Alright, I just found something that I have to show you. Watch this guy right here: "I'm feeling perfectly fit at the moment, as sane as I ever am, and I'll take the drug now. " That British guy is a member of Parliament and he just took a psychedelic on television.
"And now. . .
I'm. . .
fairly lucid, Humphrey. " Ah yes, Humphrey, very lucid. This is my favorite part: "I can't be certain that uh.
. . uh.
. . .
what's happening now to you. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
now I'm back lucid again and I see that the sentence I meant to say. . .
. can't be said. " Why is he doing this?
? ? The answer is that it's 1955 and psychedelics are legal both in the UK and the US.
And not just legal! They're an exciting area of medical research. But by the 1980s, all of that had changed.
"America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. " The United States had declared a "War on Drgs. " Psychedelics were banned, and the research turned much darker.
For the last 40 years, as you probably know, most psychedelics have been illegal. "This is your brain on drugs. .
. " "Stop it, get some help. " But now, the tide has started to change again.
. . "Psychedelic drugs aren't just for hippies anymore.
. . " "Magic mushrooms" "Psychedelic mushrooms may be headed for legalization" "Drpping acid could soon be legal" Today, there's a new and growing fight to make psychedelics legal again in the United States.
They're once more this really interesting area of study, with researchers suggesting that they could have major health benefits. If those claims are true - if psychedelics can successfully treat disorders that millions of people struggle with, then we made a big mistake in how we classify these drugs. That's the debate that's going on right now.
So over the past few months we dove deep into this topic and in this video we're going to take you on a trip to better understand what scientists have recently uncovered about these drugs, why people are so excited about them all of a sudden, and most importantly what having legal psychedelics would actually mean for you. "War on Drgs! " "Declared a war on drugs.
. . " "We must wage what I have called total war against dangerous drugs.
. . " "Magic mushrooms!
" "Psilocybin, a breakthrough therapy producing substantial antidepressant and anxiolytic effects. . .
" There's a lot of news and preconceived ideas about psychedelics these days, not all of which are exactly scientific. Let's clear a few things up. Welcome to "Psychedelics For Nerds".
. . Psychedelics are a big group of drugs.
You've probably heard other names for a bunch of them like ecstasy and acid and molly and magic mushrooms. In fact, I found this amazing report from the DEA that just lists hundreds of different names for drugs. It's like 50 pages long, so I didn't print it out but let me just read some to you: Angels in the Sky, El Gata Diablo, Electric Kool-Aid, Flash, Flat Blues, Mother of God, Mellow Yellow, White Fluff, White Lightning, white Owsley, Yellow Dimples.
. . all right.
. . You get the idea.
. . "How do you do, fellow kids?
" For the purposes of this video, we're going to stick with their scientific names. All of these drugs act on the same serotonin receptor in the brain called the 2A receptor and they're sometimes called classic psychedelics. Then there are MDMA and ketamine.
They're generally classified under the umbrella of psychedelics but they each work a little bit differently in the brain. The word "psychedelic" actually comes from a combination of Greek words that loosely translates to "mind manifesting. " When people take these drugs they often see vivid colors or shapes moving.
A lot of the times people feel intense emotions or grapple with intense emotions that they're already feeling. The underlying theme what really sets psychedelics apart is that "mind manifesting" element to all of them. They can really change your perception of the world.
"These drugs compared to others have a profound effect on one's perception of reality including one's perception of oneself. . .
" That's DrMatthew Johnson, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins. He's one of the best known researchers in this field and in an area that's both full of hype men and critics, I appreciated that his work seemed very measured. "I've been doing work with psychedelics since 2004, both their mechanisms as well as potential therapeutic applications of these psychedelics.
If you're interested in the effects of drugs on the mind I like to say using psilocybin mushrooms in religious rituals. Peyote, which is a cactus containing mescaline, was used in rituals by Maya and Aztec people and it's still part of some modern day religious ceremonies. Fast forward to the 1900s, psychedelics were legal and available in the United States.
In those days a company that made LSD would just send it out to doctors to try it with their get they kind of. . .
escaped the lab. Enter the 1960s. Spiritual enlightenment.
. . Summer of Love.
. . hippies.
. . .
Of course, not everyone's experience was peace and love. As more and more people got their hands on these drugs, negative headlines began to appear. Understandably, public opinion of psychedelics began to shift from hippies to widespread fear and distrust.
"This is the most dangerous drug that has ever come upon the market and it can have tragic if not fatal consequences if they use it. " Then came a set of policy changes collectively called "The War on Drgs" "Declared a war on drugs. .
. " "America's public enemy number one. .
. " "Drgs are menacing our society, they're killing our children. .
. " "The conclusion that these drugs were so dangerous that you couldn't do human research with them was was not at all supported. It was very clearly a socio-political phenomenon where these drugs were just so associated with the counter-culture that they became really forbidden even for researchers.
. . " The research that did get done during this time seemed to support the government- -backed narrative that psychedelics were extremely dangerous, cementing public opinion in support of the War on Drgs.
But we now know that not all of the research done during this time was true. Here's one absolutely crazy story: In one really big study, researchers at Johns Hopkins spend 1. 3 million dollars to investigate the effects of ecstasy on monkeys brains.
When the results came out, the media publicized a shocking result: that just one night of using ecstasy could result in permanent brain damage. Here's just one quote: "Using ecstasy is like playing Russian roulette with your brain function. " Terrifying.
The study was published in the extremely famous and reputable Science journal in 2002. And it included the data point that 20% of the animals tested on died. "It just didn't make common sense like how do you get 20% of your animals dying and you claim this was a single recreational oral dose of this drug that millions and millions of people have taken?
" It didn't make sense because it wasn't true. A year later, those same researchers retracted their own study because they figured out that they had accidentally injected the monkeys with meth instead of ecstasy. Seriously it was meth all along!
