December 10, 2015 • 40 mins
In the form of recreational ecstasy, the psychoactive drug MDMA carries with it a stigma of wide-eyed ravers, free love and counterculture pharmacological spirituality. But beyond its cultural legacy, MDMA offers a potent therapeutic tool for doctors and therapists -- if we can only unravel its mysteries. Join Robert and Christian for a look at past and current studies into the healing properties of this powerful substance.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your Mind from housetop work
dot com. Hey, wasn't discussedable in your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. So we are
in part two of our M d M A Spectacular,
and the last episode we talked primarily about what M
(00:24):
d M A is, when it was invented, who invented it,
and what its physical effects on the body are, right yeah. Uh,
And so if you haven't listened to that and you
want a little bit more background, I recommend that you
go back and listen to it. But what we're gonna
focus on here today is primarily how it's being used
in studies, or how it's been used really for the
last thirty or forty years, uh, in studies on how
(00:46):
to treat people for various things from everything from mental
problems to PTSD to cancer. Yeah, and uh, as as
we set up in the last episode, you're basically dealing
with two different phases, right. So the such stence is uh,
his first sin the size and the early twentieth century.
It's not until uh, generally the what the sixties, seventies
and eighties that you see it used therapeutically, you see
(01:09):
people experimenting with its, uh, the potential potential benefits outside
of a recreational environment. But then it becomes enemy number one, right,
it becomes caught up in the culture episode. It was
immediately placed on like the most restrictive drug list, so
scientists couldn't even use it in their labs to study its.
(01:30):
And this goes for various psychedelics as well, such as
a psilocybin. But then in recent years, we've seen a resurgence.
You've seen you've seen psilocybin, you've seen in d m A,
all these substance coming back into the lab and uh
and and professionals are able to actually explore them some more,
look at these undeniably potent, powerful substances and say what
(01:52):
what he or can we use? What can we change? What?
What can we just try to to use in a
proper environment, and and out of it all generate some
sort of positive effect. Yeah. And so before we get
into the real, you know, boiled down details about this,
I want to remind everybody that the podcast isn't the
only way that you can, you know, interact with us
(02:13):
or see the things that we're looking at. This week.
We also are always writing on stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. There's galleries, there's articles. At least once
or twice a week we're putting stuff up there, and
videos as well. So there's all the old stuff to
blow your own videos. But Robert, for instance, is currently
working on the How Stuff Works Now series and as
(02:34):
much as possible we try to share those videos as well. Uh,
and they're very stuff to blow your mind related topics, right, yeah, yeah,
very much, weird science that sort of thing. And hey, uh,
I know a lot of you listen to us on
various aggregated programs, various apps and whatnot, but but there
are certainly iTunes users out there getting us on iTunes
(02:55):
and listen us to listening to us on your iPhones.
If you get us through iTunes, show us some love
there helped the algorithm and that's a great way to
support the show without spending a dime. So all right,
let's get into the pharmacological healing properties of m d
M A and this brings us back to Sholgun. Yeah,
so Alexander Shulgan, who we talked a lot about in
the last episode, also known as Sasha Shulgin, the godfather
(03:17):
of ecstasy. UH was also primarily responsible for bringing to
the psychological community uh in in particular UM his wife Anne.
My understanding was that she was a therapist and she
used M d m A and some of her therapy
sessions with her patients. But he also UH introduced it
(03:39):
to a guy named Leo Zef in ninety seven who
started using it in psychotherapy and introduced other therapists to it.
And so my understanding is that there is this kind
of underground network of therapists who were using it in
their research and in their studies. And this is before
it was tremendously legal. Yes, obviously it U One of
the areas you see mentioned a lot is it's used
(04:00):
in couples therapy. Because ultimately, as as we try to
drive home in the last episode, this idea that M
D m A and ecstasy produce, this feeling of ecstasy
is is a bitness leading. It's more empathy and sympathy.
It's more a feeling of openness. Again, I like to
think of it as the self becomes permeable to the world,
(04:21):
and so it it's able to improve emotional communication skills.
So that was a boost empathy. So This is where
psychotherapist would use it to say, you have two individuals
that they're having marital problems, they're having communication problems, they
have all this stuff bottle up inside. Well than in
these cases, perhaps m d m A can be used
(04:41):
to open the two up to get them to talk
about things that they're not talking about. So it's not
a situation where like you're having marital problems, take two
of these and commy in the morning. It's like, let's
let's have a rap session and let's take this. You
will take this first, and this will enable the sort
of open communication we need. Yeah, I can't ephasize this enough.
(05:01):
For all of these psychotherapeutic uses that we're talking about here,
they have to go hand in hand with actual sit
down in the chair, talk to a therapist counseling. Right.
It's not like you just take the m d m
A and call them in the morning. Right Like as
we just said, it's it's got to be in conjunction
with building trust with somebody that you can talk to
objectively about whatever the issues. It's the m d m
(05:23):
A assisted psychotherapy, not psychotherapy assisted m d m A usage.
And and we'll get into this more, especially with the
PTSD stuff. But basically what it does, the argument is
is that it allows you to increase your trust for
people if you have trouble trusting people, and it reduces
your fear and anxiety levels. So it's particularly good as
(05:44):
I you know, as you just mentioned, for something like
couples therapy where there's communication issues, if you have fear
of not communicating something or you need to trust your
partner more. That that's where the idea lies in its usage.
So yeah, it was being used as early as the
seventies and you know, probably up until the mid eighties,
right around the time that it was made illegal in
(06:05):
the United States. Uh, but you know that that was
primarily like an underground thing. It wasn't like it wasn't
like a man dated. It wasn't like in the D
S M for or whatever came out in the seventies, right,
and so, uh, it wasn't until a more modern time really,
right around the two thousands, I want to say, where
(06:27):
we started seeing m d m as show up again
in psychotherapy trials. That's right. And uh, the primary player
here is an organization known as MAPS that's Multidisciplinary Association
for psychedelic studies, and they're they're concerned not just with
m d m A, but with psilocybin other substances um.
And they continue to explore quote whether m d m
(06:50):
A assisted psychotherapy can help heal the psychological and emotional
damage caused bi sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas.
So this is this is one of the huge areas
of exploration here. And oh and just to give a
little more background on maps UM there, it's as they
are operating in several different countries I think five right now, Canada, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, Israel,
(07:15):
and in the US. Yeah, there are trials being done
in the US. And I think I mentioned this at
the end of last episode, but it bears repeating here.
It is super expensive to research system. Not only because
of all of the restrictions that have to be placed
on the facilities in which you are holding the m
d m A for these trials, right, Like you have
to build like like super like heavy door frames, right
(07:37):
or like security systems that you normally wouldn't have for
these places. But the medical grade m d m A
is also quite expensive. It can cost up to a
hundred and seventy dollars or seventy five dollars per dose.
So and that's like, as we were saying last episode,
one dose is like a hundred, two hundred and fifty milligrams. Yeah. Again,
(07:58):
think back to the fact that one of the reasons
that it was shell for so long is that it
was expensive to study. So even in the you know,
the early twentieth century German chemicists looked at it and uh,
and they realized, oh, it has some sort of interesting properties,
but who has the budget to explore it. So before
we dive deeper down to the psychotherapy thing, I think
an interesting way to approach this is to add the
(08:20):
criticisms up first, so then as we go through it,
we can sort of say, okay, we're those criticisms valid
or not. Uh. And in the research, one of the
major m d m A researchers who's published a lot
of literature on this is a guy named Andy Parrott,
who's i believe, out of the University of Swansea, and he,
you know, has done a great paper that's on sort
(08:40):
of just the the general twenty five years of empirical
history of chemistry, right that the chemistry behind m DM
UM but he does acknowledge that there's been some criticism, uh,
and mainly that it's not safe for clinical use. Uh.
And some proponents say that it needs to be used
repeatedly for more than one or two sessions or otherwise
it won't produce gains in those situations, right. Uh. And
(09:04):
remember from the last episode, m d M AS effects
are short lived, and uh, it doesn't exactly work like that.
You know, as we said before, there's a chronic decline
over time. The more you use it, the less positive
effects are and the more the negative effects are. So
there's some concern about that with the tolerance levels. But
there's also acute effects of m d M A that
(09:26):
are unpredictable, which we talked about as well last time.
