Rick Doblin on a Life in Psychedelics Advocacy

any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. My guest today is an old, old friend of mine. His name is Rick Doblin. He founded the Multi Disciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies to win his maps back in the mid nineteen eighties, and he's been fighting the good fight on psychedelics reform

and legalisation for all those years. He's best known for the role he's played in trying to get the f d A to approve the drug m d m A otherwise known as ecstasy for treatment of PTSD, and that seems like it's gonna happen in the next couple of years. But Ris also played a pivotal a really historical role in the Psychelics Renaissance, both leading up to it and what's going on now. So Rick, thanks ever so much for joining me on Psychoactive even it's such a pleasure.

Glad to be home here talking with you. Okay, Well, well, so my and if our listeners, I should let you know that there's a special on Netflix that was put together by Michael Polling called Changing Your Mind, based upon his book. It's a four part series and one of the episodes, I think focuses on Rick and Map. So we thought this would be a really good time to have Rick on to join us. So, Rick, is there

anything you want to tell you? Always right to begin with about the special and what you think is going to be in there. Uh that Yeah, Well, first off, I like to say that, you know, we don't really do science. We do political science, meaning that we have to be very political about you know, what drug we use, what patients we do that and keeping sense of the larger political dynamics and so a lot of it is

symbolic communications. So one of the things that I'm so excited about for the Netflix documentary is that there's two minutes of the documentary that's going to be about a police officer from the Boston area who's also a psychotherapist, and he's been through our training program for therapists because he's interested in giving m d m A to police officers with PTSD and he's had people that he's um in his department and departments that he knows of have

committed suicide police officers, and so he's very compassionate. And I've gotten to meet his police chief and also the head of the Police Offs Union for Massachusetts and others, and we were able to persuade his police chief, Sarco Gregarian is the police officer's name, that he should be permitted to volunteer to receive m d m A in a protocol that we have f d A d A proof protocol to give him du made a therapist as

part of their training. And so he did get that permission, and there's a documentary team following his journey from police officers psychotherapist to police officers psychedelics psychotherapist, and two minutes of him taking m DUMA and him commenting on it was filmed and is going to be used in the Netflix documentary. So I think the message that we're trying to send to people. Is the opposite of this is,

you know, psychedelics for hippies. And you know, I've often thought about the police as the predators and myself as the prey and other drug users as the prey. But in this case, you know, I've sort of wised up about that, and I think if we weren't for the drug war, you know, we would all be uh much more grateful for the police. And so I think this communications about how the m d m A says that therapy is really for everybody. It's for um, police officers,

it's for prisoners, it's for prison guards. UM, it's for perpetrators, it's for victims, you know, I think, I mean when you're talking about the cops. I mean there's also been this whole connection with the military, right imagine saw There's something popped up just just recently, in fact, that the former head of the Australian Defense Force, as a fellow named Chris Barry, has said he hopes this moves forward

in Australia. And I think you've had your own contacts with the Pentagon and with the military, if I recall correctly, in Israel and also in Jordan's so maybe just you know,

say a little more about that. Yeah. Well, also the head of the military in England is very interested in m d m A and General Nick Carter, and he's been very much support of of m d m A. But for me also it has involved this kind of healing process, the same as working with police officers, working with the military, and you know, for this idea of

political science. You know, we have such support in America for the military that I felt it was absolutely essential that we have bipartisan support for what we're trying to do. And so we've gotten support from some very right leaning philanthropists, Rebecca Mercer being the most right leaning of them. Uh, you know, Cambridge Analytica and Bright Bart and Parlor. I want to get into effort thing, but just stick with the military leadership. You've had contacts with the Pentagon, You've

had contacts with Israeli Jordanian military. I mean, how far have they gone would have been the most successful. Just to give you a quick overview, We've treated over sixty veterans with PTSD, but we have yet to treat a single active duty soldier and so that is the kind of crossover that we're anticipating as the next step in this integration of psychedelic psychotherapy into society will be actually

working with active duty soldiers. And we are working with a Dr. Bob Kaufman, who is senior emeritus psychiatrist at Walter Reid, the military hospital there, and we're thinking that over the next couple of months we might actually be able to um enroll active duty soldiers as well. And we do have support from Bob Persons, who's a major

philanthropist who himself had PTSD from Vietnam. He started going together, he started Go Daddy, Yeah, yeah, and so he has actually donated funds to treatment facility in Rockville, Maryland, not far from Walter read specifically for active duty soldiers. But here's where I learned about the hierarchies in the military.

