Brian Earp on Love Drugs

to use any type of drug. One of the most popular episodes the Psychoactive to date has been the one where I invited my friend Julie Holland to service my co host and answer questions with me from you the audience. So we're going to record another one of those episodes, and we need your questions. Leave us a voicemail with a question as deep else as possible at one eight, three, three, seven, seven nine sixty, or he can record a voice memo and send it to Psychoactive at protozoa dot com. I'm

sure it's going to be a great second go with this. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. I thought this episode to have me talking with Kat Packer, who's in charge of regulating cannabis for the city of Los Angeles. But instead this being Valentine's Day week, we're gonna talk about love drugs with the bioethicist Brian Earp. He's a bioethicist and a philosopher and

interdisciplinary researcher. He's currently the Associate director of the Yale Hastings Program and Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University, and he's also a research fellow with the Oxford u Hero Center for Practical Ethics. He's co authored a book with a title that just captivated me at the start. In the US, it's called Love Drugs The Chemical Future of Relationships. If you get into the UK, it's called

Love Is the Drug, with the same subtitle. He co authored it with a faster at Oxford named Julian Sevalescue. Our conversation is really going to focus on his writing about drugs and drugs and love, drugs and breakups, drugs and relationships. So Brian, thanks so much for joining me on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me on. Your book's got a great provocative title, at least in the US, Love Drugs. You gotta give the elevator pitch four or five sentences

about what that books about? How do you sum it up? I guess it's right there in the title. It's a book about love, it's a book about drugs, and it's

a book about the effect of drugs on love. So partly we try to understand what are the chemical possibilities for intervening in our romantic neurochemistry that can really influence our relationships, both commonly used medications that are already available and you know, psychedelic drugs and m d m A and other drugs that are sort of coming down the pipeline. And then in thinking about the ways that love can be manipulated neurochemically, what does that teach us about love?

Is love something that we can gain insights into by thinking about it as a sort of thing that's to some extent under our control or that we can at least influence, rather than something that just happens to us passively. What I love about the book is you go much deeper in terms of exploring not just m DUMA and other drugs, but trying to lay out ethical frameworks for

how we think about using psychoactive drugs. Um In facilitating relationships, and not just facilitating relationships, but also helping people break up from relationships or avoid bad relationships. What's been the principal reactions to the book that you and Julian put out there. Well, the feedback from people who have read the book has been overwhelmingly positive. But when people hear about the book where they think they have a sense of what the book is about, they often have an

extremely skeptical response. So they think something like, well, if you if you have to take a drug in order to feel love for your partner, surely whatever you're feeling can't be authentic. It's not real. It's just the drug

that's doing the talking, so to speak. And I think what's surprising is just how readily convinced people seem to be when you get down into the details of what it's actually like two approach your own inner emotional life under the influence of a drug, and how under some circumstances people will report that they feel it enhances the authenticity of their relationship to themselves but also to their partners.

And as you point out, it seems like it should be self evident if we're going to be bringing these powerful drugs back into mainstream medicine as part of this so called psychedelic renaissance. We shouldn't only be studying the effects of these powerful agents on individuals and their clinically diagnosable symptoms. You know, we're all embedded within relationships and

social networks. And this is a broader fault of so called Western medicine and that it tends to atomize, and it tends to focus on the individual and their symptoms and ignore the relational and the wider social context. But of course, you know, psychedelic drugs have been used in social context as part of religious and spiritual ceremonies in

in some groups for many generations. And as you pointed out right at the get go, m d m A was used in a Western medical context therapeutically four couples as recently as the nineteen eighties, and we've we've forgotten about that, it seems, and we're now back to the individual focused model. But we think that we should really expand out and look at how drugs affect us in

relational and social context. You know, my first encounter with m d M A was when I was in my early thirties and going through a difficult time in my marriage, and a friend of mine gave nesa m d m A and my wife and I did it, and initially it felt like it was a thing that was going to save our relationship, the type of communication it opened up.

You know, we were committed to doing it in a way, so we understood we would just keep going back to the drug to facilitate this feeling, but that there will be certain ways to bring back the feeling and the lessons of the m d m A without using the drug itself. And in the end um, after trying to number more times, we ended up getting divorce. But I've always thought that our use of m DUMA helped us to a softer landing and better enabled us to be

very good co parents for our our young daughter. So I thought that that was really a beautiful story that you told, and I think it's important for people to understand that that gives us a better sense of how m d m A works than just this this blunt love drug kind of stereotype knee jerk response that I'll sometimes get when talking to people about the subject matter of the book is that they think, well, m d

m A is a pro love drug. It's something that just binds people together, no matter how incompatible they may be with the thought that again it it just takes you over zombie like and causes you to feel these these kinds of ways towards your partner, whoever you're taking the drug with, and as your experience illustrates, and as we also mentioned in the book, that's just not the case.

In some ways, the way that it's been used for PTSD is illustrative for how it can be used in a relational context, because what happens in PTSD is somebody brings up a topic that you don't want to talk about. It's very triggering for you, and you shut down and you divert the conversation to practically anything else, and as a consequence of that, you never really face and work

through and deal with whatever is the underlying trauma. And most contemporary medications for PTSD sort of paper over the symptoms and help you cope with the fact that you

haven't dealt with the trauma. But precisely why m d m A and in some cases sylo cyberin asisted therapy seems to be helpful for these sorts of conditions is that in some ways, it takes the lid off, and it allows you to confront difficult thoughts and uncomfortable truths and buried emotions rather than coming from a place of fear, approaching those emotions from a from an open minded and

almost loving stance. And so the love that you feel when people think of it as a love drug isn't just a sort of one dimensional love for the person sitting across from you or for whoever you're romantically involved with. There's also sort of loving attitude that you take towards your own emotions again under the right conditions. If if you happen to be among the subset of people for whom it works this way, it can lead you to think to yourself, maybe I shouldn't be with my partner.

Maybe what I've been hiding from, Maybe the buried emotion that I haven't been wanting to confront is the fact that my partner and I are fundamentally not suited to each other, or we've grown apart in a way that means we should let each other go. And as you say, with a soft landing or from a place of compassion, rather than you know, throwing dishes across the room, and

having some big storm out. I mean, M d m A seems like one of those drugs where, when used in the context with a therapist or responsible knowing way, the ratio of good outcomes too bad is about as high as you can get with psychoactive drugs. Is that fair to say? I think or can you think of cases where we're doing M d m A in a controlled environment has actually led to significantly bad results, well in terms of just the effects on the brain and

subjective consciousness and so forth. In order to get neurotoxic effects with m d m A you have to take several doses and higher doses, and and over repeated use. You can have a physiological risk from the drug. But as you say, when it's taken at a relatively low dose or controlled dose on a handful of occasions spaced out over time, in terms of its effects on the brain and the body, it's very very low risk, and it doesn't have a risk of an addiction for example.

So among the various drugs that are used in the psychopharmacopeia that's rolled out in psychiatry, m d m A is certainly among the safer of those drugs. Now, because M d m A is used in conjunction with counseling, or it should be under this model that we're discussing. It's true that the drug can sometimes put people into a state whereby they come to have to deal with some things that maybe they aren't prepared to deal with. That's a possibility, and it's why the psychotherapeutic context is

so important. So one way to misuse the drug is to take it in large doses, well, dancing all night in a hot warehouse and not drinking enough water and having other drugs through your system and so forth. That can be dangerous as well as enormous fun and pleasure, right Well, of course, of course, I mean so that you're you're right, there's always there's always a benefit to risk ratio. But let's say that that raises the risk

side of the Asian. Whereas another way to potentially go astray is to, you know, take it in a sort of self directed attempt at therapy with your partner or something like that, but where you haven't really laid the groundwork. Now, you don't necessarily need to have a trained therapists sitting there. I'm sure that people have had self experiments and experiments within the relationships that have been successful without all the

paraphernalia of the therapeutic context. But what we advise in the book is that really the best case scenario and where where we should center the discussion is around a carefully controlled session where somebody who has training in helping people work through difficult matters is part and parcel to the whole experience precisely so that when difficult things arise, you can work through them in a productive, in a therapeutic way, rather than make a rash decision in response

to them or whatever it might be. You know, you point at one point that actually, most divorces aren't about

people in this horrendous, horrible throwing dishes thing. It's more about you know, married couples, oftentimes with kids, you know, just getting to a point where everything's flat and not working and not good communication what you call gray relationships, and that this is sort of an optimal use or most likely to be successful use of m d M. A just say a little more about that we're aware of concerns that people have and we think they're they're valid.