They can both be positive or negative, right like that,
for instance, that there's both positive and negative emotional responses,
or or that there's some undesirable experiences during the sessions,
and sometimes these undesirable experiences can last up to two
weeks long. So that's kind of parrots argument is, you know,
(09:47):
let's let's stop before we do this. But uh, there's
also the idea of the neurochemical depletion the serotonin. Uh,
and can lead to feelings of depression, anger, and paranoia anyways. Uh,
and it's especially bad for those who have pre existing depression,
and it could even predispose people who like, for instance,
(10:07):
we're already depressed but had um you know, dealt with
that issue, to a recurrence of their previous psychological disability.
So these are all of his essential like criticisms of
I don't know that we're quite there yet for the
psychotherapy thing. And he presents us with two scenarios in
which he thinks that that this isn't going to particularly
(10:29):
work out. And I'll read through the first one and
we can respond to these as we go through the
benefits of the psychotherapy and see if see if his
criticisms are right. Yeah. So if we don't launch into
picking them apart right away, understand it, that's the reason. Yeah. Okay, So, parents,
first scenario is that you have a special Air Force
soldier who's discharged from the army because he has PTSD
(10:51):
post traumatic stress disorder. His therapist says, let's try this
m d M A assisted therapy. Oh, but the drug
stimulates the re emergence of the soldier's unpleasant war experiences,
and this includes feelings of aggression, the soldiers trying to
control these while he's at the clinic. However, later that evening,
this is the scenario, mind you, he violently attacks a
stranger in the street. Following his arrest, his lawyer argues
(11:15):
that this aggressive act has been triggered by the m
d m A assisted therapy session. So okay, so so sorry.
Parrot is basically saying, Okay, this guy could potentially go
out in assault somebody due to the negative feelings that
get dredged up by this therapy induced m d m
A session. Okay, I have so many responses to that.
Stick clear for a minute, a right. The second scenario
(11:37):
that he lays up is called involves a hypothetical case
of a female rape victim UH. He says. After the
first m DM assisted therapy session, the client feels much better,
but the games do not injure over time. Following a
second UH session, this m d m A assisted again.
There's a brief period of of relief, and then a
third session is requested, but the therapist explains that she
(12:00):
can't clinically recommend it to the client. Now Quote seeks
out their own illicit supplies of ecstasy slash m d
m A. The only time she feels good is when
she is on m d m A, and she becomes
an habitual user. However, with reducing efficiency and increasing midweek blues,
her chronic anxiety, depression, and low self esteem steadily worsens.
(12:21):
Mm hmm, yeah, so I don't know. I mean, that
seems counterintuitive even in and of itself, right, and the
idea that this person would become a habitual user given
what we know from Parrot's own discourse about m d
m A and that most people don't use it more
than ten times. Everything we discussed in the first episode
seems to to poke holes in that argument and a
(12:43):
lot of the research for that game parrots own writings.
So I'm not quite sure about this, but let's let's
see if it matches up as we go along. Okay, Now,
this is something that ties into a criticism of scenario one,
but also just important to to look at going forward
is that when it comes to the treatment of p
E s D, there is and there is an urgent
need for better treatment methods. So this is just this
(13:05):
isn't just a situation of a bunch of scientists or
even an organization saying hey, we've got to find a
way to make m d M a practical This is
not what you Harrelson wearing a hip jacket around, right.
This is this is here a professional saying, hey, we
need a better tool here, we need better methods, and
we need need better drugs to help these individuals. There's
(13:28):
a potential answer here, let's explore it. So to piggyback
on top of that, I think it's important that we
sort of just quickly prime and established what PTSD. It's, right, Like,
it's a term a lot of us throw around, and
I've heard people say before like, oh I have PTSD,
you know, And uh, this is what PTSD is. Uh.
It is a manifestation of trauma physically in your body.
(13:49):
It's common in victims of war and abuse. It involves shaking, sweating, crumbling, anxiety,
and flashbacks. And basically what we're looking at here is
the psychological scars having physical repercussions. Right, So they're physically
affecting a person's body. So that's what we're talking about
here for treatment is being able to get get them
(14:11):
to integrate past that physical trauma rather mental trauma manifesting
physically So here a couple of quick points that come
directly from MAPS about m d m A assisted psychotherapy.
They said, they say an Indie may assisted psychotherapy India
is only administered a few times, unlike most medications for
mental illnesses, which are often taken daily for years and
(14:35):
sometimes forever. UH and MAPS is undertaking a roughly twenty
million dollar plan to make m d m A into
a Food and Drug Administration approved prescription medicine by one
now Here are just a few up pointers as well
that come from Ingrid Pacy, who I mentioned earlier. There's
(14:56):
a fabulous bit with her on the CBC Radio Ideas
again their three part series A High Culture, which I
highly recommend for anyone who's interested in just the overall
uh re emergence of psychedelic research over the past a
few decades and in some of the you know, the
the the concerns they're in. But Ingrid Percy is a psychiatrist.
(15:18):
She's a lead investigator of MBAM a assisted therapy for
treatment resistant post traumatic stress disorder at the University of
British Columbia. So she points out that from phase one
studies around the world, we know that m d m
A seems to lower fear, particularly for treatment resistant PTSD,
creating a window. And it's interesting she says window because
(15:39):
because Hulkin references a window at that I believe was
the hundred neogram creates a window during which the trauma
can be considered and discussed without the associated fear getting
in the way. So it's about sort of allowing the
monster to come out so you can look at it
and deal with it and and and perhaps exercise it right.
(15:59):
According to pay see M d M. A psychotherapy usually
begins with feelings of relaxation, easing of muscles, and among
PTSD patients you often see the flashes of the past
trauma that then emerge, and it can even be a
strong bodily experience. So we mentioned this in the last
episode about how how taking ecstasy can produce uh, these
(16:20):
very strong negative feelings can can pull those out of
an interet. So that's where I assume Parrot is getting
his scenario to of which the soldiers experienced such a
negative emotions being recalled Yeah, and that but that that
what where I can't I'm having difficulty following him is
the logical extension of that to going out and assaulting
(16:42):
a person on the street, right, because he's saying, well,
you're gonna pull You're gonna pull the monster out of
the closet, and then the monster could win. Well, yeah,
but part of what are you gonna do? Just leave
it in the closet. I mean, the idea here is
we've got to we've got to face these traumatic experiences, right,
and that m D MAY assisted psychotherapy can potentially allow
us to do so in a safer way with reduced
(17:04):
fear um and and during all of this, the therapist
or monitoring vital signs. Uh uh. Really, it's kind of
the best case scenario to be doing m d m
A in right, because you're not like like we talked
about last episode, like the some of the bad side
effects like the overheating or the chewing on your teeth,
(17:24):
running about music. Yeah, all of that kind of stems
out of the dance culture, not because of the drug,
but because of the environment that you're in. Right. Yeah,
So you know this is again it's about using it
therapeutically with a therapist, using it as a way to
open that window, to to gain access to things that
are normally going to be too too buried, or or
(17:44):
to fear ridden to tackle and this is this is
really key here. Again. One of the major issues is
that there we need better tools, we need better medications
to treat PTSD. And according to two percy um, you
see about a thirty percent UH success rate for conventional
multi year PTSD therapy, but so far with the m
(18:08):
d m A PTSD therapy you've seen they've seen an
eight five percent success rate. Wow, okay, well that backs
up some of the other stuff that I read, which
said that there were significant gains found on there's a
there's a scale that's used to measure somebody's level of PTSD.
It's called the PTSD scale. And after using that UH,
after using m d m A in therapy, using the
(18:30):
PTSD scale, they found that there were great gains over time.
And in fact, when they did placebo trials telling people
that they were doing m d m A when they weren't,
they found less gains. So the the evidence does seem
to show that this works. Um. It also, you know,
the aim here is is to help these people with
(18:51):
their debilitating symptoms. It's it's when they haven't responded to
other therapies, and it's this isn't like oh, let's just
try this. You know, this is this is a such
watrotion where it's resistant to the last resort. Yeah. Uh,
you know, the other treatments are anything from talking to
exposure therapy, to the things that cause the PTSD to
all these daily medications that we could be using. Uh.