This was now over ten years ago, and there's a psychiatrist, Rob McClay at the San Dieg Enaval Medical Center, and he had a two week inpatient program for Navy Seals and Marines with PTSD, and this was the last step before they would either get enough relief from their PTSD symptoms that they could go back to duty, or they would be transferred to the v A as disabled from PTSD, and so he wanted to work with us on m D m A. And what he said was that he

wasn't high enough in the hierarchy, that he needed to get the support of the admiral in the facility. And I said, okay, that sounds reasonable. So then he gets the support of the admiral, and then he says, well, the admiral likes this idea, but he's not high enough in the hierarchy. We need to go to the Pentagon.

And I just kept thinking as I was going in the Pentagon that, um, you know, in the sixties the Yippies had tried to levitate the Pentagon as part of their Vietnam War protests, and needless to say, the Pentagon did not levitate. But here we were, all these decades later, being invited into the Pentagon to talk about psychedelics the hippies. The Hippies couldn't levitate it, but we could go in

and talk about helping the veterans with PTSD. And the meeting went great, And then they said that they weren't high enough in the hierarchy that we had to go up to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs in charge of all health for all the militaries of all the different divisions, and they said we needed to go onto the hill, meaning we needed to get political

support as well. So that's when we started engaging Senator j. Rockefeller, and he also had a series of meetings with the Eric Shinseki and several secretaries of the v A. And this all culminated in a meeting in two thousand and fourteen with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs and his staff, and the National Center for PTSD of the v A, the executive director and the assistant director of that, and a variety of other people from the Navy.

What they said was that there was a concern about working with active duty soldiers, and the concern was that if they were to permit us to work with active duty soldiers at that time, they were worried that the need for treatment for PTSD was so great that that would encourage active duty soldiers to try to self medicate, and that they would get the quote wrong message, which

we've heard so much in drug policy. You know. My my view of that it was, well, if the need is so great, you know, you should immediately start research, but the decision was made that we should start with veterans. And one of the people that was at that meeting was Dr John Crystal, who's head of the Neuroscience division

of National Center for PTSD at Yale. And there was a woman named Candice Monson who used to be the head of women's health at the Boston VA and she had developed a treatment for post traumatic stress disorder called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy, and conjoint means couples or diets, and what that means is that in this diet, both of them are brought into the therapy, but one of them has PTSD and it affects the relationship there they're in,

but the other person doesn't have PTSD. And they felt that if you could do this sort of couples therapy or diets, that that might be more effective than just treating the individual patient with PTSD. And so since they had heard about the love drug and the hug drug as ecstasy, their idea was that this would be a good first step that we could try to blend m d m A with cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy, that we

had to pay for it. The v A would not pay for it, they wouldn't refer any veterans to the study, and the study would take place with academic affiliations, but not inside the v A, and that we would not be permitted at that time to do anything with active duties soldiers, and so we thought any place we can start is a great idea, and so that began our first effort with v A affiliated therapist working outside of

the v A, and the results were phenomenal. It was better than anything they'd ever seen before, both in the reduction of PTSD symptoms in the person with PTSD and also in the strength of the relationships, and so this

was just so exciting. We did six die ads and we have now built on that and have funded a study that's going to be with sixty diets in Toronto, thirty that get cognitive behavioral can joint therapy and thirty get cognitive behavioral con joint therapy with m d m A. And we're also starting studies inside the San Diego VA and eventually also inside the Phoenix b A to blend M D m A with cognitive behavior can joint therapy.

It's safe to say that at this point, you know, the head of the Veterans Administration, United Dates, probably you know, the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin. Probably their equivalents in other countries are all aware now of m d m A and its potential to treat PTSD. Yes, yes, and it's it's safe to go even further that they are both aware and supportive of the research. Like sure, General Nick Carter, the head of the British military recently retired.

