Searching For a Cure to PTSD at Burning Man

least expected places. I'm your host, Michelle fay Cortes. Today we're taking a look at where illegal drugs need cutting edge therapy. Psychedelic drugs weren't always taboo. In the fifties and sixties. The medical world was actually really excited about them. Researchers studied LSD in psilocybin or magic mushrooms as a way to treat conditions like depression and even addiction. Before nineteen sixty five, more than a thousand studies involving psychedelics

were published. Many people thought they were breakthroughs, providing the first hope for treating mental health conditions when little else worked. But then psychedelics became the drug of choice for the counterculture and the government cracked down. In Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, criminalizing the use of psychedelic drugs and all that scientific research into their therapeutic potential. It ground to a halt. In recent years, the rules are relaxed

a little. Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Agency are again allowing researchers to conduct studies on psychedelic drugs therapies. Some have been really promising, but they don't come cheap. So how do you bank roll a psychedelics revolution? A revolution that brings to mind Stoner's in taid more than patients and hospital gowns. One man thinks he knows here are Bloomberg's Christin Brown and Sarah

McBride to take you on a trip. A few weeks ago, Sarah and I were cruising across the Nevada Desert in a rented van on our way to Burning Man. We weren't headed there on vacation. We were giving a ride to Rick Doblin. He's the CEO of a nonprofit called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Most people just call it MAPS. And Burning Man, of course, is the annual

party of the Nevada Desert. Thousands of people show up at this dust Bowl each year to parade around in crazy costumes, dance, enjoy the art, and yes, do drugs. But the party scene wasn't the only thing bringing Rick to Burning Man. Rick is a man on a mission

to legalize some of those drugs as medicines. But so your goal is of intually not just medical decision of qui well, this legalization of psychedelics in general and mainstreaming of the opportunity for people they have healing experiences, spiritual experiences right under medical or not necessarily under medical supervision, under religious supervision, but also a fundamental human right to

explore your own consciousness. Rick is a champion for the healing powers of drugs broadly known as psychedelics that includes LSD, mushrooms, and depending on who you talk to, m D m A also known as ecstasy. Like Michelle mentioned, those drugs are all illegal. Rick is hoping that with persuasive enough scientific research that will change. But nothing will change unless studies show those drugs hold healing power, and paying for those studies takes serious bank. That is what brings Rick

to Burning Man. People often describe Rick as this sort of cheerleader for psychedelics. He was in full smooth mode even before we arrived at the Burning Man gates. Everyone knows him. On the way, he stopped at a rest stop and bumped into lots of people who wanted to catch up. He that was Floora Bellini, a spiritual adviser to entrepreneurs. When we run into her, she is a hot tip for Rick. She wants to introduce him to

some people who might have money for maps. She throws out names like Guy la Liberte, who co founded Cirque to Slay, and Garrett camp, Uber's co founder. She and Rick agreed to try to reconnect when they got to the Playa. That's what the regulars like to call Burning Man. But first we have to get in and ask people who have never been burning roll around dirt. Oh let's not tell them we've never been them because I don't and they asked us. We'll just let you talk. Yeah,

I see someone rolling around in the dirt right now? Yeah? Why are they? Why is it like a hazing thing? Yeah, I'm not, Yes, I have refused. A few minutes later, I had changed my tune burns. Actually, this is my first Are you going to make me roll around in the dirt? Hey? Okay, I'll get off all right. I was looking it on the way now wearing my weights. That was me coming to grips with my new burning

man milia. That's something Rick is pretty good at. He just adapts to whatever environment he's in, and it makes him a great fundraiser, perfect because mainstreaming psychedelics is massively pricey. Rick's biggest challenge right now is getting the green light from the Food and Drug Administration. He's just kicked off the final stage of that approval process, what's known as Phase three clinical trials. That means hundreds of people are

testing a drug under close medical supervision. Rick chose's focus carefully people with post traumatic stress disorder like veterans, so a hundred people with PTSD will get treated with either m d m A or placebo, and doctors will monitor their progress closely. Those Phase three tests alone costs twenty six million dollars, and a nonprofit bringing a drug to market is rare. The only other one was Are You four eight six, an abortion drug approved in two thousand.