(19:14):
One therapist says that they think that it works because
of m d M as unique properties. And we talked
about this last time. It's both a stimulant and a psychedelic, right,
so they said, quote, the stimulant gives people confidence and
the psychedelic allows people to reflect on themselves and their
experiences in a different way. This combination helps them confront
painful memories. And then in two thousand nine there was
(19:35):
an article by a Norwegian psychologist named I Believe this
is paliurine Yo Hansen, and he argued that it works
through several mechanisms. Basically, the m d M A is
increasing the levels of oxytocin in your body and this
is the we call it the cuttle chemical. Um. I
think you guys might have talked about this previously on
the episode it's released during breastfeeding, not in the episode
(19:59):
on the show and Stuff to Blow your mind at
five years one of yeah, the most frequently mentioned uh
properties of the body. I feel. So it increases our
oxytocin and what that does It prevents the brain's emotional
processing center from overpowering our higher thoughts. So it quells
fear and it encourages trust, just like we were talking
about earlier. So, um, you know we mentioned m d
(20:23):
m A has to occur in conjunction with psychotherapy. You
aren't just taking m d m A. And it's not
like you immediately go into therapy and you're taking m
d m A with the therapist. You need to establish
trust with this therapist through a series of sober sessions
before you do these m d m A sessions. And
usually at the most I think it's like three sessions,
which kind of makes sense along the lines of what
(20:45):
we know about people taking m d m A, its
effects and their efficacy. But then also, you know this
uh contradicts. I want to say, parents first example of
the potential uh subject where this wouldn't work for them, right,
and that they've become sorry it was their second example
where the girl becomes an addict, right, Um, so they
(21:09):
only use it for three sessions at the most. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and we come back.
We're gonna we're gonna roll through some other potential uses
of m d m A as a cancer fighting agent.
Uh is potential uh aid in in couples therapy and
even away to ease an individual uh to the death point.
(21:36):
All Right, we're back. So we set up for this
a little bit in the in the previous episode. The
potential for for e m d M A to help
us fight cancer, which is this is one of the
This is an area of m d m A research
that is uh, it kind of stands apart from the
rest because it's so it's not attached to the most
apparent properties of the drug. Right. In fact, so funny. Sorry.
(21:59):
Yesterday was getting my hair cut and as the first
time I was getting my haircut by this particular hairdresser.
She asked me what I did for a living and
what I was working on right now, and I told
her was researching m d M UH and and she said, oh,
that's fascinating. And I said it can be used to
help people with cancer. And her immediate thought was, oh, yeah,
that makes sense, Like if they're in pain, it would
make them feel happy, And I was like, oh no,
(22:21):
I mean, yes, there are instances where they've been using
it therapeutically that way, but no, Like, let's recap from
last episode, there's that apotosis effect in which programs cell
death actually attacks the cells in your liver and retina
when you take M D M A. Uh so let's
remember that that's what they're using here to try to
(22:42):
take take cancer out there, trying to kill the cells
and cancer. It's not just as like a you know,
sort of like a pain reducer kind of thing. Yeah.
So we've known since around two thousand six that actual
c M D M A and antidepressants such as prozac
have the potential to stop cancer cell the catches. Then,
in order to kill the cells, who have to drop
(23:03):
an absurd amount of ecstasy, as in a highly lethal dose. Um. Like,
just to refresh, we were talking in the previous episode
about how you're talking about, uh, the average dose being
in in then like a hundred hundred and right, and
if you get into one or one point five grams,
you're getting into into a deadly amount, potentially deadly amount.
(23:25):
So in two thousand eleven, researchers from the University of
Birmingham and the University of Western Australia UM looked into this.
They were they were basically looking to ways at ways
to tweak ecstasy, UH, to tweak m d m A
at the atomic level, swapping out some of the atoms
in its chemical composition to increase its cancer fighting power
by a factor of a hundred. So to put that
(23:47):
in perspective, that means that you could have a single
tablet of modified ecstasy, they would have as much cancer
fighting power as a hundred tablets without boosting the unwanted
effects of the drug. So, because because the amount of
this is my understanding, the amount of m d m
A needed to start attacking the cancer cells is like
(24:07):
a hundred grams, right, and so to that would totally
kill you. Yeah. Yeah, that's like a hundred times as
much as would be a hundred times a very strong dosage. Yeah,
So they need to make it more powerful so you
can take less of it to attack the cancer but
not have the negative side. Yeah, So basically taking the
synthetic substance and tweaking it even more to encourage the
(24:30):
properties you need and discourage the properties that are going
to kill the patient. And this is exactly the kind
of thing that Alexander Shulgin would have promoted and wanted
I think his his his studies of these psychedelic compounds
to be used for going forward, you know, I mean,
his hope was that they would be studied educationally so
(24:51):
that we could find these kinds of uses for the Yeah, exactly,
to go back to the road map scenario, it's saying, hey,
there's this road and h you didn't know it, but
there's a little turn here to the left, and it
leads to a potential cure for cancer. So when you
get into exactly how this works, uh, you really get
bogged down rather quickly in the chemical and biochemical details.
(25:13):
But the basic explanation, as a rolled out in that
paper is the theory behind it is the drug is
attracted to the fat in the membranes of cancerous cells
and it makes the cells quote a bit more soapy,
which can break down the membrane and kill the cell. Unfortunately,
cancerous cells are more susceptible. So again they hope to
(25:38):
hope to refine this. Uh. Last the most recent stat
I saw was there hoping to make it possible by
one but again that was that that that was when
they were rolling up in that particular, and it said
they thought they're about a decade away. I'm curious where
they're at with it right now as Yeah, hopefully we'll
get an update, uh in the near future. Yeah, I
(26:00):
wouldn't be surprised if we see something come out in
the next year or so. Yeah. So yeah, so all right,
we've covered PTSD cancer. What else can we use this for. Well,
we already mentioned couples therapy and about how it was
rolled out with apparently some level of success in the eighties.
But there's actually a two thousand fifteen study that was
published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and they set out
(26:22):
to examine how m d m A might be used
to improve communication about a spouse in therapy. So this
is interesting. It seems to be the key key here.
That's not about as much about oh here you both
take m DMAIN will also together, but it's about getting
an individual to share their own feelings and open up
about what's bothering them. So yeah, I could imagine based
(26:43):
on the stereotypes surrounding m D m A again, people
hearing this and going oh okay, so they take ecstasy
and it makes them want to have sex, which would
subsequently they want to love each other. They feel more open,
they feel more sympathetic. That's not again ecstasy is a misnomer. Uh.
And this isn't all sexual. This is more about communication. Yeah,
(27:04):
and you know, I do have to say that, you know,
it's it's it's totally believable that you would have two
individuals who have a connection with each other while they're
on m d M A and then afterwards they realize, well,
as my normal self even with the inside of what
I had conversing with this individual, I no longer feel
that connection. But again, this entails the therapist being present
(27:25):
and using the information that you bring forth. So yeah, right,
we don't recommend that like couples just do this in
their kitchen together. Yeah, certainly not the kitchen. Um. So,
so we've discussed m duma's ability to increase sociability. The
drug alter speech production and fluency as well and U
and according to the study, it may influence speech content.
So what they did is they rounded up thirty five
(27:47):
healthy individuals with prior in m d M A experience
UH completed UM two session with UH within subjects double
blind study during which they received one point five milligrams
of oral m d m A, and they also had
a tiny that's a very small amount, one point five
that is, so then they would after the the substance
(28:11):
had taken hold um whatever limited hold it would have.
Given the dosage, they engaged in five minutes standardized talking
tasks during which they discussed a close personal relationship, and
they found that both analytic methods that they employed revealed
that m d m A altered speech content relative to
pill see about the drug, increased use of social and
(28:32):
sexual words, consistent with reports that m d m A
increases willingness to disclose. Okay, so that lines up with
what we know from the PTSD thing, right, It makes
me trust people, it makes you, you know, you're more permeable,
yourself is more permeable. And using the machine learning algorithm,
the Receichers researchers found that m d m A increased
use of social words and words relating to both positive
(28:55):
and negative emotions. So, in other words, it helped them
open up about how they felt about the other individual,
what the problems might be. And and that is why
it seems like you could be very useful in m
DM assisted psychotherapy. So I guess like the big problem
here though, is how illegal it still is, and that
(29:16):
it's really difficult to conduct trials like this, especially in
a place like the United States. Right. So, but some
of the articles that I was reading about both the
PTSD thing and the cancer studies were saying that they
think that that there's going to be m d M
A approved by the FDA, the Federal Drug Administration again,
like maybe in the next ten years or so. Yeah,
(29:37):
and it seems like the same prognosis with Canadian law.