He spoke about how this was a very important priority and that there should be more research and he actually was speaking at a fundraiser at a million dollars was

raised for our research in London at King's College. You know, the Israeli military is very supportive and they've you know, permitted people that have PTSD from their war service to be in our studies, people who are still well, it's different in Israel and that once you're in the military you still have to do like reserve duty for like a significant amount of until you get I think around

forty or so. So those people were permitted there. So I think that we we do have not just active awareness, but I think we have good will in the sense that these people hope that it works well. For example, right now, there's over a million veterans receiving disability payments from the v A for PTSD, and it costs the v A over seventeen billion dollars a year in disability payments to these million people just for their PTSD disabilities. They get payments for other disabilities as well, So the

scale of the problem is enormous. Now people are thinking it's somewhere like eighteen veterans a day committing suicide in the US. It's just tragic. And so I think that we have this cultural moment that's happening, which we call the psychedelic Renaissance, that has been building over the last twenty years, but now it's really reached a further development point where I think we can now actually treat the first active duty soldier. We'll be talking more after we

hear this ad. Earlier, you mentioned the Mercers, right, the Mercer's, famous right wing philanthropists and political donors in America strongly backed Trump for a very long time, and you took some flak when you took some support from the Mercers. And then more recently I saw that you know, former Governor Rick Perry of Texas and then going the Trump cabinet. He stepped out there big time on this stuff. So tell us a little bit about that whole thing with

the mercers. And it made me about Rick Perry, the governor. Yeah. So with Rebecca, because she was so associated with Trump and Bannon, a lot of people have demonized her, and you know, I don't agree with those parts of her, but she was willing to give us a million dollars. The only limitation was that the money go to treat veterans, and and I said sure, And I thought it was

absolutely essential that we have this bipartisan support. And and that's what I've gotten enormous criticism about from people like, you know, you shouldn't work with her. But I had this passover, said or a couple of years ago here in Boston, and there was an elderly couple that was at the second to last seats on a long table, and and so we sat down next to them, and this group of people were scientists there. They were mostly scientists.

So I went to this guy and I said, um, you know our our ego scientist And he said no,

he was a judge. I said, okay, um. And then his wife we started talking and she's recently written a book about how to help people with their children who are dying of various diseases, and the work with grief, and so we got into this really long discussion about m dm A therapy and all that we're doing, and then we started talking about marijuana and the government monopoly on marijuana that we were trying to break, and it was just a delightful conversation, and somehow slowly I started

thinking that there was more going on. Then um meets the and I looked at this guy and I said, are you, by any chance Stephen Bryer, the Supreme Court judge? And he smiled and he said, yeah, yeah, I am that Stephen Bryer. And I said, oh my god. Well, then let me ask you an ethical question, if you don't mind. So this is after we've had, as I said, all these discussions about psychedelics and grief and m d

m A. So I said, here's my ethical question. I have accepted this million dollar donation from Rebecca Mercer, and I'm getting enormous criticism for doing that, and I think it's absolutely essential. It's it's that we must build bipartisans support and so ethically, you know what do you think about this? I said, Man, of our donors are more on the progressive side, and um, you know, what's your

opinion of it? Ethically? He said, the essence of democracy is trying to find common ground with people with whom you may disagree with on every other issue, and that in our hyperpartisan world there's not enough of that. So he said, you did exactly the right thing to take this money from Rebecca Mercer. So I felt, okay, the Supreme Court has said that I did the right thing. But let's just shoot back for a few minutes, back

to the old ays, because I'm remembering. I think maybe you and I met it might have been eighty eight, and I remember I think you were responsible for taking me to my first and maybe my second raves in the early nineties, I think in San Francisco, Oakland or nearby Richmond. And for me it was a real eye

opener to go to a rave. And I've done M D M A a a number of times before with my wife at the time, but to be in a rage, just to see the atmosphere there, to see the absence of kind of you know, men not hitting on women in the same way they would if there was alcohol around. Uh you know, if if you wanted to get up close to the stage and have to elbow your way forward, people just let you through. So I mean, you really helped open my eyes to In fact, I'll tell you