That people when they seem to have access to some drug based solution or so they think to their relationship that when a couple is fundamentally incompatible with each other and really what they should do is break up, they might turn to this medication or this drug as a kind of chemical band aid to just patch things over, rather than accepting the reality of their situation and moving on.

The thing about these gray relationships that you mentioned is that they aren't fundamentally characterized by abuse or toxic behavior or or what or what have you, But rather, as you say that the feeling of love has basically faded from the relationship, and the couple maybe continues to have shared values and shared projects. Maybe they have children they're raising together, Maybe they've got plans for the future that they've oriented themselves around, and and they value the relationship

and want to work on it. And it seems like if you've got a case of a relationship that has a lot of valuable components to it and you're not ready to throw in the towel, and there's a possibility that partly what you need to to rekindle a sense of intimacy with your partner is, you know, in addition to talk therapies, you know a chemical agent that will hopefully enhance the effects of the talk therapy you were going to do anyway, Well, then it seems like that

would be the best case scenario for for introducing the drug in addition to the other therapeutic means you want to try to try. Yeah, you know, probably there was a connection that you did not make, I think in the book, but which really struck me because it came through to me from reading your book, which is, you know, on the one hand, m d m A looks like it's going to be approved for PTSD, and you talk about the importance thill of primarily using M d m

A and gray relationships. But then you have this little couple of pages where you talk there's a researcher at McGill University who makes the point that oftentimes heartbreak bear's a remarkable resemblance to PTSD, And then you talk about a study or that he's done in which people try to, you know, reduce the heartbreak, that the symptoms of heartbreak, not within d M A actually, but with another drug.

What are the other drugs that can also help in these loving in either enhancing a love relationship or dealing with the trauma of it. The drug that the researcher uses as pro panelol, which is a beta blocker, and the particular therapy is called reconsolidation therapy. It immediately bears a resemblance to what people might think of with the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, tampering with memories sort

of an intervention. A major difference is that the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind plot revolves around the technology that as I recall, sort of deletes certain memories, just races them from your consciousness and your ability to recall them, whereas this real world, real life reconsolidation therapy works a

bit differently. Basically, come into the lab, do you take preparing a law which kind of suppresses part of your nervous system so that you're automatic kind of emotional responses and fear responses to things is settled down, and then you write out a memory, the memory of the betrayal, a memory of the breakup, whatever it is that's really torturing you, and you experience what it's like to reflect on that content without the emotional response that's been so

crippling for you before undertaking this treatment, and then you restore the memory you sort of you know, through this exercise, you you re encode the memory again with some of that emotional drama stripped away from it, and then you you do this on a number of occasions, and the idea then is that you're able to remember what happened. So it's not that you have a break in the

continuity of your biographical narrative or anything like that. But when you remember it, it just doesn't trigger the trauma response. And so that's the logic of that kind of therapy. So the researcher Elaine Burnett has made the point that what he calls romantic betrayals or other sorts of romantic traumas can be among the worst experiences of people's lives, and he thinks that we shouldn't treat them with kind of rolling our eyes and saying, oh, it's just a breakup,

you'll get over it. You know. He primarily treats people with post traumatic stress disorder from all the usual causes, assault and violence, and you know, serving in a war environment, and what he was noticing was that some people were coming to him talking about their partner of twenty years walking out on them suddenly, or other such shocks to the system that come about through you know what feels like a broken heart, and and he's right to say that, in the long course of a life, some of these

romantic upsets and breakups and betrayals and so forth can certainly be among the most psychologically jarring and difficult to deal with. So once again we're in a situation where people might be worried that when you go through a breakup, the thought is you don't want to just take some drug to make those sad feelings go away, because part of the sadness is giving you an opportunity to slow

down and reflect and learn from what happened. And then as you begin to emerge from your shell and try to pursue relationships going forward, hopefully you've you've figured out some pitfalls that you don't want to fall into again. Pain sometimes is something that you know makes you stronger, but pain is also sometimes something that just crushes your soul.

And figuring out when somebody's in a position where a drug assisted treatment modality would help them get from the soul crushing kind of pain to the instrumentally useful kind of pain, that seems like something that's useful, you know, Brian, I just say I'm prepping to have this conversation with you. I actually watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a couple of nights ago, and so one of the other

things that you know. Obviously the book is called Love Drugs, but a big part of your book is about love, and you go through a kind of systematic analysis of love in a way I've never really read before, you know, I mean breaking it out, the dual nature of love, in the ways in which it's both biological and psychlosocial, the different brain systems of lust and libido and a

action and attachment all being components. Just explain more about why that sort of analysis was important is sort of us and enabling people to think about more productive and ethical ways of dealing with quote unquote love drugs and anti love drugs. Sure. I think one way that people in just popular discussions think about love, and it's maybe reinforced through films and poetry and so forth, is the

idea that it's something that happens to you. Love strikes you, like with Cupid's arrow, and then it's out of your control. And part of what we were thinking about is when you imagine intervening into some system with a technology. Partly what you're trying to do is not necessarily to control it in some deterministic sense, but you're trying to exert some influence over this system so that it moves in

a direction that is conducive to your flourishing. Now, of course, you can mess up systems by intervening in them and make things much worse, which is partly why we wanted to write this book. We wanted to try to sketch out what kinds of interventions are likely to be good for us and which one are likely to have, you know,

potentially very negative individual or society level consequences. But when you think about the system of love as the sort of thing that could be tampered with in a way, then you have to think, well, what are the moving parts, what's susceptible to influence? And here's where we begin to realize that thinking about love as something that's disconnected and just floats around in your soul is going to lead

lead you astray. Now, you can influence your feelings of love through non chemically mediated interventions, Like if you're obsessed with someone and you're trying to create some distance, you can just stop looking at their pictures on Facebook, and you can, you know, delete their phone number from your phone. There's all sorts of low tech ways to change the way you feel about someone that show that we're already used to the idea that we should be able to

exert some influence over love. And then we just realized that, however much there is a psychosocial and historical component of love, which there surely is, there's also something going on in our brains and something going on in our biology. And we thought that as we're taking drugs for other purposes, you know, just common medications like S S R eyes for depression and so forth, we should be alert to the possibility that we're already influencing the biological dimension of

love inadvertently. And then the book kind of shifts from a warning, you know, let's be sure that we aren't taking drugs for other purposes that are influencing our romantic neurochemistry in ways that might be interfering with our relationship goals too, then you know, promoting this more positive account. What if we could actually harness these technologies to change love, or nudge love, or assist love in a direction that we want, and the only way to do that is

to realize that love is a biopsychosocial phenomenon. It's all of those things. There's a way it feels like to be in love. There's the psychology of love. There's the social context, which shapes what kinds of phenomena account as love or get labeled as love or talked about as love, or have poems written about as as as constituting love.