This is just me here, but my my worry here
is that what happens when this gets beyond peer reviewed publications,
science journalism and uh and you know in radio programs
and podcast what happens when this becomes a political football
and we have individuals saying, oh, well, you're about to
(30:00):
allow our psychotherapists to start giving ecstasy to people. What happens? Then?
It kind of reminds me of another stuff to blow
your mind related thing, when you did that video last
week about the god helmet, and there's a lot of
response on social media when we posted that video, I
got the impression that a lot of people just read
the headline and didn't watch the video, but they are
(30:20):
basically if give a primer on what the god helmet is, well,
this was basically we're talking about cranial electromagnetic stimulation affecting
various portions of the brain, if very basically turning things
in your brain on and off in order to see
how they affect. Electrical stimulation. Slide electrical stimulation to see
how it affects your experience of reality, right, and uh,
(30:43):
there was some research involving this that's saying that you know,
by changing the way that you perceive reality, it might
be able to help people overcome racism, for instance, right. Uh.
And the responses to that on our our social media channels,
a lot of people were very angry because they saw
that as kind of like mind control, right, almost like
in a fascist kind of sense. So I could see
the same thing happening with M D m A. Right,
(31:05):
It's like, oh, these these therapists, you know, they're the
activist therapists are going to try to reprogram our brains,
so we're just like them. Well, I mean the thing
is that both of these situations, whether you're talking about
you know, electrical stimulation of the brain, or pharmacological stimulation
of the brain. You're dealing with a psychedelic effect. You know,
(31:26):
you're you're taking your normal consciousness experience and you're tweaking
it a bit. You're changing and you're changing your perception
of self uh and reality in at least a very
limited way. And that that can be frightening, that can
be illuminating, And that's that's the whole that's psychedelia as
a whole door for a lot of experiences, and a
(31:48):
lot of them think of it like sort of along
the lines of um drawings. Okay, so let's say like
you're looking at a drawing, and if you know what
one point perspective is, it's kind of how Wes Anderson
shoots a lot of his cookies, right, Like, you've got
a center point and everything stems out of that center
point coming at you. But then you can switch to
two point perspective or three point perspective, where you're looking
(32:09):
at multiple angles, or you're looking up or down from
like a skyscraper or something like that, right, And that's
like a very basic metaphor for what's going on here.
It's just changing the perspective with which you can look
at the world with yeah, one might be heard to
say something along the lines of, I've never thought about
myself that way before. I've never thought about uh, this
(32:31):
individual in this particular way before. And again, this isn't
us condoning like go out and do m d m
A right now, or us saying don't do m d
m A right It's it's neither of those things. But
I do think that it's interesting within a restrictive environment
using it in conjunction with therapy, and especially uh, you know,
in a clinic like this, where there's somebody on hand
(32:53):
in case like you have a bad reaction or whatever, right,
rather than being in a farm in the middle of
the woods where there's a secret a coming on. Now.
The final example of m d m A therapy and
m d m A research that we want to mention
here is the possibility of using m d M A
to treat individuals who are having a hard time with
(33:16):
with their with their impending death, with with with fatal
life you know, fatal conditions, life threatening illnesses, uh as
they approach the death point. And there have been some
other studies that involve psilocybin and it's use magic mushrooms
psilocybin as as a way to help people deal with
(33:37):
that scenario. It's not just the pain we're talking about here, right,
We're talking just gravity of understanding your yeah, thinking about yourself,
and the grappling with mortality and the basic heavy human stuff.
So the the main individual here is uh San and
sell Most psychiatrist Phil Wolfson, and he's currently studying the
use of m d m A assisted psychotherapy to ease
(34:00):
anxiety in eighteen adults diagnosed with life threatening illnesses. Now,
all of these individuals have a prognosis life expectancy of
at least nine months there can they currently have severe
anxiety related to life threatening illness. So his goal here
is to see whether patients suffering from crippling anxiety, fear,
or depression over a terminal diagnosis can confine relative peace
(34:23):
via in d m A assisted psychotherapy sessions. So it's
kind of the same scenario we've talked about with these
previous psychotherapy examples, helping them open up about what's happening,
help them gain a little perspective on what's happening, and
in doing so, perhaps find a place of peace. Right,
see it from a different angle, one with less fear. Yeah,
(34:45):
but again, Wilson's study is just getting off the ground here.
UM just started up this year, so hopefully we'll we'll
hear more of the details in the years to come.
Uh And you know, some of the core findings, and
there's clearly got to be a lot of more research
done in all of these areas before we're just doing this,
you know, casually, especially in the sense of like predicting
(35:08):
that the f d A is going to approve m
d M A for these public use. And I think,
I mean casual is a good thing to mention because
I think the underlying truth here is that it's such
a potent and powerful substance that it should never never
be done casually. Like I would argue that even in
a recreational environment, it's not something to take lightly. Yeah,
(35:30):
I mean the research that needs to be done right
now is on all kinds of things, like why individuals
have such strong physiological ab reactions to it, right, Like
we talked about the first episode, there's very occasionally individuals
who have like cardiac arrest or seizures or something that's
not a common side effect of this, But why is
it happening to these some individuals right, Other things like
(35:52):
why is there such a variance in the mood reactions?
Why for some people is at all positive but for
other people there's positive and negative or others it's just negative.
You know what's going on there? How do other drugs
in conjunction work with m d M A, right, especially
like when you think about UM PTSD patients who are
already taking daily medication for their PTSD, how's that interacting
(36:14):
with the m D I mean, even Sasha Shulgin in
his research parties would tell his his friends, Look, don't
take any medication for like three to five days before
you come over here. And then you know, we just
need to figure out the chronic tolerance development as well,
to like nail that down. Why is it that when
we take m d M A human bodies basically over time,
(36:37):
probably like between one dose and ten doses, over time
the positive effects lesson in the negative effects get worse. Indeed, Now,
to close out here, I just want to throw out
a quick quote. This comes to us from from Alan
Watts the late British Buddhist and encounter culture um icon.
(36:58):
I'd say UM wrote a lot spoke a lot about
about Buddhism and h and also a certain amount about
about other other modes of religion, and also about a
lot of the counterculture of stuff that was happening at
the time time he was alive. This particular quote comes
from nineteen seventy and he's he's probably commenting more directly
on on overt psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD. But I
(37:22):
think this holds true for a lot of what we've
talked about regarding m D m A. He says, psychedelic
experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but
a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the
various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer
necessary or useful. If you get the message hang up
the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes,
(37:46):
and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently
glued to the microscope. He goes away and works on
what he has seen. And I think that that matches
up rather nicely with the with the goals of m
D and assisted psychotherapy. I do, yeah, And I kind
of have always thought of Alan Watts as being sort
of contemporary of Sasha Shulguns as well to kind I
(38:08):
wonder if those guys ever met, but they're kind of
like on the same Yeah, exactly, that them and the
two of them in Timothy Lyric here on The Psychedelic Avengers.
Uh So, I think that's about you know, what we've
got here on M D M A. But I'd really
like to hear from you the audience some more about
this because I'm sure there's a lot of things we
(38:28):
didn't cover. The literature in this is dense. I mean,
we spent two days studying all this stuff leading up
to it, and I there's no way we could even
touch the surface. You know, there's just so much that's
being studied in it right now. So I'd love to
know if there's things that we missed, or there's things
in particular that you you know about that are in
(38:49):
trial right now or being studied right now that we
would be interested in coming back to in a future episode.
Get in touch with us over social media. That is
one of the best ways to let us know about
these things. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and don't forget that you can always talk to us
on periscope every Friday at noon. Yeah, and if you
would like to hear us take this approach, this sort
of one to approach with with other substances such as
(39:11):
h such as marijuana. We've ever done any content on
marijuana and medicinal marijuana that would bush an interesting topic.
