheduled
off of one, so that we're now saying this does
have medicinal use. As you know, even cocaine is an
unscheduled one. Cocaine's considered schedule two because the dentists will
use it the nts, and so I began sits like
(25:22):
a more restricted status than cocaine.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
I think your study is going to be a major
step towards people like Secretary Kennedy putting real pressure to
make it available in this country. Let me ask you
one of the questions about the risk side. When you
think about the number of people who might be helped
by hypergain, how serious, in your judgment, is the cardiac challenge,
(25:48):
and to what degree does the magnesium eliminate or minimize
that risk.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
I'm not aware of anybody that's had full blown torsades
when they got prophylactic magnesium. I'm always asking, but that
seems to be something that really risk mitigates. When I
went to the head of cardiac electric physiology at Stanford
and others, and people that ran that in the University
of Colorado and others. What they told me is they said, hey, look,
(26:14):
we have this drug, Tikisan, we use it all the time.
It's got more risks than I begain. We give it
in a cardiac monitoring unit. A lot of these deaths
that happened in these arrhythm as, it happened early twenty
years ago and whatnot. It all happened when people were
getting this administered to them in hotel rooms, you know,
(26:35):
in various places because people are really addicted. There wasn't
another way to do this. You couldn't get it in
the US. This is the only way to kind of
get off of heroin or whatever it was. So they
were willing to take that risk. But the reality is
is that we're not going to be doing that in
the US, right We're going to be giving this in
a cardiac monitoring unit, and we're going to have a
(26:55):
lot of tools on our tool belt, just like cardiologists
do for tikasan to be able to deal with it.
And because of that, it's really not any more of
a risk than the FDA approved drugs for cardiac rhythmias,
and the cardiologists would be heavily involved in these administrations.
When you talk to them about it, they're like, yeah,
you know, there's a risk, but you know, we would
(27:16):
just put people in our unit and we would monitor
and manage the risk. And we needed to do something,
we would do something about it, you know. And so
I think it's about medicalizing this and within a legitimate
medical setting and really thinking about this as a medical
intervention within the US healthcare system. And if you think
(27:36):
in those terms, and we get to that point, and
I think it's a consideration when you're talking to a patient,
and it's always a consideration as the doctor, but it's
the like healthcare policy level. It shouldn't be something that
gets in the way. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1 (28:10):
If EYB again turns out to have the variety of
capabilities that we have some at least glimmerings of its
effect both on the quality of life, the relative health
of patients, and the fiscal impact is going to be staggering.
This could be one of the great breakthroughs of the
next ten or fifteen years.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
That's what we feel. I mean, I don't think, you know,
I've said this publicly before. I'm not aware of a
brain acting compound that is this sophisticated or this broad spectrum.
And you know, you think about antibiotics and you have
these broad spectrum antibiotics that can take care of all
sorts of different bacteria or whatever. I mean, this is
a really broad spectrum. The data that we have right
(28:54):
now suggests it's a really broad brain drug, kind of
brain plasticity drug.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Let me go back for a second because it hit me.
Governor Habit of Texas signed a law just in June
of this year, June eleventh of twenty twenty five to
establish serious clinical trials to what excent are they going
to be hampered by? The degree to which I begin
is currently a Schedule one status.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
You can do Schedule one studies in the US right now.
There have been a number of them with other psychedelics
like psilocybin and whatnot, and so there's a lot of hurles.
You have to have a safe and weigh it every
day and all that stuff. But people can do that.
That's fine. You can still get there. And that's our
current investigation in new drug application sitting in the FDA
(29:43):
right now, takes all that into account. But to your point,
to really study this and to get researchers more enthused
to do it, if it could be down scheduled down
to two or three, then you don't need to safe
pharmacies can administer it and it would make research a
whole heck of a lot easier. Now, if that didn't happen,
(30:06):
would you still be able to do the research? Absolutely,
that fifty million is going to go towards good work
and all that good stuff. What you have to do
to do a schedule one study is you have to
install a safe and a key card reader, all this stuff.
You have to have a DEA agent come out and
look at your safe. It's quite a journey, but you know,
we're on board for that.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
I think we need a much higher sense of urgency
about certain kinds of breakthroughs. And I'm thinking, like from
the Veterans Administration, the scale of what they deal with
in areas that are potentially directly affected and improved by
IBA game, it really should be a national project to
make sure how to use it, to make sure that
(30:46):
it's safe, but then to get it very widely available
throughout the entire Veterans administration program.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
Oh absolutely. We've been trying to have those initial conversations
and really try to find inroads into talking with folks
in the current VA. I've had some discussions with former
administration kind of officials from the VA with enthusiasm, you know.
I think that there's a certain hot potato that happens
(31:15):
with some of this stuff where somebody has to hold it,
you know, and so we're happy to kind of hold
it and get enough of the ball rolling so that
there's some momentum. And then my senses is that once
there's enough of a snowball effect, to your point, then
the VA is going to really pick this up and
run with it. That's really my hope. I met with
folks early on at the VA and showed them the
(31:36):
data a couple of years ago, some of the senior
doctors there, and they all seem very enthused. And so
it's just in my view of matter of time but
continuing to do the good work.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
Where are the major veterans organizations on ibogame.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
They're very positive, you know, and I've talked to some
folks from DD two and so they're very positive. But
I think everybody is in the kind of wait and see.
And that's why I think what Governor Perry's you know,
work in Texas and now in other states, why that's
so important, Because I think that getting some momentum going
(32:12):
and then being able to go back once we have
a big completed trial where we can go and say,
look like, we do this in two hundred veterans, and
it separates really nicely from hopefully I'm speculating right now,
but if everything goes well, it separates really nice from
the placebo pill and it looks like it's very real.
We want to get this through the FDA, and we
(32:33):
want the VA to take it up and run with
it as soon as we do.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
What you're doing is really really important for literally millions
of people.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
I'm very impressed. Frankly, this was exactly the conversation I
was hoping we were going to have after our introductory
conversation about IBA game. I want to thank you for
joining me and giving us your medical assessment on ibgame treatments.
And I want to let our listeners know they can
find the study you conducted, which was published in Nature
(33:03):
Medicine at Nature dot com, and they can also read
more about it by visiting med dot Stanford dot edu.
And you're really doing very important work, doctor Williams. And
I'm very grateful that you would take this time to
share with us.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, thank you so much, speaker, and happy to chat anytime,
and thank you for your interests. So have a great tek.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Thank you to my guest, doctor Nolan Williams. You can
learn more about the Stanford Study and ibigain on our
show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Gagish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.
Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
(33:47):
at Gingerish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us
with five stars and give us a review so others
can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
Newtsworld can say for my three free weekly columns at
gingrishpe sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This
is Nutsworld.
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