But the damage was already done. . .
not just to the monkeys. . .
but also to our understanding of psychedelics as a whole. This is still how people were talking about psychedelics when I was in high school, like referring to this study. This is one of the reasons why I think it's so important how we frame early science and technology while it's still being developed.
Tt can set the stage for how we think about something for decades. "What a sad state of affairs that it, you know, had to be put on deep freeze. It's really been only the last decade or so where things have really ramped up.
" We have learned a lot about psychedelics in the last decade. And we're in this interesting moment where new research has caused a lot of hype around these drugs. .
. "Psychedelic mushrooms -" "Magic mushrooms -" "- is helpful to patients suffering from -" "depression" "PTSD" "Anxiety" "and forms of addition. .
. " "It's huge. It's HUGE!
" In one recent study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, one high dose of psilocybin relieved anxiety and depression in cancer patients for six months. In another in Nature, two-thirds of patients treated with MDMA no longer experienced PTSD. IF psychedelics are actually this effective, this is.
. . huge if true.
So huge in fact that my b***s*** detector started going off a little bit. I mean we have gotten this wrong before. .
. "One of the things that happens if someone tells you that a substance is like good for a million different things is your b***s*** detector goes up a little bit. .
. "Right. What we're most confident of is: MDMA in the treatment of PTSD.
Psilocybin in the treatment of alcoholism, smoking cessations, cancer-related distress, and then major depressive disorder, what people will know as depression. Why would something that helps with cancer-related distress also help you quit smoking, also help you keep quit drinking, also help also help with depression? Like what's going on?
The reason that psychedelics might be able to help with so many kinds of disorders is that they can alter the conversations between individual brain cells. "All of these disorders are characterized by a narrowed mental and behavioral repertoire and psychedelics seem to have this ability to really powerfully blast people out of those ruts. " This is a simplification, but researchers now think these drugs allow individual brain cells to form new connections with the cells around them and that could actually change how your brain works even after the drug is gone.
In essence, rewiring how your brain processes certain emotions or desires. But I want to be really clear about something: Research already shows that they are not for everyone. For example, for people with a family history of schizophrenia research shows that psychedelics could trigger manic or psychotic episodes.
It's important not to over hype science in progress. The point of this show though, Huge If True, is to imagine positive futures that we can help build. I want you to just imagine for a minute that this works.
That we invest in further research and we discover that psychedelics can reliably and at scale treat these conditions. Five percent of adults in the US have PTSD in any given year in 2020 that meant 13 million people. Eight percent of adults in the US have had at least one major depressive episode and those numbers are increasing particularly among young people.
These charts aren't just numbers going up. These are real people that are struggling. And the scientific question that is now slowly being separated from politics is: Can psychedelics help?
At the population level no one knows yet. But what we've seen so far is promising enough that some of these drugs are on the path to FDA approval. "We're maybe a year or two away from MDMA being approved in the US by the FDA for PTSD and then probably another year or two after that for psilocybin being approved.
" So there are a few visions for how legalization could actually play out and if you're thinking that this is going to be like cannabis where you can just buy it in a dispensary and then use it at your leisure, that's probably not going to be what's happening at least not for a long time. You can think of legalization of psychedelics on a grid like this. On the top is whether you take it in a supervised way or on your own.
And on the side is whether it's described by a doctor or not. Generally, medical cannabis is here - prescribed by a doctor but you can use it anytime by yourself. If cannabis is legal recreationally in your state then you're here and you can just go to a store without a prescription.
But with psychedelics most of the debate is focused here where it's legal but only in a supervised setting. What DrJohnson is talking about which is FDA approved MDMA and psilocybin is having doctors prescribe the medication and a licensed therapist supervising the trip. In this possible future you would go to a certified clinic where you would lie down in a comfortable position you'd put on a soft eye mask and you'd start to hear music.
This is a real playlist for trips from Johns Hopkins and the drug would take effect. You'd have a journey all your own but under the supervision of a licensed professional. The therapy piece is yet another part of this that's still being figured out.
There's not a lot of research on what kind of therapy works best or what sort of stimulation during the trip is most effective, not to mention research on what makes a patient feel safe and comfortable during this really vulnerable moment. Not all of the debate is in this box. .
. If you've seen headlines about Oregon and Colorado legalizing psilocybin, that's actually a little bit different, that's in this box. In those two states it's now legal to go to what they call "healing centers" and take psilocybin in a supervised setting with a facilitator not a doctor.
But none of those centers are open yet. Whether it's FDA approved or legalization on a state level the vision for taking psychedelics is the same right now. It has to be done in a supervised setting only.
But this conversation about psychedelics is moving really fast. Someday soon maybe we'll be having a debate in this column, but it's not what scientists and governments are focused on right now. I honestly don't know what the best next step is for psychedelics.
All I really care about is that we're basing our regulation on great science, science that we've invested in and listened to, without unwarranted fear or hype. Because the story of psychedelics is a classic tale of trying to control something that we don't fully understand, creating a narrative of fear and distrust that drove researchers away, stifling decades of innovation and progress that could have potentially helped millions of people. But in the last 10 years or so we've seen the beginnings of something different, where once again we're taking a look at these drugs, this time with a more measured approach, hopefully outside of the tides of public perception.
Because what's actually important and what I think that's too often missed in these conversations is the millions of people that are struggling with health conditions that we can figure out how to treat. Right now, the research reveals some real promise for how psychedelics might be able to help and beyond that, it shows just how much we still can learn about the human brain - about ourselves. Huge If True is an optimistic show about using technology to make the world better.
If that's something that you believe, in the best thing that you can do to support us is to subscribe. And if you do subscribe, let me know, I'd love to meet you in the comments. See you for the next one!