Let us know if you'd like to hear eisdesfect. The
idea for this episode came out of us talking about
the instances of synthetic cannabis in the news. Yeah, and hey,
you want to get in touch with this directly, you
want to cut out stuff to blow your mind dot
(39:32):
com and all the social accounts, you can just email
us at and below the mind at how stuff Works
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. D foy thot about
(40:08):
the
Welcome to stuff to blow your Mind from housetop work
dot com. Hey, wasn't discussedable in your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger. So we are
in part two of our M d M A Spectacular,
and the last episode we talked primarily about what M
(00:24):
d M A is, when it was invented, who invented it,
and what its physical effects on the body are, right yeah. Uh,
And so if you haven't listened to that and you
want a little bit more background, I recommend that you
go back and listen to it. But what we're gonna
focus on here today is primarily how it's being used
in studies, or how it's been used really for the
last thirty or forty years, uh, in studies on how
(00:46):
to treat people for various things from everything from mental
problems to PTSD to cancer. Yeah, and uh, as as
we set up in the last episode, you're basically dealing
with two different phases, right. So the such stence is uh,
his first sin the size and the early twentieth century.
It's not until uh, generally the what the sixties, seventies
and eighties that you see it used therapeutically, you see
(01:09):
people experimenting with its, uh, the potential potential benefits outside
of a recreational environment. But then it becomes enemy number one, right,
it becomes caught up in the culture episode. It was
immediately placed on like the most restrictive drug list, so
scientists couldn't even use it in their labs to study its.
(01:30):
And this goes for various psychedelics as well, such as
a psilocybin. But then in recent years, we've seen a resurgence.
You've seen you've seen psilocybin, you've seen in d m A,
all these substance coming back into the lab and uh
and and professionals are able to actually explore them some more,
look at these undeniably potent, powerful substances and say what
(01:52):
what he or can we use? What can we change? What?
What can we just try to to use in a
proper environment, and and out of it all generate some
sort of positive effect. Yeah. And so before we get
into the real, you know, boiled down details about this,
I want to remind everybody that the podcast isn't the
only way that you can, you know, interact with us
(02:13):
or see the things that we're looking at. This week.
We also are always writing on stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. There's galleries, there's articles. At least once
or twice a week we're putting stuff up there, and
videos as well. So there's all the old stuff to
blow your own videos. But Robert, for instance, is currently
working on the How Stuff Works Now series and as
(02:34):
much as possible we try to share those videos as well. Uh,
and they're very stuff to blow your mind related topics, right, yeah, yeah,
very much, weird science that sort of thing. And hey, uh,
I know a lot of you listen to us on
various aggregated programs, various apps and whatnot, but but there
are certainly iTunes users out there getting us on iTunes
(02:55):
and listen us to listening to us on your iPhones.
If you get us through iTunes, show us some love
there helped the algorithm and that's a great way to
support the show without spending a dime. So all right,
let's get into the pharmacological healing properties of m d
M A and this brings us back to Sholgun. Yeah,
so Alexander Shulgan, who we talked a lot about in
the last episode, also known as Sasha Shulgin, the godfather
(03:17):
of ecstasy. UH was also primarily responsible for bringing to
the psychological community uh in in particular UM his wife Anne.
My understanding was that she was a therapist and she
used M d m A and some of her therapy
sessions with her patients. But he also UH introduced it
(03:39):
to a guy named Leo Zef in ninety seven who
started using it in psychotherapy and introduced other therapists to it.
And so my understanding is that there is this kind
of underground network of therapists who were using it in
their research and in their studies. And this is before
it was tremendously legal. Yes, obviously it U One of
the areas you see mentioned a lot is it's used
(04:00):
in couples therapy. Because ultimately, as as we try to
drive home in the last episode, this idea that M
D m A and ecstasy produce, this feeling of ecstasy
is is a bitness leading. It's more empathy and sympathy.
It's more a feeling of openness. Again, I like to
think of it as the self becomes permeable to the world,
(04:21):
and so it it's able to improve emotional communication skills.
So that was a boost empathy. So This is where
psychotherapist would use it to say, you have two individuals
that they're having marital problems, they're having communication problems, they
have all this stuff bottle up inside. Well than in
these cases, perhaps m d m A can be used
(04:41):
to open the two up to get them to talk
about things that they're not talking about. So it's not
a situation where like you're having marital problems, take two
of these and commy in the morning. It's like, let's
let's have a rap session and let's take this. You
will take this first, and this will enable the sort
of open communication we need. Yeah, I can't ephasize this enough.
(05:01):
For all of these psychotherapeutic uses that we're talking about here,
they have to go hand in hand with actual sit
down in the chair, talk to a therapist counseling. Right.
It's not like you just take the m d m
A and call them in the morning. Right Like as
we just said, it's it's got to be in conjunction
with building trust with somebody that you can talk to
objectively about whatever the issues. It's the m d m
(05:23):
A assisted psychotherapy, not psychotherapy assisted m d m A usage.
And and we'll get into this more, especially with the
PTSD stuff. But basically what it does, the argument is
is that it allows you to increase your trust for
people if you have trouble trusting people, and it reduces
your fear and anxiety levels. So it's particularly good as
(05:44):
I you know, as you just mentioned, for something like
couples therapy where there's communication issues, if you have fear
of not communicating something or you need to trust your
partner more. That that's where the idea lies in its usage.
So yeah, it was being used as early as the
seventies and you know, probably up until the mid eighties,
right around the time that it was made illegal in
(06:05):
the United States. Uh, but you know that that was
primarily like an underground thing. It wasn't like it wasn't
like a man dated. It wasn't like in the D
S M for or whatever came out in the seventies, right,
and so, uh, it wasn't until a more modern time really,
right around the two thousands, I want to say, where
(06:27):
we started seeing m d m as show up again
in psychotherapy trials. That's right. And uh, the primary player
here is an organization known as MAPS that's Multidisciplinary Association
for psychedelic studies, and they're they're concerned not just with
m d m A, but with psilocybin other substances um.
And they continue to explore quote whether m d m
(06:50):
A assisted psychotherapy can help heal the psychological and emotional
damage caused bi sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas.
So this is this is one of the huge areas
of exploration here. And oh and just to give a
little more background on maps UM there, it's as they
are operating in several different countries I think five right now, Canada, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, Israel,
(07:15):
and in the US. Yeah, there are trials being done
in the US. And I think I mentioned this at
the end of last episode, but it bears repeating here.
It is super expensive to research system. Not only because
of all of the restrictions that have to be placed
on the facilities in which you are holding the m
d m A for these trials, right, Like you have
to build like like super like heavy door frames, right
(07:37):
or like security systems that you normally wouldn't have for
these places. But the medical grade m d m A
is also quite expensive. It can cost up to a
hundred and seventy dollars or seventy five dollars per dose.
So and that's like, as we were saying last episode,
one dose is like a hundred, two hundred and fifty milligrams. Yeah. Again,
(07:58):
think back to the fact that one of the reasons
that it was shell for so long is that it
was expensive to study. So even in the you know,
the early twentieth century German chemicists looked at it and uh,
and they realized, oh, it has some sort of interesting properties,
but who has the budget to explore it. So before
we dive deeper down to the psychotherapy thing, I think
an interesting way to approach this is to add the
(08:20):
criticisms up first, so then as we go through it,
we can sort of say, okay, we're those criticisms valid
or not. Uh. And in the research, one of the
major m d m A researchers who's published a lot
of literature on this is a guy named Andy Parrott,
who's i believe, out of the University of Swansea, and he,
you know, has done a great paper that's on sort
(08:40):
of just the the general twenty five years of empirical
history of chemistry, right that the chemistry behind m DM
UM but he does acknowledge that there's been some criticism, uh,
and mainly that it's not safe for clinical use. Uh.
And some proponents say that it needs to be used
repeatedly for more than one or two sessions or otherwise
it won't produce gains in those situations, right. Uh. And
(09:04):
remember from the last episode, m d M AS effects
are short lived, and uh, it doesn't exactly work like that.
You know, as we said before, there's a chronic decline
over time. The more you use it, the less positive
effects are and the more the negative effects are. So
there's some concern about that with the tolerance levels. But
there's also acute effects of m d M A that
(09:26):
are unpredictable, which we talked about as well last time.