And that of course influences how we feel about our own relationships, because you know, we don't know if what we're feeling is love until we look out there in the culture and see what people are talking about, and then we kind of triangulate what we think we're feeling with what we see getting identified as love and the culture.

And then this, this previously under explored aspect of love which we try to bring out in the book, is that there's also a subterranean aspect of love, which is what's going on in our brains and our bodies when we form attachments and feel lust and attraction toward people, and develop a sort of bond with a partner over the long haul. All of that is the sort of thing that's increasingly susceptible to being studied in a in

a scientific way. I was thinking back to the lesson I learned from reading Andrew Wild's book The Natural Mind many years ago, where he makes the point that any alteration of consciousness that we attained or can attain by using psychoactive drugs can also be attained without using these drugs. It just oftentimes takes more discipline or effort, and that psychoactive drugs are, for better or worse, the quick and

easy ways of getting these alterations of consciousness. That would that ring true with what you've studied about drugs and love. I think it's true that certain altered states of mind that otherwise might only be achievable through you know, dedicated meditation and stream sort of bodily practices and so forth, some such states of mind can be fairly, readily, fairly directly and with relatively little effort be achieved through ingesting

certain substances. And I think worry people have is that that might somehow cheapen the insights that could be gained. There's an understandable cultural association between effort and value, the idea being that if you really work for something and you achieve some some outcome, that outcome is just simply worth more than the very same outcome that's gotten through some more efficient means. Let's say, and you know, I

think you could even concede that point. You could say, maybe it is more valuable to achieve a certain kind of state of consciousness or insights that that may a company that state of consciousness through you know, decades of meditation and so forth. But unless you think that the value of that state drops to zero if it's gotten through m the ingestion of a substance, then you might still want to acknowledge that it could still be valuable.

And the way that people talk about their experiences on psychedelics and sometimes in the case of m d m A assisted psychotherapy, is that they feel that it's dramatically transformative of certain aspects of their lives. Again, not everybody has this experience, as lots of individual differences depends on

the dose and the setting and all that stuff. But for a lot of people who have just been enrolled in these trials, let's say, the drug assisted psychotherapy trials for PTSD, many of them, the majority of them in some cases, will say that the experience that they have is among the most meaningful in their life. And so

it's clear that the value isn't zero. And even if you think you can somehow squeeze some more value out of that state of mind by struggling for it without any chemical assistance, you know, what people are experiencing is clearly something that is not just a hedonic experience, but something that that is striking to them as very meaningful and something from which they feel that they learn that they gain real insights into their life and their relationships

and their own emotional world and so forth. So there may be a tradeoff there, but the tradeoff isn't one that that should cause us to dismiss the use of the drugs altogether. We'll be talking more after we hear this add there's one point where you say that the quote unquote naturalistic fallacy is one of the oldest and

most famous mistakes in ethics. You know, on the show, we've oftentimes had this issue about, you know, whether or not psilocybin or mescal in or d m T or whatever it might be, is more good, is better if it comes directly from the plan as opposed to being synthesized. And there's been a discussion about this but I guess

that same debate happens with ethics as well well. Absolutely, I mean, there's a sense in which things that are natural, if that means that we've co evolved with them and therefore we have some deep knowledge about how they work and we have a very good sense of of how to use them responsibly, then there's a sense in which

naturalness is a proxy for something that we value. But if you can recreate the chemical structure of something in a laboratory and you can learn to use it in a responsible way over time, then it's it's hard to see what the ethical relevance is of something merely being natural versus artificial, Because of course, some natural things are quite bad, like cancer, and some artificial things are obviously good,

like corrective eyeglasses and so forth. So yeah, people have to get over the natural equals good and unnatural equals bad dichotomy. But you know, both of those concepts maybe proxies or approximations for other things that we do care about, you know, Brian, at what point you mean you obviously talk about the dual nature of love and both the biological on the one hand, is psychological, and how they

interplate with one another. But one of the most fascinating things you talked about was how powerful two people looking deeply into one another's eye and remaining silent could be in terms of love. I found that fascinating. Yeah, well, this is even a trans species effect. So there's evidence that looking into a dog's eyes also releases oxytocin in both the human and the dog and seems to be part of the process by which humans and dogs form

a bond with one another. And contrariwise, in the same chapter where I was talking about some anti love remedies, people say, well, if I'm if I'm hooking up with someone and I don't want to become attached to them, what should I do? And the answer is you should close your eyes while you're having sex with them so

that you don't form this attachment. Now, again, there's whole sorts of ethical critiques that can be raised about the scenario, but nevertheless, as a practical matter, closing your eyes and blocking the release of oxytosein is helpful, and keeping your

eyes open will foment a bond in many cases. You know what I was thinking about the extremes of biological love versus psychosocial I guess the extreme of the psychosocial one might be where you have an arranged marriage where the couple comes together and ultimately full deeply in love.

And conversely, on the extremely biological. I just saw the remake a West Side Story, and there's that seed where Tony and a real lock eyes without ever knowing other, and it just seems it's biology on steroids, right, So that does happen. You know, people have something like this phenomenon of love at first sight. Now, usually there's all sorts of background conditions, like they're in proximity to each other. You know, if they live far apart, they probably wouldn't

have this experience and so forth. But you're right to point out that there's different ways that relationships are um normatively constructed in different environments. In the case of an arranged marriage is very interesting because in the quote unquote west we think of love matches as being the ideal. And in many cultures, you know, there's forced marriages, which

we object to in the book. But in some cases, the families get together and they try to find a mate for you, and you have a veto but you meet the person and maybe you you have to create love with them, and we think that's a very interesting case study for the kind of thing we're talking about, which is what if you could use not only the psychosocial tools but also biotechnological tools to help bring love into a relationship that you want to be relationship where

it doesn't necessarily start out that way. So let's go through a few of the drugs now, because this is where I learned I think the most from your book, from everything like oxytocin to SSR eyes to a range of others, but starting off with oxytocin, you know, which I guess is sometimes called the cuddle drug or the love drug enhances bonding, but it's also something that you

can get in a nasal spray. And so is oxytocin is something that we see potentially coming along as something that might be used in addition or separately from m d M A to accomplish somewhat similar objectives or is m d M A going to be more appropriate for certain context and oxytocin not? And is the research really in on oxytocin is yet? Yeah? Well, one thing is m d M A also stimulates the release of oxytocin just endogenously, So it's not a clean break between those

two interventions. You know, we started by researching oxytocin. When we have this idea for what what we're biotechnological ways of intervening in certain aspects of love. What we notice was all this stuff coming out about oxytocin, and we

thought it seemed very promising. There were all these headlines coming out about you know, people sniff oxytocin and it improves trust, and it improves eye contact and all these other things and bonding cues and so forth, and so we thought, oh, well, that seems relevant to our project, and we did a literature review, and what we found was a couple of things. One the most recent and and probably most important concern is that a lot of

the initial findings simply don't seem to replicate. So what you'll find is that a handful of laboratories will be conducting basically the same experiment. And let's say that, just to simplify, let's say twenty laboratories run this experiment and one of them gets a statistically significant result that looks publishable,

and the other nineteen laboratories don't don't find anything publishable. Well, what happens, just as a matter of sociology of science, is that those nineteen labs will simply file away their non significant result in the file drawer. This leads to something called the file drawer problem. And then that one lab that thinks it's found something, but just mathematically we can tell from the situation it's got to be a fluke.