It was also controversial. That brings us back to why Rick is something of a folk hero in certain circles, especially among people who hope psychedelics will one day win wide acceptance, and not just for PTSD treatment. And if you need money for something controversial, we're better to look for it than a burning Man. Burning Man has become a beacon for rich technorati. After all, tickets alone cost

as much as dollars. Rick was already a long time Burner when he saw the potential wealthy tech people were coming. More and more people were coming from tech from the Bay Area. UM, it was a great opportunity to hang out and talk to people. So Rick doesn't hit people up for cash right at Burning Man. He gets to know them and when it's all over, then he asks them to donate to MAPS, his nonprofit. Many of his big donors are people he's met at Burning Man, or

they're connected to people he's met there. The festival has become such an important place to cultivate donors. He listed in the MAPS annual report. His entire board of directors goes to Burning Man. That's six out of six. One guy on his board, David Brauner, runs the soap company Dr Brauner's. David also hosts a camp at Burning Man and sets aside an air conditioned crash pad there for Rick not that Rick sleeps much a burning Man. He's

much too busy schmoozing. Rick has some pretty surprising donors. Richard Rockefeller, a great grandson of the famous oil baron, gave him money. Joby Pritzker, from the Chicago family behind Hyatt Hotels, sits on his board. Rebecca Mercer, the Trump megabacker, gave Maps a million dollars earlier this year. And a chunk of Rick's cash even comes from an air to the Precious Moments figurines, you know, those little porcelain Chaska's.

But more and more he wants to tap into the set of young millionaires and billionaires that Silicon Valley is minting. Sometimes that calls for discretion. I asked him if there was anyone in particular on his ongoing wish list, anyone he's trying to bring on board to donate to Maps. Are there some that you have your eye on that you think you just cultivate them a little bit more, perhaps they'll support maps finance chime. Yeah, and would we know some of their names? But I don't. I don't

think visiting them will. Hell. Burning Man doesn't deliver just on the money front. Rick gets to know a lot of people on the research side too. Tons of scientists had to burning Man. One afternoon, I went to a talk on the neuroscience of psychedelics. It was given by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and it was packed. Rick taps into that burning Man community to help a lot of movers and shakers in the field

connect with each other. For example, one night, we were riding across the playa on a two story tall brass dragon art car. That's when Rick finally got the chance to introduce two key players in the movement, the Dutch military's head psychiatrist and a doctor from Arizona. Oh God, there is right there yet, Eric, I was great. I felt that I need to say, h oh, thank you. I mean, that's fine. To be clear. That's a high ranking doctor from the Dutch government on a work trip

to burning Man. The night before, he told us he had gotten stranded on the far end of the play at and watched the sun rise. When he wasn't riding around on the art car, Rick was baking around looking for big wigs who could help his cause. He never quite reconnected with his friend Floor, the one who promised introductions to the Cirque des founder and the Ubert co founder. We know because we spent a whole night biking around

the Plia with Rick looking for them. He struck out at one party where he was hoping to run into Sergey Brenn, the Google co founder, He wasn't there. Instead, Rick got to talk with Grover Norquist, the anti tax crusader, for around twenty minutes. He also hubbed up with Darren Aronofsky, the director of the movie Black Swan. Rick strategy is to kind of just go with the flow and hope that the chaos of Burning Man delivers him to someone with deep pockets and an interest in psychedelic drugs. This

particularly here. You know, I don't have a list of people that I know where they're camping and I want to go see them. So that's how you've approached in the past. Yeah, sometimes I have that set up. This year, I don't. So this year is more like serendipity. And we thought he'd be upset by all the missed connections, but Rick always focuses on the positive, even when he just missed the co founder of Circus by a few minutes.