They can both be positive or negative, right like that,
for instance, that there's both positive and negative emotional responses,
or or that there's some undesirable experiences during the sessions,
and sometimes these undesirable experiences can last up to two
weeks long. So that's kind of parrots argument is, you know,
(09:47):
let's let's stop before we do this. But uh, there's
also the idea of the neurochemical depletion the serotonin. Uh,
and can lead to feelings of depression, anger, and paranoia anyways. Uh,
and it's especially bad for those who have pre existing depression,
and it could even predispose people who like, for instance,
(10:07):
we're already depressed but had um you know, dealt with
that issue, to a recurrence of their previous psychological disability.
So these are all of his essential like criticisms of
I don't know that we're quite there yet for the
psychotherapy thing. And he presents us with two scenarios in
which he thinks that that this isn't going to particularly
(10:29):
work out. And I'll read through the first one and
we can respond to these as we go through the
benefits of the psychotherapy and see if see if his
criticisms are right. Yeah. So if we don't launch into
picking them apart right away, understand it, that's the reason. Yeah. Okay, So, parents,
first scenario is that you have a special Air Force
soldier who's discharged from the army because he has PTSD
(10:51):
post traumatic stress disorder. His therapist says, let's try this
m d M A assisted therapy. Oh, but the drug
stimulates the re emergence of the soldier's unpleasant war experiences,
and this includes feelings of aggression, the soldiers trying to
control these while he's at the clinic. However, later that evening,
this is the scenario, mind you, he violently attacks a
stranger in the street. Following his arrest, his lawyer argues
(11:15):
that this aggressive act has been triggered by the m
d m A assisted therapy session. So okay, so so sorry.
Parrot is basically saying, Okay, this guy could potentially go
out in assault somebody due to the negative feelings that
get dredged up by this therapy induced m d m
A session. Okay, I have so many responses to that.
Stick clear for a minute, a right. The second scenario
(11:37):
that he lays up is called involves a hypothetical case
of a female rape victim UH. He says. After the
first m DM assisted therapy session, the client feels much better,
but the games do not injure over time. Following a
second UH session, this m d m A assisted again.
There's a brief period of of relief, and then a
third session is requested, but the therapist explains that she
(12:00):
can't clinically recommend it to the client. Now Quote seeks
out their own illicit supplies of ecstasy slash m d
m A. The only time she feels good is when
she is on m d m A, and she becomes
an habitual user. However, with reducing efficiency and increasing midweek blues,
her chronic anxiety, depression, and low self esteem steadily worsens.
(12:21):
Mm hmm, yeah, so I don't know. I mean, that
seems counterintuitive even in and of itself, right, and the
idea that this person would become a habitual user given
what we know from Parrot's own discourse about m d
m A and that most people don't use it more
than ten times. Everything we discussed in the first episode
seems to to poke holes in that argument and a
(12:43):
lot of the research for that game parrots own writings.
So I'm not quite sure about this, but let's let's
see if it matches up as we go along. Okay, Now,
this is something that ties into a criticism of scenario one,
but also just important to to look at going forward
is that when it comes to the treatment of p
E s D, there is and there is an urgent
need for better treatment methods. So this is just this
(13:05):
isn't just a situation of a bunch of scientists or
even an organization saying hey, we've got to find a
way to make m d M a practical This is
not what you Harrelson wearing a hip jacket around, right.
This is this is here a professional saying, hey, we
need a better tool here, we need better methods, and
we need need better drugs to help these individuals. There's
(13:28):
a potential answer here, let's explore it. So to piggyback
on top of that, I think it's important that we
sort of just quickly prime and established what PTSD. It's, right, Like,
it's a term a lot of us throw around, and
I've heard people say before like, oh I have PTSD,
you know, And uh, this is what PTSD is. Uh.
It is a manifestation of trauma physically in your body.
(13:49):
It's common in victims of war and abuse. It involves shaking, sweating, crumbling, anxiety,
and flashbacks. And basically what we're looking at here is
the psychological scars having physical repercussions. Right, So they're physically
affecting a person's body. So that's what we're talking about
here for treatment is being able to get get them
(14:11):
to integrate past that physical trauma rather mental trauma manifesting
physically So here a couple of quick points that come
directly from MAPS about m d m A assisted psychotherapy.
They said, they say an Indie may assisted psychotherapy India
is only administered a few times, unlike most medications for
mental illnesses, which are often taken daily for years and
(14:35):
sometimes forever. UH and MAPS is undertaking a roughly twenty
million dollar plan to make m d m A into
a Food and Drug Administration approved prescription medicine by one
now Here are just a few up pointers as well
that come from Ingrid Pacy, who I mentioned earlier. There's
(14:56):
a fabulous bit with her on the CBC Radio Ideas
again their three part series A High Culture, which I
highly recommend for anyone who's interested in just the overall
uh re emergence of psychedelic research over the past a
few decades and in some of the you know, the
the the concerns they're in. But Ingrid Percy is a psychiatrist.
(15:18):
She's a lead investigator of MBAM a assisted therapy for
treatment resistant post traumatic stress disorder at the University of
British Columbia. So she points out that from phase one
studies around the world, we know that m d m
A seems to lower fear, particularly for treatment resistant PTSD,
creating a window. And it's interesting she says window because
(15:39):
because Hulkin references a window at that I believe was
the hundred neogram creates a window during which the trauma
can be considered and discussed without the associated fear getting
in the way. So it's about sort of allowing the
monster to come out so you can look at it
and deal with it and and and perhaps exercise it right.
(15:59):
According to pay see M d M. A psychotherapy usually
begins with feelings of relaxation, easing of muscles, and among
PTSD patients you often see the flashes of the past
trauma that then emerge, and it can even be a
strong bodily experience. So we mentioned this in the last
episode about how how taking ecstasy can produce uh, these
(16:20):
very strong negative feelings can can pull those out of
an interet. So that's where I assume Parrot is getting
his scenario to of which the soldiers experienced such a
negative emotions being recalled Yeah, and that but that that
what where I can't I'm having difficulty following him is
the logical extension of that to going out and assaulting
(16:42):
a person on the street, right, because he's saying, well,
you're gonna pull You're gonna pull the monster out of
the closet, and then the monster could win. Well, yeah,
but part of what are you gonna do? Just leave
it in the closet. I mean, the idea here is
we've got to we've got to face these traumatic experiences, right,
and that m D MAY assisted psychotherapy can potentially allow
us to do so in a safer way with reduced
(17:04):
fear um and and during all of this, the therapist
or monitoring vital signs. Uh uh. Really, it's kind of
the best case scenario to be doing m d m
A in right, because you're not like like we talked
about last episode, like the some of the bad side
effects like the overheating or the chewing on your teeth,
(17:24):
running about music. Yeah, all of that kind of stems
out of the dance culture, not because of the drug,
but because of the environment that you're in. Right. Yeah,
So you know this is again it's about using it
therapeutically with a therapist, using it as a way to
open that window, to to gain access to things that
are normally going to be too too buried, or or
(17:44):
to fear ridden to tackle and this is this is
really key here. Again. One of the major issues is
that there we need better tools, we need better medications
to treat PTSD. And according to two percy um, you
see about a thirty percent UH success rate for conventional
multi year PTSD therapy, but so far with the m
(18:08):
d m A PTSD therapy you've seen they've seen an
eight five percent success rate. Wow, okay, well that backs
up some of the other stuff that I read, which
said that there were significant gains found on there's a
there's a scale that's used to measure somebody's level of PTSD.
It's called the PTSD scale. And after using that UH,
after using m d m A in therapy, using the
(18:30):
PTSD scale, they found that there were great gains over time.
And in fact, when they did placebo trials telling people
that they were doing m d m A when they weren't,
they found less gains. So the the evidence does seem
to show that this works. Um. It also, you know,
the aim here is is to help these people with
(18:51):
their debilitating symptoms. It's it's when they haven't responded to
other therapies, and it's this isn't like oh, let's just
try this. You know, this is this is a such
watrotion where it's resistant to the last resort. Yeah. Uh,
you know, the other treatments are anything from talking to
exposure therapy, to the things that cause the PTSD to
all these daily medications that we could be using. Uh.