They published their fluke as a result, and that that gets in the literature, and that's what everybody thinks the finding is. But unless you know what all the unpublished studies were, you actually can't even interpret the statistical values

that are present in the paper. So some researchers with integrity decided to look in their own file drawer and taken an accounting of how many versions of experiments they did, if you count pilot studies and things that are kind of near misses and so forth, And they said, you know, if we're honest, if we look at the bulk of all the work that we've done, not just our published papers, it's not clear that we have very good events for a lot of these these findings. Now some of them

may hold up over time. All that is just to say that we're at a stage in the scientific research process, where it's unclear which of the published findings will prove to be replicable over the long run, in which of them will turn out to just be flukes. Nevertheless, I'm still not certain that oxytocin is going to be a

major player in this area. One reason is that you know, our our brains release oxytocin under certain conditions through touch, through orgasm and kissing and hugging and eye contact and all sorts of things, so we're capable of producing our own oxytocin. It's conceivable that somebody who has a deficit in that capacity, who actually isn't able to release oxytocin on their own, or potentially somebody who's unable to engage in the sorts of activities that would allow them to

do so. Maybe somebody has some sort of trauma that disables them from certain kinds of physical contact, let's say, but they nevertheless want to enhance their bond with a partner. It's conceivable that some such people maybe candidates for an oxytocin based treatment. But what we're seeing with these nasal sprays where you just spray the oxytocin right up through the blood brain barrier and into the brain through the nose.

Is that the effects are pretty short term. The effects are measured on these highly artificial economic games and so forth. So if you're trying to operationalize trust in the context of a study, it's through these these pretty staged kind of interactions that it's not clear how they reflect anything we do in real life, and the effects seem to seem to wear off. So I'm not I'm not too keen on oxytocin as being very likely to be a significant intervention in this area, but the jury is still

out because it's still a young research field. Hello, and maybe wonder whether there could be almost a deliberate weaponization of oxytocin that you would have, whether it's a sports team or a military unit or some other group where you want to enhance their kind of intro group sense of loyalty and fidelity and closeness and enhance the sense of alienation and maybe even hostility to the other group.

That maybe oxytocin could be weaponized. Well, that's an interesting idea. Obviously, there are all sorts of psychosocial methods to achieve the same thing. In military training, for example, so a lot of what's done is precisely to strip away some of the person's sense of independent personal judgment, to socialize people into obedience to authority within a hierarchical structure, to feel a sense of real brotherhood and familial connection among the

the troops that are all on the same side. And also a sort of vilification and demon demonization and dehumanization of the enemy. And so you know, that's all accomplished with traditional standard military training. Whether that could be enhanced through the strategic use of oxytocin, it seems possible, But again, I'm not sure that the science is is evolved enough to be able to make any sort of strong prediction. So we typically don't think about animal studies as being

so key to understanding love relationships and humans. But you have a number of pages where you talk about research involving a type of rodent called voles. Just just tell our audience a little more about voles in the research and why they're relevant to think about humans. Possibly relevant, I should say, so, voles are a species of rodent, there a mammal. There are for our purposes two main

variety of voles. There's prairie voles and montane voles, and one of the species is more or less monogamous in the sense that we think of. They bond together with one partner, they protect the nests from competing potential mates, they really raised the offspring together, and so forth. The other species of val, which is closely related, nevertheless has an important difference in its mating style, which is that

it's uh polygamous. And so these voles take multiple partners, they aren't as involved in protecting and guarding the primary bond with one partner and so forth. And so this this is part of what caused researchers to realize that there's certainly has got to be some kind of biological basis to aspects of our romantic or mating psychology, and it's just so so obvious in the case of voles,

where you can also manipulate these variables. So you can intervene in the oxytocin system through injecting certain chemicals into the nucleus cucumbents of these voles, and you can in essence flip the monogamous voles to become polygamous by introducing an oxytocin blocker, and you can similarly get the polygamous voles to behave in a more monogamous way by tampering with their brain chemistry as well. And so, you know, there's always the question of how much about humans can

be learned from these kinds of animal studies. But some researchers think that this basic oxytocin system and its role in bonding and our attachment to a close partner is something that seems to have been highly conserved through you know, many different mammal species, and that there's good reason, evolutionary reasons to think that that a very similar system would

be conserved in humans. You know, there may be technological developments that allow us to administer oxytocin in a way that's more comparable to what you can do with a role, where you can do these direct injections, and if that's true, it might be that you could, you know, assert a stronger sway over human mating dispositions, which which would be

quite a striking outcome. He reminded me of conversation I had with the guest some weeks ago about kenemy, you know, and that's one where it's oftentimes used in the party scene by stiffing it right and you know, nasally, but that would the therapists tend to prefer the intramuscular administration is way to going more directly there, But people haven't really tried the intramuscular or i the administration of of

oxytocin and evaluated that is yet well. Oxytocin it works in two different ways depending on if it's active in the brain versus active in the blood stream. So it works as a neuro hormone in the in the blood stream, and that's you know, how it's used. For example, in the context of birth thing it's part of what causes the letdown of milk, and it stimulates the cervical contractions and so forth. When oxytocin is active in the brain,

it works more like a neurotransmitter. And the issue is just that the blood brain barrier causes the brain based oxytocin and the bloodstream based oxytocin to not intermingle very much, and so injecting oxytocin into the bloodstream isn't necessarily going to have the strong brain based effects that allow it

to work as a neuro transmitter. I see, So another drug you talk about, it's some length in all sorts of ways are the SSR eyes, you know, I mean this is something that what roughly ten percent of the population over the to twelve in America. But you make the point not just that ss OUR eyes need to be looked at in terms of their impact on the individual, but that one of the biggest mistakes that we make in therapy and medicine and in research is not looking

at the impact of drugs on people's relationship. There's looking just solely doesn't reduce their depression, help them, you know, get a bottom of that depression. But actually there's a whole relationship that people are involved in, and obviously we assume if you can reads to depression, that should help

the relationship. But you point out that there's a whole lot of ways in which this could also go the other direction, right, So one thing people should should realize is that when you run a clinical trial to test the effect of some drug, you have a hypothesis about what you think it's gonna do, and you prepare the trial to be able to capture data that's relevant to your hypothesis. So once people started using selective serotonin reptake inhibitors,

which are s R eyes as intended and to pressence. Well, the questionnaires and the measures they use in the study overwhelmingly have to do with symptoms of depression. Often these trials aren't set up in such a way to even capture the full range of bodily harms, but they certainly are not including questionnaires to do with interpersonal relationships or how's your relationship working out? And so this is a general point. You know, the drugs that we ingest for

medicine are just chemicals. They're just molecules, and they act on our brain in whatever way they act. But when we give them a name, when we call the drug an antidepressant, we're just saying what we mean to use the drug for. We're not saying what is the overall effect of the drug. The drug may have all manner

of other effects that we simply haven't measured properly. And then what happens is over time, when people are using these drugs, especially on the wide scale like we're seeing, you start to get stories anecdotes, case studies where people are coming and saying, Doc, you put me on these pills, and you know, maybe my symptoms of depression are a little bit alleviated. But I found that I'm just not

in love with my partner anymore. And we've had a strong relationship for fifteen years and all of a sudden, you know, after three months into taking these drugs, I just find that my my love of life and love for my partner are diminished. And what's going on? And if you start to hear enough of those stories, you think, well, maybe this is the sort of thing we should be

studying systematically rather in this slap dash anecdotal way. But you are finding that in some cases, when you, in a prospective study ask people about their relationships who are taking ss R eyes, you find some disturbing outcomes. One of them is is that people will say, Okay, I feel that the drug is dampening my chronic, maladaptive feelings of sadness, which is maybe the point of the drug, But I also find that it's dampening my ability to

care about my partner's feelings as well. It's not just my own feelings that I'm sort of detaching from. UH. In a controversial way, some people think that that's that's not the way to deal with these problems is just by you know, muting the feelings. Um. But if you're muting your ability to respond to your partner's feelings. That's something that could have pretty severe consequences for the relationship. So yeah, we we argue that it's a major mistake

not to systematically study these interpersonal variables. And I'll say, you know, I'm familiar with a number of researchers who

are extremely critical about s s R is. The one point that they'll make is that the known risk of a side effect on libido in dampening people's sex drive is very robust, and some studies put the risk of that upwards of Now, I do want to just add a caveat to this, which is that a given physical side effect, if we want to know morally how to feel about it, we have to understand how does it fit into the whole dynamic of the relationship. And I'll

just add to that. One reason why I think a lot of this research hasn't been done is precisely because it starts to get complicated when you put two people in the picture, Because now you're not just checking off symptoms with person A. You have to ask yourself questions like what style of attachment does this person have with others?