He says it's fate, he'll have another opportunity for that introduction. Instead, he relishes the small victories, like getting part of his organization listed on a flyer each visitor receives when they arrive at Burning Man. Oh my god, Oh wow, that's awesome. Oh wonderful is eight? That was just after we'd rolled into Burning Man. The flyer mentioned the Zendo Project, part of maps that helps people on bad trips at festivals. It was listed up high on the flyer above the fold.

This is about the information. This is so good. This is the kind of thing that you're gonna want to keep with you. The guy's enthusiastic a hundred percent in that came through the first time we met Rick at a conference in San Francisco, he asked us if we minded doing our interview while he picked up a little weed. Rick lives in Massachusetts, where apparently the selection just isn't

as good. He asked the saleswoman at the dispensary for the pottiest pot, and then he showed us how he planned to sneak his two hundred and twenty nine dollars worth of lemon tie test airport security when he flew back east Later that night. Really, Rick's entire adult life

has been intertwined with the legal status of psychedelic drugs. Well, the first time that I ever tried psychedelics was at college, and it was in my freshman year of college, and it was LSD, and I was profoundly impacted by the sort of flow of thoughts and feelings. This was in the early nineteen seventies. M d m A wasn't yet part of the college drug scene, but LSD and mushrooms were. By the nine eighties, m DMA became more popular. Rick was thinking he wanted to become a therapist and use

m d m A to heal people. But then m DMA became illegal to so Rick, who was thirty but still working on his undergrad degree, sued the government. He lost, but found his lifelong calling. Rick realized that bringing m d m A back was going to be a political battle, so years after starting MAPS, he ended up getting a PhD from Harvard in public policy, not psychology. He toiled in obscurity for decades, but finally his cause has gained traction.

Lots of scientists are studying m d m A and PTSD, some of them get funding for MAPS in one especially compelling study published this year, twenty six veterans and first responders with PTSD got therapy along with m d m A. After just two sessions, they no longer met the medical definition of PTSD. So we think one is when it will become m d m A sisted psychotherapy will be a legal treatment available by prescription, So that's roughly three

years from now. But that's not just Rick's opinion. Here's Gooul Dolan, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies psychedelic drugs. The clinical trials of m d m A for PTSD are remarkable and the responses are like nothing we've ever seen before, right, I mean, fs arise don't work out well, therapy doesn't work out well. You know, no ner a psychiatric drugs basically has those has had

those kinds of responses. Gool's most recent study was kind of amazing, and it grabbed a nice big headline in the New York Times. Her researchers gave m DUMA to octopuses, which are usually really kind of owners, and octopus has basically started hugging each other, or, as Gool put it, they definitely become more pro social on m d M A. A lot of Gool's research, like the Octopus study, focuses

on figuring out how psychedelics work. There's a lot we don't know, but it seems that the real power of the drugs is putting people in a state of mind where they're more receptive to things like suggestion or empathy. In a sense, what the drugs really do is help people heal themselves. That's one of the things that makes

them tricky drugs for pharmaceutical companies to pursue. Most of the research surrounding psychedelics involves using them to make typical talk therapy more effective, rather than using them on their own. Not to mention then, in studies, the drugs seemed to do their job after only a few doses, rather than a potential lifetime income stream of a prescription pill, and patents have expired on M d M A, so it wouldn't really make them much money anyway, but researchers are

still making incredible discoveries. Johns Hopkins is a major hub of psychedelic research. Back they did a small pilot study of smokers after going through one psychedelic session. A whopping eight of the volunteers had kicked their habits. Six months later, after a year, sixty seven were still non smokers, and it could also help alcoholics. When Gul was a medical school, she spent some time staying why AA meetings are effective.