(19:14):
One therapist says that they think that it works because
of m d M as unique properties. And we talked
about this last time. It's both a stimulant and a psychedelic, right,
so they said, quote, the stimulant gives people confidence and
the psychedelic allows people to reflect on themselves and their
experiences in a different way. This combination helps them confront
painful memories. And then in two thousand nine there was
(19:35):
an article by a Norwegian psychologist named I Believe this
is paliurine Yo Hansen, and he argued that it works
through several mechanisms. Basically, the m d M A is
increasing the levels of oxytocin in your body and this
is the we call it the cuttle chemical. Um. I
think you guys might have talked about this previously on
the episode it's released during breastfeeding, not in the episode
(19:59):
on the show and Stuff to Blow your mind at
five years one of yeah, the most frequently mentioned uh
properties of the body. I feel. So it increases our
oxytocin and what that does It prevents the brain's emotional
processing center from overpowering our higher thoughts. So it quells
fear and it encourages trust, just like we were talking
about earlier. So, um, you know we mentioned m d
(20:23):
m A has to occur in conjunction with psychotherapy. You
aren't just taking m d m A. And it's not
like you immediately go into therapy and you're taking m
d m A with the therapist. You need to establish
trust with this therapist through a series of sober sessions
before you do these m d m A sessions. And
usually at the most I think it's like three sessions,
which kind of makes sense along the lines of what
(20:45):
we know about people taking m d m A, its
effects and their efficacy. But then also, you know this
uh contradicts. I want to say, parents first example of
the potential uh subject where this wouldn't work for them, right,
and that they've become sorry it was their second example
where the girl becomes an addict, right, Um, so they
(21:09):
only use it for three sessions at the most. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and we come back.
We're gonna we're gonna roll through some other potential uses
of m d m A as a cancer fighting agent.
Uh is potential uh aid in in couples therapy and
even away to ease an individual uh to the death point.
(21:36):
All Right, we're back. So we set up for this
a little bit in the in the previous episode. The
potential for for e m d M A to help
us fight cancer, which is this is one of the
This is an area of m d m A research
that is uh, it kind of stands apart from the
rest because it's so it's not attached to the most
apparent properties of the drug. Right. In fact, so funny. Sorry.
(21:59):
Yesterday was getting my hair cut and as the first
time I was getting my haircut by this particular hairdresser.
She asked me what I did for a living and
what I was working on right now, and I told
her was researching m d M UH and and she said, oh,
that's fascinating. And I said it can be used to
help people with cancer. And her immediate thought was, oh, yeah,
that makes sense, Like if they're in pain, it would
make them feel happy, And I was like, oh no,
(22:21):
I mean, yes, there are instances where they've been using
it therapeutically that way, but no, Like, let's recap from
last episode, there's that apotosis effect in which programs cell
death actually attacks the cells in your liver and retina
when you take M D M A. Uh so let's
remember that that's what they're using here to try to
(22:42):
take take cancer out there, trying to kill the cells
and cancer. It's not just as like a you know,
sort of like a pain reducer kind of thing. Yeah.
So we've known since around two thousand six that actual
c M D M A and antidepressants such as prozac
have the potential to stop cancer cell the catches. Then,
in order to kill the cells, who have to drop
(23:03):
an absurd amount of ecstasy, as in a highly lethal dose. Um. Like,
just to refresh, we were talking in the previous episode
about how you're talking about, uh, the average dose being
in in then like a hundred hundred and right, and
if you get into one or one point five grams,
you're getting into into a deadly amount, potentially deadly amount.
(23:25):
So in two thousand eleven, researchers from the University of
Birmingham and the University of Western Australia UM looked into this.
They were they were basically looking to ways at ways
to tweak ecstasy, UH, to tweak m d m A
at the atomic level, swapping out some of the atoms
in its chemical composition to increase its cancer fighting power
by a factor of a hundred. So to put that
(23:47):
in perspective, that means that you could have a single
tablet of modified ecstasy, they would have as much cancer
fighting power as a hundred tablets without boosting the unwanted
effects of the drug. So, because because the amount of
this is my understanding, the amount of m d m
A needed to start attacking the cancer cells is like
(24:07):
a hundred grams, right, and so to that would totally
kill you. Yeah. Yeah, that's like a hundred times as
much as would be a hundred times a very strong dosage. Yeah,
So they need to make it more powerful so you
can take less of it to attack the cancer but
not have the negative side. Yeah, So basically taking the
synthetic substance and tweaking it even more to encourage the
(24:30):
properties you need and discourage the properties that are going
to kill the patient. And this is exactly the kind
of thing that Alexander Shulgin would have promoted and wanted
I think his his his studies of these psychedelic compounds
to be used for going forward, you know, I mean,
his hope was that they would be studied educationally so
(24:51):
that we could find these kinds of uses for the Yeah, exactly,
to go back to the road map scenario, it's saying, hey,
there's this road and h you didn't know it, but
there's a little turn here to the left, and it
leads to a potential cure for cancer. So when you
get into exactly how this works, uh, you really get
bogged down rather quickly in the chemical and biochemical details.
(25:13):
But the basic explanation, as a rolled out in that
paper is the theory behind it is the drug is
attracted to the fat in the membranes of cancerous cells
and it makes the cells quote a bit more soapy,
which can break down the membrane and kill the cell. Unfortunately,
cancerous cells are more susceptible. So again they hope to
(25:38):
hope to refine this. Uh. Last the most recent stat
I saw was there hoping to make it possible by
one but again that was that that that was when
they were rolling up in that particular, and it said
they thought they're about a decade away. I'm curious where
they're at with it right now as Yeah, hopefully we'll
get an update, uh in the near future. Yeah, I
(26:00):
wouldn't be surprised if we see something come out in
the next year or so. Yeah. So yeah, so all right,
we've covered PTSD cancer. What else can we use this for. Well,
we already mentioned couples therapy and about how it was
rolled out with apparently some level of success in the eighties.
But there's actually a two thousand fifteen study that was
published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and they set out
(26:22):
to examine how m d m A might be used
to improve communication about a spouse in therapy. So this
is interesting. It seems to be the key key here.
That's not about as much about oh here you both
take m DMAIN will also together, but it's about getting
an individual to share their own feelings and open up
about what's bothering them. So yeah, I could imagine based
(26:43):
on the stereotypes surrounding m D m A again, people
hearing this and going oh okay, so they take ecstasy
and it makes them want to have sex, which would
subsequently they want to love each other. They feel more open,
they feel more sympathetic. That's not again ecstasy is a misnomer. Uh.
And this isn't all sexual. This is more about communication. Yeah,
(27:04):
and you know, I do have to say that, you know,
it's it's it's totally believable that you would have two
individuals who have a connection with each other while they're
on m d M A and then afterwards they realize, well,
as my normal self even with the inside of what
I had conversing with this individual, I no longer feel
that connection. But again, this entails the therapist being present
(27:25):
and using the information that you bring forth. So yeah, right,
we don't recommend that like couples just do this in
their kitchen together. Yeah, certainly not the kitchen. Um. So,
so we've discussed m duma's ability to increase sociability. The
drug alter speech production and fluency as well and U
and according to the study, it may influence speech content.
So what they did is they rounded up thirty five
(27:47):
healthy individuals with prior in m d M A experience
UH completed UM two session with UH within subjects double
blind study during which they received one point five milligrams
of oral m d m A, and they also had
a tiny that's a very small amount, one point five
that is, so then they would after the the substance
(28:11):
had taken hold um whatever limited hold it would have.
Given the dosage, they engaged in five minutes standardized talking
tasks during which they discussed a close personal relationship, and
they found that both analytic methods that they employed revealed
that m d m A altered speech content relative to
pill see about the drug, increased use of social and
(28:32):
sexual words, consistent with reports that m d m A
increases willingness to disclose. Okay, so that lines up with
what we know from the PTSD thing, right, It makes
me trust people, it makes you, you know, you're more permeable,
yourself is more permeable. And using the machine learning algorithm,
the Receichers researchers found that m d m A increased
use of social words and words relating to both positive
(28:55):
and negative emotions. So, in other words, it helped them
open up about how they felt about the other individual,
what the problems might be. And and that is why
it seems like you could be very useful in m
DM assisted psychotherapy. So I guess like the big problem
here though, is how illegal it still is, and that
(29:16):
it's really difficult to conduct trials like this, especially in
a place like the United States. Right. So, but some
of the articles that I was reading about both the
PTSD thing and the cancer studies were saying that they
think that that there's going to be m d M
A approved by the FDA, the Federal Drug Administration again,
like maybe in the next ten years or so. Yeah,
(29:37):
and it seems like the same prognosis with Canadian law.