And what's really going on in the relationship and what are the background conditions of their story and so forth, and it's just increasingly hard to scientifically capture all of that variance, which I think is part of the reason

why it hasn't been done. Um but just finally on ss R I s, as some researchers think that the the therapeutic effect that's been reported is most of it is probably down to placebo, and that there's not a lot of good evidence that over and above placebo, ss R E s are for most people very effective even in treating depression, in other words, doing the thing that they're intended to do well. I mean, I was struck though,

because you said there is this limited evidence. You know, it's not just about blunting libido and arousal and the duration intensity of orgasms, but also blocking empathy. You know, quite a substantial and real SSR I sort of just

not caring as much about their partner. The depression gets lifted a bit, but then it's counteracted by this actually serious negative effect on that and that that seems to be fairly common, although, as I guess you say, there's not enough research to really know, but you did report a few studies which indicated that was a pretty sick

nificant impact of S s R EYES, right. I mean, so people who are taking ss R E s and who have noticed diminishments in their libido sometimes will just spontaneously report to their doctor as well that it's not just their sex drive that's been diminished. It's, as you say, their sense of empathy, their their ability to care about others feelings, and their ability to cry, their ability to

imagine and to dream. I mean, all sorts of things seem to be dulled by S s R E s for many people, and we think that figuring out what the interpersonal and social aspects of that are is something that should be front and center in this research going forward. You know, Brian, you talked about oftimes people don't pay attention, whether it's physicians researchers to the quote unquote side effects, which may include, you know, decreased libido and what that

would mean for relationships. But one of the interesting ones you talked about was in pointing out that oftentimes with O c D that an emotion like intense jealousy are some of the assessive aspects of amorous relationships can effectively be treated quote on well with the same drugs that we use to treat O c D. Yeah, A couple of researchers have noticed that at the level of symptomology and behavior and mindset, there are some striking parallels between

classical symptoms of o c D and certain experiences of jealousy, one of which is this checking behavior. So I have O c D, and for years, whenever I would get out of the car and i'd i'd locked the door and start walking to the store, I think that I really locked the door, and I go back and check it and Okay, it's there. And then I do it and I go and I do this, you know, fifteen times before I finally leave. It's a totally compulsive thing.

I know, it's irrational. I can't help it. Well, some people who experience jealousy do the same thing, you know, they check in with their partner. Who were you talking to and what were you talking about? And this kind of a thing, and they start to obsessively interrogate the partner because they're really just trying to deal with their own compulsion. I mean, the partner maybe is giving them

no legitimate reason to feel this extreme jealousy. And so in those cases where you have an irrational jealousy that's causing you to engage in these compulsive, repetitive behaviors that you know are really not helpful. It seemed likely to these researchers that there might actually be a neurochemical basis

for both of these kinds of symptoms. And so there are a couple of instances where the psychiatrists actually prescribed S s R e S in conjunction with cognitive behavioral therapy as a treatment for jealousy basically and found that in the cases described it was effective. Yeah. I mean you also talk about how you know, some of some of these things like m D M A almost cannoperate directly in terms of our love relationship by affecting our emotions.

But then you take a drug like viagra, right, which I guess, like I says, all, I can go cut both ways. I mean, on the one end, if viagra by enabling you know, an older man to get an erection and have sex, and if that's a desirable thing in the relationship, that could be a good thing, and not least be a good thing, because then if you're having sex, it's gonna be releasing oxytocin, which is going to be another kind of love making or love feeling drug.

On the other hand, if your partner is not interested in that part of thing, and maybe you know, viagraphy if you want to just left well enough alow, and a couple is aging into a fairly non you know, conventionally sexual relationship, or their sexual relationship is evolving away from being so focused on erections, maybe viagra does more

harmening good. Yeah, I think that's right. There's been some interesting feminist critiques of viagraa which is that it prioritizes and promotes a certain kind of penile vaginal intercourse, which often for women is not necessarily the most enjoyable form of sexual activity. And so it might well be that, you know, as people are going into older age, you know, assuming a heterosexual couple, a lot of women would prefer to have non penetrative forms of sex and to explore

their bodies in different ways and so forth. But if there's this imperative to you know, have a certain kind of uh sex into old age, and to to take a pill to accomplish that, some people would say the pill is having a certain physical effect that maybe narrowly conceived do you think is desirable? But maybe you should step back and think about the bigger picture here, you know, is there more to sex than just the sort of

thing that this pill enables. Well, you also talk about, you know, different types of relationships and the role of sex in and I remember reading once Brian. I don't know if it's accurate or not, but that if you look at the relationships that oftentimes are the most successful over a long period of time, it's where the couple is more or less evenly matched in their desire for sex. So that a couple which remains highly sexually oriented is

more likely to do well. Or conversely, a couple where both are are not particularly sexually oriented, for whom they have a loving relationship that's almost maybe more like a sibling relationship, you know, with little or no sex can also be highly successful. And that some of the greatest tensions can result when the when then there's a mismatch there.

And then I think in the book which you raises the issue that one could use drugs either to bring these things more into a greater commonality, that in one sense it might be helping the less sexually oriented person to become more so or conversely diminishing the person who's more sexualized, who wants more sex, in order to create a greater meeting ground, and that this can be done

an ethically either way. Yeah, there's a there's a certain possibility here that, you know, adjusting libidos of one or the other partner to try to make them more harmonious could be helpful. An early critique of some of our work I don't remember who raised this was that, you know, there's an alternative here to to try and get this couple's libidos matched, Which is supposed one partner is interested in having sex once a month and the other one would really prefer to be having sex once a day.

It seems like, gosh, how are they going to deal with this problem now? Of course, the problem assumes that they're in a monogamous relationship. There's a background norm here that's causing this particular mismatching libido to amount to a problem. Whereas it could be the case if this couple was in an open relationship and the partner with the stronger libido was allowed to have sex with other partners under certain agreed upon conditions and so forth, it might be

that there's no problem at all in the relationship. And so this just drives to a broader point, which is partly what we're trying to do in the book is say it's not ever enough to just ask what's the local effect of technology? We have to rather ask what are the set of norms within which the technology is working, What are the set of social background assumptions that are

shaping how we evaluate the technology? And so you're right, I think that for a couple who overall values of monogamy, and they have strong reason too, and maybe they've considered open relationships and so forth, and they've thoughtfully rejected that given their particular you know, dispositions and values for them, it might be that the use of a drug to sink things up in terms of libido could be the

best solution for them. But this is always a risk of technologies, is that they sometimes allow us to they disincentivize us, I should say, from having to think about the norms that we're taking for granted, Whereas if we didn't have the technology available, we might have to confront certain things about our implicit value system that otherwise we wouldn't be interrogating. And that's something that that has to

be kept in mind. That technologies can draw our attention away from social conditions and from background norms, and that's something that we should be wary of. Let's take a break here and go to an ad h Of course, you keep making the point that we just need to be aware of the ways in which drugs can affect