you may remember this one of the great moments. We went there with some friends of ours, John Morgan and Linds So unfortunately are now deceased, but they were great drug researchers. Lynn Lin's every one of the great sociologists about this. You know, John Morrigan a professor at the City University of New York Medical School. And we've gone there, and you know, most people in the twenties. You and I are I think in our late thirties at the time, Lynn and John must have been late forties or in

their fifties. And there's this moment. John's kind of there, he's kind of moving to the music, and some young woman comes up to him and she says to John, are you looking for your child? And he goes no, and she goes, so why are you here? And he goes, I just want to be enjoying myself. And she looks at him and she goes, I want to be just like you when I grow up, you know, and it

was this beautiful moment in a rain. And then I think back to those days when m D m A was much better known as ecstasy, when it was a rave scene, when you were just getting going, Oh, when the whole thing was seen as a bit flaky at that time. I remember some years later, I think you had done some study where they required people to take some spinal fluid and the result was that some myth went out there that you know, that that these spinal

taps caused you know, your spines to shrivel up. Back in that day, when I would bring up n D m A among people to know about it, the most common thing I hear was doesn't it drain your spinal fluid? And it became one of those myths. It was like LSD splits your chromosomes right, or marijuana makes men grow

breast um. I mean, it was these things that you know, you know, might have had when I oda of truth to them, but essentially became these broad cultural myths that I think you had a battle against for quite some years.

Oh yeah, I mean there are still people that think that m D m A causes holes in the brain, because over twenty years ago, OPRAH broadcast a show about a young woman that had used a lot of ecstasy, used a lot of other drugs, and she had gotten spec scan, which is blood flow in the brain, and the spec scan supposedly showed holes in her brain. It

was a graphically manipulated image. It was totally fake. They just took every area that had below a certain amount of blood flow, they showed it as a whole, and it was completely dishonest. And what was even more incongruous was the woman whose brain it was riddled with these holes that you could see in the image that they showed was was on the show and she was walking and talking and she was fine. You know, if you'd be dead if you had those kind of holes in

your brain. But there are people today that still believe that m d m A drain spinal fluid or m DMA causes holes in your brain. And so the neurotoxicity of m d M A was something that was used for quite a long time and through the nineties as

well as an argument to block research. Actually, there was a researcher, Frantz vole Inviter in Switzerland that had done brain scans for the first time with people pet scans before and after m d m A and found no evidence of quote holes in the brain or neurotoxicity at all. So then, let me just say, in the nineties, this idea of MDMA and serotinergic neurotoxicity was becoming increasingly discredited, and time was going by and people were still looking fine.

You know. The idea then finally became, oh, it's a time bomb theory that you you have cognitive reserve and you can hurt your serotonin with m DMA and it doesn't show up until you get old. Now, meanwhile, a lot of old people in the seventies and eighties had taken m d m A, they were fine. And then things go along in the nineties and people are not believing this. But NIDA is pretty committed to blocking research

into the benefits of illegal drugs at the time. Rick, So I mean that you're you're actually leading into this is a great place to make this transition because there you are at MAPS, You're making stuff. But Maps is still a small organization. You know, you're up to five or ten people working for you. You're focused on this little issue. Now the last five years, MAPS, together with the public benefit corporation that you've created that's owned by

the nonprofit organization. You now got a couple hundred people working for you. You've got a budget, I think in the tens of millions of dollars a year. You are the largest drug policy formal organization in the world right now. You know, you've spent decades out there, you know, making the provocative arguments all this sort of stuff, and now you're transitioned into running you know, I mean something that's fantastic, incredibly influential. Personally. You're out there like you're I see

you at the conferences. Now you're like a rock star there. You're getting interviewed over the major media. You know, you're not doing just the kind of you know, drug policy podcast like my but the Joe Rogans and all the others. But I have to say, for you, what the hell has this transition been like for you? I Mean, I saw you a few years and I was gonna worry because you're still traveling over the place and I'm saying, oh,

ship ricks burning out, but you're thriving these days. Um, But what has been like personally for you to go in the last five or ten years from chugging along doing your thing to having a mega organization. So the thing about MAPS that has been so delightful is that