This is just me here, but my my worry here
is that what happens when this gets beyond peer reviewed publications,
science journalism and uh and you know in radio programs
and podcast what happens when this becomes a political football
and we have individuals saying, oh, well, you're about to
(30:00):
allow our psychotherapists to start giving ecstasy to people. What happens? Then?
It kind of reminds me of another stuff to blow
your mind related thing, when you did that video last
week about the god helmet, and there's a lot of
response on social media when we posted that video, I
got the impression that a lot of people just read
the headline and didn't watch the video, but they are
(30:20):
basically if give a primer on what the god helmet is, well,
this was basically we're talking about cranial electromagnetic stimulation affecting
various portions of the brain, if very basically turning things
in your brain on and off in order to see
how they affect. Electrical stimulation. Slide electrical stimulation to see
how it affects your experience of reality, right, and uh,
(30:43):
there was some research involving this that's saying that you know,
by changing the way that you perceive reality, it might
be able to help people overcome racism, for instance, right. Uh.
And the responses to that on our our social media channels,
a lot of people were very angry because they saw
that as kind of like mind control, right, almost like
in a fascist kind of sense. So I could see
the same thing happening with M D m A. Right,
(31:05):
It's like, oh, these these therapists, you know, they're the
activist therapists are going to try to reprogram our brains,
so we're just like them. Well, I mean the thing
is that both of these situations, whether you're talking about
you know, electrical stimulation of the brain, or pharmacological stimulation
of the brain. You're dealing with a psychedelic effect. You know,
(31:26):
you're you're taking your normal consciousness experience and you're tweaking
it a bit. You're changing and you're changing your perception
of self uh and reality in at least a very
limited way. And that that can be frightening, that can
be illuminating, And that's that's the whole that's psychedelia as
a whole door for a lot of experiences, and a
(31:48):
lot of them think of it like sort of along
the lines of um drawings. Okay, so let's say like
you're looking at a drawing, and if you know what
one point perspective is, it's kind of how Wes Anderson
shoots a lot of his cookies, right, Like, you've got
a center point and everything stems out of that center
point coming at you. But then you can switch to
two point perspective or three point perspective, where you're looking
(32:09):
at multiple angles, or you're looking up or down from
like a skyscraper or something like that, right, And that's
like a very basic metaphor for what's going on here.
It's just changing the perspective with which you can look
at the world with yeah, one might be heard to
say something along the lines of, I've never thought about
myself that way before. I've never thought about uh, this
(32:31):
individual in this particular way before. And again, this isn't
us condoning like go out and do m d m
A right now, or us saying don't do m d
m A right It's it's neither of those things. But
I do think that it's interesting within a restrictive environment
using it in conjunction with therapy, and especially uh, you know,
in a clinic like this, where there's somebody on hand
(32:53):
in case like you have a bad reaction or whatever, right,
rather than being in a farm in the middle of
the woods where there's a secret a coming on. Now.
The final example of m d m A therapy and
m d m A research that we want to mention
here is the possibility of using m d M A
to treat individuals who are having a hard time with
(33:16):
with their with their impending death, with with with fatal
life you know, fatal conditions, life threatening illnesses, uh as
they approach the death point. And there have been some
other studies that involve psilocybin and it's use magic mushrooms
psilocybin as as a way to help people deal with
(33:37):
that scenario. It's not just the pain we're talking about here, right,
We're talking just gravity of understanding your yeah, thinking about yourself,
and the grappling with mortality and the basic heavy human stuff.
So the the main individual here is uh San and
sell Most psychiatrist Phil Wolfson, and he's currently studying the
use of m d m A assisted psychotherapy to ease
(34:00):
anxiety in eighteen adults diagnosed with life threatening illnesses. Now,
all of these individuals have a prognosis life expectancy of
at least nine months there can they currently have severe
anxiety related to life threatening illness. So his goal here
is to see whether patients suffering from crippling anxiety, fear,
or depression over a terminal diagnosis can confine relative peace
(34:23):
via in d m A assisted psychotherapy sessions. So it's
kind of the same scenario we've talked about with these
previous psychotherapy examples, helping them open up about what's happening,
help them gain a little perspective on what's happening, and
in doing so, perhaps find a place of peace. Right,
see it from a different angle, one with less fear. Yeah,
(34:45):
but again, Wilson's study is just getting off the ground here.
UM just started up this year, so hopefully we'll we'll
hear more of the details in the years to come.
Uh And you know, some of the core findings, and
there's clearly got to be a lot of more research
done in all of these areas before we're just doing this,
you know, casually, especially in the sense of like predicting
(35:08):
that the f d A is going to approve m
d M A for these public use. And I think,
I mean casual is a good thing to mention because
I think the underlying truth here is that it's such
a potent and powerful substance that it should never never
be done casually. Like I would argue that even in
a recreational environment, it's not something to take lightly. Yeah,
(35:30):
I mean the research that needs to be done right
now is on all kinds of things, like why individuals
have such strong physiological ab reactions to it, right, Like
we talked about the first episode, there's very occasionally individuals
who have like cardiac arrest or seizures or something that's
not a common side effect of this, But why is
it happening to these some individuals right, Other things like
(35:52):
why is there such a variance in the mood reactions?
Why for some people is at all positive but for
other people there's positive and negative or others it's just negative.
You know what's going on there? How do other drugs
in conjunction work with m d M A, right, especially
like when you think about UM PTSD patients who are
already taking daily medication for their PTSD, how's that interacting
(36:14):
with the m D I mean, even Sasha Shulgin in
his research parties would tell his his friends, Look, don't
take any medication for like three to five days before
you come over here. And then you know, we just
need to figure out the chronic tolerance development as well,
to like nail that down. Why is it that when
we take m d M A human bodies basically over time,
(36:37):
probably like between one dose and ten doses, over time
the positive effects lesson in the negative effects get worse. Indeed, Now,
to close out here, I just want to throw out
a quick quote. This comes to us from from Alan
Watts the late British Buddhist and encounter culture um icon.
(36:58):
I'd say UM wrote a lot spoke a lot about
about Buddhism and h and also a certain amount about
about other other modes of religion, and also about a
lot of the counterculture of stuff that was happening at
the time time he was alive. This particular quote comes
from nineteen seventy and he's he's probably commenting more directly
on on overt psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD. But I
(37:22):
think this holds true for a lot of what we've
talked about regarding m D m A. He says, psychedelic
experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but
a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the
various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer
necessary or useful. If you get the message hang up
the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes,
(37:46):
and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently
glued to the microscope. He goes away and works on
what he has seen. And I think that that matches
up rather nicely with the with the goals of m
D and assisted psychotherapy. I do, yeah, And I kind
of have always thought of Alan Watts as being sort
of contemporary of Sasha Shulguns as well to kind I
(38:08):
wonder if those guys ever met, but they're kind of
like on the same Yeah, exactly, that them and the
two of them in Timothy Lyric here on The Psychedelic Avengers.
Uh So, I think that's about you know, what we've
got here on M D M A. But I'd really
like to hear from you the audience some more about
this because I'm sure there's a lot of things we
(38:28):
didn't cover. The literature in this is dense. I mean,
we spent two days studying all this stuff leading up
to it, and I there's no way we could even
touch the surface. You know, there's just so much that's
being studied in it right now. So I'd love to
know if there's things that we missed, or there's things
in particular that you you know about that are in
(38:49):
trial right now or being studied right now that we
would be interested in coming back to in a future episode.
Get in touch with us over social media. That is
one of the best ways to let us know about
these things. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and don't forget that you can always talk to us
on periscope every Friday at noon. Yeah, and if you
would like to hear us take this approach, this sort
of one to approach with with other substances such as
(39:11):
h such as marijuana. We've ever done any content on
marijuana and medicinal marijuana that would bush an interesting topic.
Let us know if you'd like to hear eisdesfect. The
idea for this episode came out of us talking about
the instances of synthetic cannabis in the news. Yeah, and hey,
you want to get in touch with this directly, you
want to cut out stuff to blow your mind dot
(39:32):
com and all the social accounts, you can just email
us at and below the mind at how stuff Works
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. D foy thot about
(40:08):
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