our relationships. You know, one of the things you come back to oftentimes is about hormones and drugs that affect hormones, like birth control pills, And there was some study I think you pointed out about, you know, the impact of birth control pills on the types of mates that women may end up choosing and whether those relationships turn out to be successful long term or not. Right. So, this is research where some of it seems robust, some of

it seems contested. But the standard narrative is that part of what drives our attraction to particular mates is something to do with our old factory system. We seem to be picking up through our nose and through all faction evidence of the genetic compatibility of ourselves with the partner in terms of passing on healthy and in systems. It's called immunohisto compatibility complex is something that supposedly is detectable in this semi conscious, unconscious way through you know, molecules

that we can we can smell off the person. And so the thought is birth control, hormonal birth control may disrupt this process. It may make it so that we're less sensitive in terms of these subtle cues that we pick up through a person's smell to our sort of underlying compatibility with them that normally would be driving our

sense of attraction. And so here's the risk. Suppose that I'm on birth control, I'm I'm dating around and I'm trying to figure out who a good might mate might be, and I've I've got this process blocked so that I'm missing a certain amount of important information, and I'm going off of other information. You know, this person is charming and friendly, and they seem nice, and we get along well, and they make me laugh and so forth, and so

you you decide to go along with that partnership. And then at some point, let's say you want to have children with this person, so you you go off birth control. And now it happens is in some cases you have information now made available to you that in some cases just turns you off, where through these subtle, subconscious cues that you're getting through your factory system, something in your

brain is saying, warning, this is not a good genetic match. Uh, this is not somebody who you should be combining your genes with for the sake of the health of your offspring. And the way that that plays out phenomenologically is that you just feel not into the person. Your your sexual chemistry is not there, and so this can be a very devastating kind of a situation for people. There's evidence

that this sometimes happens. How often it happens, how robust this story is is unclear, but that's kind of the starting point for research in this area. But the result being that a couple of that gets going when a woman's using the birth control that later in the life she may find herself being maybe sexually less connected, less frustrated.

But I think you also make the point, or these studies make the point that sometimes that same person who she's feeling more and more dissatisfied with may actually turn out to be good on the parenting level or something like that. Right, there seems to be some paradoxical findings in this area. So yeah, We'll have to see how this research develops. But it's it's it's it's a very sort of thing that we're talking about should be done.

I mean, lots of people are und hermonal birth control, and as many women know, hormonal birth control can have radical effects on your subjective experience, on your moods, on you know, sometimes how you relate to other people, and so understanding the full swath of of potential effects beyond just you know, you might experience nausea or breast tenderness. It's like you might experience relational difficulties, and we should be aware of the range of relational difficulties that people

may face. Well. A big part of the book, also, right, is talking about the role of drugs in terms of our unhealthy or dangerous or abusive relationships, as well as relationships that might not be any of those, but which

for religious or cultural reasons, may be disfavored relationships. Right, And you talk about obviously, when it comes to drugs, are sums that are gonna help reduce you know, sort of anti lust drug and that may be the easiest, and anti attraction drugs are harder, and anti attachment drugs

even harder. Than that, But you have a whole discussion about, you know, trying to block lust, right and obviously with pedophilia, you know there's testosterol blockers and this chemical castration, but you know there's also other situations you talk about where people may want to be blocking the lusty field, blocking their feelings of wanting to have sex with somebody from the same sex, where that's not something that their culture

or religion permits. Just expand on that part of it, Brian, if you would, right, So, we were thinking about these hypothetical anti love drugs, and some of them are not so hypothetical. So as as you mentioned, intervening in the testosterone system can very much dampen in person's libido. And if you have a damp in libido, that means that, as you said earlier, you're not releasing oxytocin in certain contexts,

which can affect attachment and so forth. So you can institute a kind of global anti i don't know, bonding, anti romance effect in some cases through these libido impairing drugs, which which have been used in the case of sex offenders and in the case of some people with pedophilia, in the case of sex offenders or people of pedophilia. Beyond that, are there cases of just, you know, ordinary folks who might also be interested in somehow taking an

anti love drug just to use that shorthand. And we noticed in looking through the literature that there's there's a lot of people who think to themselves, gosh, you know, my life would be so much better if only I could not be in love with this person. You know, maybe you're pining after somebody who won't ever return your feelings. Let's say, unrequited love can be an absolute disaster for your sense of self esteem, your ability to focus on

anything else. And so it seems like, wow, if I could take some pill that would allow me to just focus more on myself and my own goals and not be so obsessed with this person who will never be interested in me, maybe that would be a situation where it could be ethically appropriate or even prudent to use this technology. We also thought of somebody who is desperately attached or attracted to someone who abuses them and who they know rationally, I ought not to be in this relationship.

What's best for me is to leave this this household and get out of here and set up my life somewhere else. But many people will report that, and this is often a side effective abuse where you have a kind of Stockholm syndrome kick in, where people will feel even more attached to the person who abuses them, maybe because partly they're trying to rationalize the abuse in some way.

And so this is a very difficult situation where if a person has a higher order awareness of the fact that they ought to leave the relationship, and they wish that that first order attraction that they feel were diminished because it would help them achieve their important and sensible goal to leave the relationship, we thought that might be a good use of these drugs as well. But then

we came on too. Well, you know, once you have a technology available, once you you know, put the gun on the on the stage set, somebody might use it for something other than how it was intended. And so we thought about the way that people with minority sexual orientations, gay people in many cultures historically certainly, but also in many places today have been forced to undergo various forms of chemical castration and attempted conversion therapies and so forth.

And we think this is a real worry because the main refrain that you hear now in the case of conversion therapy is well it doesn't work. They say, well,

it's harmful in any way. It doesn't work these various techniques that people employ in in conservative religious communities to try to turn a gay person straight to to use that lingo, and and we thought, well, that's maybe a bit myopic, because insofar as there is some neurochemical, genetic, biological basis to sexual orientation, it might be that in the future technologies could be developed that would be effective and you'd have a kind of high tech conversion therapy.

And we thought this is something we should actually take seriously as a concern because it would undermine one of the main arguments that's used to promote the human and civil rights of gay people, which is sexual orientation can't be changed. Sometimes there's actually conflation, which is they'll say, well, a person is born this way, and that implies that it can't be changed, but that doesn't actually follow. You might be born with the trait that can nevertheless be changed.

But basically that's what people mean is think I didn't choose it, and also I can't change it. Therefore you shouldn't discriminate against me, And we think that's a bad argument because if it turns out that you can change it, well, then it suggests that your ethical argument for why gay people should have human rights is suddenly the empirical premise is refuted, and that just seems like a really bad

way to go. The claim for human rights and fair treatment and non discrimination of sexual orientation minorities um follows the same logic as why you shouldn't be able to discriminate against people because of their religious beliefs. But you can change your religious beliefs. It's not like they're immutable.

In fact, Dan Savage has made this point. The idea that something has to be immutable in order to be worthy of respect is just a nonsense premise, and so we should come up with stronger, more principled arguments to support gay rights rather than things that hang on a potentially contingent empirical premise about what I also see you do any of the book, and it's very nu odds right.

Is on the one hand, you say, look, it's not enough to just look at the impact of drugs and individuals and relationships in a laboratory set, and you need to look at it in the real world to real

you understand this stuff. And then I think the same point you make in some respects in terms of the ethical views, right, which is that you and I and many other people, especially people are progressively minded, would say that, you know, we need to change the morays and the values so that people can have a loving, sexual intimate relationship with somebody of whatever sexual orientation or or gender.