there's a two pronged strategy. One is drug development, and that's you know, going through the FDA trying to make m d M a sist the therapy for PTSD into an FDA proof medicine, also approved in Israel, Canada, Europe, we're working in also Australia, Brazil and elsewhere with humanitarian

projects we're trying to start around the world. But the other parallel track has been drug policy reform and really trying to make it so that people can have access to all all substances without having it to be a criminal situation. Pure drugs, honest drug education, harm reduction treatment on demand. So those two paths have been very satisfying to keep together in parallel. And what we've said to people too is that if for whatever reason the drug

policy reform is bad for the business. You know, if you can buy m DMA for ten or twenty dollars and to do it on your own, but it's sold for a lot more as a medicine covered by insurance, I don't care. I mean, if it's bad for the business model. You know, it's a fundamental human rights and we've got to get rid of the drug war and help people have these experiences beyond medicine, beyond religion, personal growth, spirituality, couples therapy, all that. So for me, it's been very challenging.

And Chris lot Lacker, who is now the deputy director of MAPS, he started Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. He's helped with a lot of the management of the staff, the goals. So I've become more fundraiser, traveling all over giving talks, starting new projects. What's been really exciting is because we have had one successful Phase three study that

we published May tenth one in Nature Medicine. It was just outstanding the results of our first phase three study and in fact Science and I'm so glad I'm mentioning this. So the journal Science publishes a list of what they consider it to be the world's top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year, and fore they considered our Phase three paper published in Nature Medicine as one of the world's

top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year. And it was just so satisfied to really speak about m d m A and the therapeutic use of m d M A as one of the world's top ten scientific breakthroughs of

the year. You know, there's over We've guessed around four hundred for profits psychedel companies with the market crash there maybe us now, but you know we're we're the leading one and we're the only one in phase three, and so because we are looking like there's a very good chance that we will eventually succeed the second phase three study, we had the interim analysis in May and the results were very good. We're we've got over probability of statistical significance.

The safety data was good. The final data point will be in October. But because it looks pretty good, but I don't know that much about commercialization, and our team really didn't know that much about what happens once you succeed. It's like the dog that catches the car. You know,

what do you do now? So we managed to hire a fantastic person, Mike Millette, who was the number two person for commercialization at Maderna, and they sold, you know, billions of dollars of the vaccine for COVID all over the world. And so he's now taken a good new

challenge his wife as a therapist. So we have been building the benefit Corporation, which, as you said, for is owned by the nonprofit and just so or listener stand it is something that's allowed within the American tax code where a nonprofit can own a for profit corporation, where all the profits from the for profit corporation go back to the nonprofit to be spent. As the executive director

in the board see fit. But I think for you it opens up the possibility that when the f d A ultimately approves m d M A for the treatment of PTSD and then presumably for other medical conditions as well, your public benefit corporation could then land up earning what

hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, it's very possible. So it will depend on the number of therapists we train, the price of m d m A, and the willingness of insurance companies and the v A to adopt it and cover the costs, which we think are are looking

pretty good. And so one of the things that I'm really a proud of is that we've added Carl Hart to the board of directors of MAPS, and I think our listeners will know Carl Hart is the professor of Psychology and the neuroscience at Columbia, who was a previous guest on Psychoactive, and who has written two very important books about about drugs and about race and about freedom,

and so, yes, his joining MAPS board is quite a coup. Yeah, And several people said, don't at him because he's so controversial, you know, because he's not just talking about psychedelics, he's talking about other drugs, opiates and heroin and saying things like I don't understand how anybody could share the Psychology Department of Columbia if they weren't using heroin on a regular basis. I thought it was a really choice quote

on his partner. Yeah, yeah, I mean he's phenomenal. And I said, well, it's because of his principal stand in the controversy. That's that's why we want him on the

board of directors of MAPS. So you know, you've got attention obviously within your organization between those people who are driven by a broader commitment to psychedelics reform and even broader drug policy reform on the one hand, and the others who are sort of micro focused on ensuring the business side UH succeeds as much as possible, right and who want to kind of keep your heads down on