Her research has suggested psychedelics might make them work even better. You know, I think you could make a case that if you gave M D M a at um, you know, one of these these alcoholics anonymous meetings instead of coffee and cigarette that, you know, the efficacy of those interventions might be bigger. The space has really grown in recent years. Another nonprofit, the U. S Oona Institute, will soon sponsor its own trials for psilocybin, and there is at least

one corporate venture in the space, Compass Pathways. They're planning their own Phase three trials in Europe and North America for treatment resistant depression. Cool thinks that funders and regulators are becoming more open minded to a future of psychedelic medicines because so many of the medicines that we have today aren't really working. I mean, I can imagine all

kinds of scenarios that you might want to use. This from Rick's point of view, PTSD is the best scenario for winning the approval of regulators in the public too. Both of the drugs that proved to treat it, Paxel and zolof are considered pretty ineffective, but studies show that m d M A is very effective. Once MAPS paves the way for m d M as medicine, Rick thinks

it will be easier to legalize psychedelics all out. The PTSD trials will take at least three years, but access could come even sooner under what's known as compassionate use programs, in which patients can gain access to experimental therapies before trials are complete. Therapists we talked to you said the results can be really amazing. One therapist who worked on MAPS earlier trials said that m DMA helped heal a woman with PTSD who had previously gone to more than

fifteen hundred therapy sessions for now. People sometimes seek out treatment outside mainstream medicine among a network of underground psychedelic therapists. Some of that even goes on at Burning Man. Rick spent much of his last few days there counseling a veteran suffering from PTSD. Rick could tell the man needed help. It was somebody that seemed on the verge of, you know, massive mental breakdown. Was was in a massive mental breakdown when we met, crying and talking about how there was

no point. Nothing else had worked PTSD for decades. You know. It was just such a powerful appeal for help. And the fact that it was both a veteran and a retired police officer. The same person who had been a veteran and also a police officer now was retired. It just made me think that this is the ideal kind of person we're trying to show. If we're trying to mainstream psychedelics. You know, what's more mainstream than a veteran

and a police officer. Along with the counseling, Rick treated the vet with m d m A. This wasn't the full treatment that MAPS is undertaking and its Phase three trials. The Phase three treatments are our of therapy with three M d m A sessions one month apart, but Rick gave the flavor of it. It was very inspiring because there was a point where this person was able to

breathe more fully than in many, many years. It started a process that I think provided hope, you know, it's not again a one dosed miracle cure, but to see someone start in a puddle of tears and feeling like all the options had been exhausted and there was no reason to live anymore. To having hope and interest in another um therapy sessions was profoundly inspiring. And also the fact that it was someone who had been a police officer for fifteen years and before that, veteran in the

Navy for a very long time. Rick says the vet is doing better and looking into getting more therapy. In one sense, legalizing m DMA for medical youth or otherwise would just be a recognition of something that is already true. Medicine isn't something that just treats illness. I think it's very difficult to figure out which uses count as medical and which uses don't. Uh, and it's become more and more difficult as medicine itself has become more consumer oriented.

That's Matt Lambkin, a law professor at the University of Tulsa. Lamb Can points out that while the approval and regulation of a drug often hinges on it having medical purpose, we also prescribe a lot of drugs to people without any medical condition at all. So what do we mean

by a medical use um. It's intuitively appealing to think, well, what we mean is treating some kind of illness, But if you take just a second to think about it, medicine does lots and lots of things besides just treating illnesses, and always has right contraception, abortion, the are medical interventions that are usually not provided to treat any illness. Lambkin can also see a future not too far away where m d m A is illegal medicine. So a lot of things that seemed unlikely to me a while ago

with respected drug policy. UM I mean, I never imagined that we would be where we are today in terms of uh marijuana across the States. It was sort of inconceivable twenty years ago. The FDA does have a track record of following the science wherever it goes. That means that m d m A could soon be widely prescribed. One thing that could easily get in the way of that, though, is money to keep pushing the science forward. Rick knows he has an uphill battle ahead, but for him that's

no obstacle. I've had to really learn how to be happy with trying rather than succeeding. And that's it for this week's prognosis. Thanks for listening. Do you have a story about healthcare in the US or around the world. We want to hear from you. You can email me at m Cortes at Bloomberg dot net or find me on Twitter at Fay Cortes. If you were a fan of this episode, please take a minute to rate and review us. It helps new listeners find the show. This

episode was produced by Lindsay Cradowell. The story editor was Mark Chauffit. Thanks also to Drew Armstrong and Liz Smith. Francesco leviashead of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.