That that should just that's just what it means about to talk about the human rights of individuals and the human rights of people, you know, when it comes to their sexuality. But then you have the interesting case, right of these young men growing up in a Jewish ultra orthodox background who feel, you know, homosexual desires, and in that community there's some encouragement, if not pressure, for these young men to take SSR eyes or other things that

we just simply reduce their sexual desire. I mean, the same thing might be true when it comes to people going to the Catholic priesthood are expected to be celibate, and it would also be true of Christian Islamic fundamentalist views where they just far home and sexuality. So we say, yes, these views, of course they should evolve in these are

backward views and their anti human rights. But in the real world, where people may in fact sometimes be tortured by their own homosexual desires, and would you know, in their own perhaps prefer to let go of those desires so that they wouldn't be so tortured, that raises an interesting ethical dilemma, right, absolutely, it's an extremely difficult case.

So I agree with you that if I could wave a magic wand and make these deep seated, religiously justified homophobic attitudes disappear, that's obviously the preferable course of action than trying to help somebody who is situated within that value system cope with or change their sexual orientation. You know, so from a progressive moral standpoint, there's simply no reason that a person should ever feel pressured to change their sexual orientation. But here's the problem. We live in a

world where not everybody has a progressive moral worldview. And in fact, if you are raised in an ultra Orthodox community or you know, fundamentalists Christian community or Islamic community, where these sort of anti homosexual attitudes are embedded within the value structure of the religion, it's easy for somebody standing outside of that worldview to say well, just you know,

just leave your community. It's it's that simple. But for some people who are in a relatively cloistered community, whose whole worldview, whose friends and family and everything that they ever cared about is wrapped up in this, and also who made themselves sincerely hold these religious beliefs, that's the

further thing. You know, a lot of these youths that I reported on, they go to their rabbis and their counselors and they say, I have these desires that I, based on my own theological commitments, believe are separating me from the creator of the universe. Now what do you do with a claim like that. I might go up to the person and say, well, let's do a little philosophy of religion and maybe I can you know, talk you out of your commitment to your reading of the

Torah or something like that. But you know, it just ain't that simple. If this other person is an adult of sound mind and they've reflected on these reviews, these views, and they've they've studied their religious beliefs, and they really have a certain kind of different premise. They model the world differently, and they see that what's most important to them and their sense of self is, say, their relationship to God, and they see their sexual desires as being

not central to their identity. Again, I think there's every reason to try to persuade them of a different view, or to try to maybe provide resources whereby there's some way to reconcile their religious beliefs with their sexual orientation. But at some point I think, I think you have to try to be respectful of a person's self conception and not tell other people how they ought to feel.

And then this raises an extremely difficult situation, which is suppose you're in one of these communities where as a matter of fact, you are depressed. You're depressed because you have feelings that you based on your theological commitments which obviously were socialized into having cause you to reject. And now you go to the doctor and you say I

need some treatment for this. Now the doctor has an opportunity to give you a drug that is, you know, on the label it says it's going to treat your depression, which is a vale reason to prescribe the drug for you, but it also has a known side effect that it is probably going to reduce your libido. Which will make you maybe not have these feelings at least not so

strongly that you had before as as a side effect. Now, if you know that that's a side effect, if it's a foreseen but now also intended outcome of the drug, it's really just being used as high tech conversion therapy. Well, it's not re orienting you necessarily, it's basically just killing your libido. But that's the situation that these counselors are

confronted with. And I guess maybe structurally the way of talking about it is how much human well being in the here and now for people who are embedded within certain social networks should be sacrificed on the altar of

long term social change by making certain technologies unavailable. If prescribing an s s r I to one of these Yeshiva students genuinely will help them function and live their life in a way that's not despairing, it seems like there's at least a prima facial reason that that should be done. Now again, somebody will say, well, you shouldn't do that, You should just change their entire social, moral,

and religious worldview. And my thought is, okay, well, God bless you, good luck, with that in some communities it seems like that's not the most immediate way to relieve suffering, and it just puts people in this horrible, horrible dilemma. And so we really struggle with that case in the book. We don't quite know what to do with it, because it's a true dilemma with just tragedy on every end.

You know, it may be also wondered about other sort of group settings, like when you know, we have an America over two million people behind bars, you know, over who are men, and in the vast majority, we presume our heterosexual who may want to have a reduced sex drive while they're behind bars to make life more manageable.

We could think about, you know, as military units become more integrated of men and women, but where there may be good reasons for military discipline to discourage any sort of sexual relationship, you know, whether homosexual, heterosexual, or what have you. That you know, there could be arguments for allowing or even having these draw ugs be administered in

order to accomplish other desirable objectives. Now, of course, there's a question about who says who determines, you know, it's one thing to say that, you know, the prison ward is gonna say we're gonna give this to all the inmates, or that the head of the military unit's gonna say we're gonna give this to all. But when done on a voluntary basis, yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, some people will question the degree of voluntariness of a certain choice if the choice is being made within what

others construe as an unjust system. So if I'm in an oppressive institution and I think that I'm making a choice to relieve certain burdens within that institution, some people would say, well, you're really being coerced by the circumstances. Now there's a whole philosophical debate we could have about that, But that's just raising a point of nuance. Here's the way of making maybe making the point even more dramatic.

I have a colleague, O the Martin Mohan, who's a Norwegian philosopher who wrote a paper about a way to potentially deal with the immense suffering that goes along with factory farming, mass factory farming of animals who are just you aren't basically being tortured all all day long and

then slaughtered unceremoniously at the end of it. Now, what people like Cale Martin and I who are non meat eaters, would prefer is that factory farming was banned, and so that's what we think is the morally preferable state of affairs. We shouldn't be having factory farming. But we're also aware of the fact that for every day that factory farming continues and isn't banned because of complicated political realities that

we can't change. You know, we should advocate for the change, and in the long run, hopefully it will be banned. But in the meantime, there's billions of animals just living utterly miserable lives, and so only Martin says, maybe there's a moral obligation to basically drug these animals on mass so that at the very least they can be, you know, high on some sort of drug and not feel all the pain that they're going through and not be aware of the fact that they're living in such dire circumstances.

You know, when he told me this idea, I recoiled. I felt, what a horrible idea. You know, if you if you administer these drugs to these poor pigs and chickens and so forth, all it's gonna do is disincentivize anybody from pursuing the long term structural change that's needed, because they'll say, well, the the animals aren't suffering anymore,

so what's the problem. And so you know this is this is an analogous kind of a dilemma, and as you can tell from my animated way of speaking, I don't know how to resolve it because I agree that those animals are suffering right now, and it might well be that the mass distribution of drugs would help these animals right now not suffer so much, but it might

be at the cost of disincentivizing long term social change. Yeah, and you know, I mean this is also where I think you have a bit of a dilemma, which is when we talk about the policy implications of all this,

and it's different points. You go back and forth between whether or not these drugs should be bad or be allowed by prescription only, right, And I think at one point you say M D M A should be prescipe prescription only is you know, adults should not be allowed to obtain that outside some sanctioned setting, perhaps involving prescription. While at the same time you're saying we don't really want to be medicalizing relationships and putting all this in

the hands of doctors in an inappropriate way. And then you bump into the issue that even when things are banned, you know, where there's a market, people will end up using this, and that bands can have the effect of reducing the number of people of access who do certain things, but at the same time increasing the dangers and risk for people who do participate or or or obtain that drug in an illicit environment. And I see that's another issue where you're sort of struggling with where should we

be going on this without coming to any clear conclusions. Yeah, so you know you're right to raise these tensions within our our work. One thing I'll draw distinction here is we think that it would be most prudent for people to take these powerful drugs under some sort of guided hand, somebody who has the wherewithal to be able to help them have the best possible experience and to avoid some

of the worst possible risks. Whether that's a doctor in a white lab code or whether it's somebody who's undergone some other form of training in a less obviously overtly medical setting. Is unclear, but we don't argue that that should be the only legal option. And I can I can tether this to another paper that I wrote with many colleagues recently, whose title is Racial Justice requires Ending

the War on Drugs. So we argue that actually drugs should be not only decriminalized, We argue for the long term legalization of drugs for reasons to do with safety and making sure that the drugs that are used aren't only available in underground markets and so forth. And so I think that it should not be a crime for people to consume substances however they are obtained. It might be good for it to be a crime for certain

people to sell certain substances in an irresponsible way. I mean, just in the way that if you have a you sell alcohol, you have to have a liquor license and you can't sell to teenagers. You know, maybe something similar should be true for silocybin and M D M A and so forth. But we do think it's prudent. We think it's makes sense and is the best case scenario to be using these drugs in an appropriately supported way. And then as for medicalization, the main concern we have

is that under the current model. If you want to make a drug available to someone, it's I there, it's a criminalized recreational drug quote unquote, or we call it medicine. And in order to give somebody a drug that we

call medicine, we have to diagnose them with something. And then what happens, and pharmaceutical companies have been implicated in this for a long time, is this kind of disease monitoring where you figure out that a drug might be able to help someone, and maybe it genuinely can help them in some way, but you don't have a diagnostic category yet, You don't have a pathology or a disease label that you can apply to them, And so you make one up, and you come up with some diagnostic criteria,

and you lobby for it, and you get some psychiatrists to sign onto and so forth, and now you've come up with a new disease that we can subsume human experience under and come up with, you know, here's the prescription to solve the disease. So we try to say we should think about drugs as potentially being enhancements, in other words, things that can simply help make your life go better if used in the right way under the

right circumstances without having to first pathologize you. We don't have to decide whether you have a relationship disorder or some sort of I don't know, commitment phobia, or something becoming a diagnostic category. We can just say, given your circumstances, a kind of relationship you're in, your values, and the likely effects of this drug, if this drug is made available to you, you know, setting other considerations aside, will

it help your life be better? And if it would help your life be better, we think that that should be a sufficient reason to make the drug available, even if there isn't some pathologization that also goes along with it. Yeah, I mean, I I just thinking in terms of contemporary politics to initiatives pest and our again back in one was an old drug decrime, one to sort of institute a Portugal like model with respect to drug possession and harm reduction and treatment. And the other was one to

legitimize psychedelic assists. Psilocybin specifically assist a psychotherapy where one would not necessarily I think, need to have a defined medical condition where one might be able to use it just to enhance quality of life. And you know, I was just recently at a meeting looking at the next wave of psychedelic spalat initiatives, and one that's being proposed, possibly in Colorado that light include both this prescribed use of psychedelics but also ways of decriminalizing the non prescribed

use as well. So it does seem like these are going to be some of the interesting policy debates going on in this area. Yeah, you're really touching on the frontier of this debate. And when the organ statute was passed or ordinance or whatever it was, I was really intrigued to see the circumstances under which they'll make a silo cybin available. And you're right, it's a sort of quasi clinic like environment where you can have access to

the drug. You don't have to have a prescription. I think you just have to be twenty one and maybe you have to get a license or something like that, and then you just take it insofar as you think it will be good for you. Maybe you even take because you think it'll be fun, and maybe that's a legitimate reason to take a drug, as long as as

you say, there's a certain margin of safety. And so this is the first practical thing that I've seen that actually maps onto our ethical framework where policymakers out there

in Oorgan. I haven't been in touch with any of them, but they've stumbled on a solution that is saying, there should be a way to safely obtain and have access to drugs that you know are sufficiently safe and that can be used in ways that are well being or life enhancing, and the fact that you see them as enhancing is enough of a reason to have access to

the drug. We don't have to go through all a rigimar role of deciding that you have some sort of treatable disease that the pharmaceutical companies can make a bunch of money off of. And so I was incredibly intrigued to see that, and I think that that's the sort of thing that's probably going to be rolling out in years to come. Okay, So, just to conclude a few

random things. One other drug we haven't talked about, but you mentioned periodically as perhaps the most universal of all love drugs is boots alcohol, right are well, Well, you know, we raised the alcohol example just to show that there are certain drugs that were culturally familiar with and then have been tangled up with our romantic escapades for centuries, and so partly the use of alcohol was to prepare the reader for the idea that altered states of consciousness

can be handled poorly and can be handled well. You know, some people get drunk out of their minds and blackout and hurt other people. I mean, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs we have, but it's also a drug that, when used responsibly, and we have certain cultural norms around how best to use it, can put a person into a state of mind where they're more open to pursuing, you know, a conversation with someone that they think is sort of cute across the way that otherwise

they might not have the confidence to do. And we further wanted to say it doesn't necessarily make the conversation that follows in authentic. I mean, you don't want to have to always be drinking alcohol in order to talk to the person. Hopefully, at some point you establish something that's non drug mediated to see whether the relationship can

stand on its own feet. But the idea that a drug could serve as a catalyst for some kind of interpersonal discovery is something we're familiar with, and we just wanted to to use that low hanging fruit as a way to prime the reader for our thesis. And one drug you don't talk much about, except we just briefly alluded to, we're pheromones. Pheromones we didn't include in the book for two reasons. One it seems like that's the

first thing that people think about. You know, you you smell somebody and then somehow you become attracted to them. But the other reason is that they're extremely poorly understood. Nobody really knows how pheromones work. Nobody knows how they relate to why it is that particular people we find

attractive and others we don't. I mentioned that we have some information about the old factory system as giving us potentially semi conscious, subconscious clues to genetic compatibility, and that came up in our discussion of formonal birth control, which might impair that process. But my understanding, which is admittedly superficial, is that pheromones are so little understood in terms of how they are related to romantic attraction that I wasn't

sure we get much attraction bringing them up. But that's something I'd like to look into some more. There's not I think a mention of the word cannabis or marijuana in the entire book. How come? Yeah, I think you're right. I don't have a good answer for that. For whatever reason, we started out with oxytocin and kind of took a winding path based on that, and we just missed cannabis. But maybe in the next edition of the book will

have a chapter on cannabis. So Brian, I asked almost all the guests here a similar question, And I'll let me frame it this way. Are you able or willing to share any ways in your own life in which psychoactive substances and love relationships have interacted that have shed insight in terms of your work or stimulated your interests in this area. Sure, I guess there's maybe one way

of saying this. So many of the academic papers that served as the basis for drafts of the book I wrote at a time when I was in a romantic relationship, and my partner was a co author on several of those papers. We both had a degree in psychology and background cognitive science and so forth, so we hadn't particularly specialized in romantic chemistry before I started on this book project.

But as a consequence, of being together and working on these projects together, we started to think about romance in terms of things that we're going on in our brains. And you know, one possibility, and I think a fear people have is that if you think about love and romantic attraction and so forth in terms of neurochemistry, some people fear that that would just kill the romance of it if it becomes sort of scientifically tractable question, which

therefore loses its mystery and it's it's poetry. And interestingly, we didn't experience that. Now, it might be just idiosyncratic because we're scientists and we like to talk about this kind of stuff, But what we found is it was possible both to describe in theoretical third personal neurochemical terms what was going on with us and to experience it

subjectively and feel the full force of its value. So the fact that knowing about how something works doesn't necessarily undermine the qualitative experience and value that's derived from that very same phenomenon, you know, experience from the inside out, was a striking discovery that came about over the course of this research. Okay, fair enough, well, Brian Listen, thanks so much for having this conversation to me, I've loved it. I love reading your book and uh I encourage our

listeners to get a hold of it. The book called Love Drugs. You know what I look forward to, you know, seeing where you go with this next. So thanks so much for being my guest and Psychoactive, thanks very much for your excellent questions. This was a lot of fun. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear

from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman.

It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus, and Darren Aronovsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to Abbvi Brioseph Bianca Grimshaw and Robert B. B M.