the broader sets of issues. Yes, and you know, as we hire more and more people from pharma who don't have necessarily a psychedelic background, they have you know, more I would say, conservative instincts, and you know that they come from a more highly regulated environment. You know, pharmaceutical companies have to be really careful about what they say and do, particularly in the era of not speaking about unapproved uses, you know, or off label uses, our our

safety lies, and just not going beyond the data. And so you know, there's nothing I've said during this discussion that's of any concern. Maybe you can answer this question, but presumably n d m A is going to be useful for seeing all sorts of other conditions, whether it's

or range of others. You can talk openly about that stuff, right, Well, yes, I can say that these are hopes, not certainties, and that the right now, the data that we have from one phase three study is not sufficient to say that we have proved that m d m A is safe and efficacious. We have suggested that it's likely from this one phase three study, but we need a second phase three study that's also statistically significant and has an acceptable

safety ratio. And then until FDA approves prescription use, we cannot say that we've proven safety and efficacy, even though we think that we may have it, it's still it's the FDA approval. What's the what's its approved by the way for for PTSD it can then doctors will then be allowed to use it for all sorts of other

medical conditions. The FDA doesn't need to step in and approve it for each condition, right right, Pharmaceutical companies cannot knowingly promote or sell for off label uses, but the practice of medicine is such is that prescribers can prescribe both for what the labeled indication is and for anything else that they think is appropriate. There have been several cases that have gone through the u S courts where the FDA has tried to make it so that pharma

companies could not even mentioned off label uses. But now if there is a scientific studies that we can share that with prescribers, even if it's a phase to study, meaning a smaller pilot study. So we've done studies with m duma sis that therapy for social anxiety and autistic adults. It was tremendously successful. We did a study with people with anxiety because of life threatening illnesses. The results were promising.

Ben Sessa, psychiatrists in England, has done a study, a small study looking at m DAMA for alcohol use disorder and what he learned was that people who are suffering from unresolved trauma often go to drugs and alcohol to to cover it up so that they don't need to think about their trauma. And if you can help them address the trauma, then you can make them make a lot of progress with their alcohol use disorder or other substance used disorders. We're thinking about doing studies with postpartum

depression with depression. So far the studies with PTSD most people with PTSD have depression, but we have not yet done a study of m d M A assisted therapy for depression UM without PTSD. And really let me ask you this. I mean, obviously you cannot get a pattern on m d m A because it was invented almost a hundred years ago and then Sasha Shulgun kind of rediscovered its therapeutic uses. But so how do you stand

to make money? Is it from the selling of m d M a. Is it from the training of the therapists or from setting up of clinics where m d m A will be administered in a psychotherapeutic context. Where does the money Yeah, So when we think about this idea of public benefit, the public benefit for us is helping people get over PTSD, you know, to to reduce their symptoms, to be able to rejoin life in a

better way. So the training of therapists could be a money maker, and in fact we've brought in several millions of dollars in fees, but so far they mostly discover our costs for the team and developing our training materials and stuff. But we felt that the training of therapists

is not a profit center. And in fact, what we want ideally is for schools of psychiatry and psychotherapy two incorporate and embed in their core curriculums modules about training people for m DUMA says that therapy for PTSD, for psilocybin, for depression, for ketamine. So that we want this to be mainstreamed, and so we are also licensing other programs to provide m d m A training for MDMA therapists as long as they have the core competencies and the

core elements of our training program in them. So we don't see the training as being a necessary profit center. Clinics are a potential profit center, but there there are some problems of which I'm not fully aware of legally. But you know, pharmaceutical companies owning clinics where their own drugs are prescribed. But the clinics of the future, the psychedelic psychotherapy clinics of the future, There's not going to be an ketamine clinic here, a psilocybin clinic, there, an

m DM a clinic there. There's gonna be therapists that are ideally cross trained in all the different psychedelics, and the clinics will provide customized, individualized, personalized psychedelic psychotherapy, and the patient will come in and they'll have discussions with their therapists and they'll say, all right, well we'll start with this drug or that drug, and then we'll move to this, and so clinics will be generalized psychedelic psychotherapy clinics.

Now interesting that when I started MAPS in nineteen eighty six, I knew, as you said, that Merk pharmaceutical company, the German Murk, had invented m DMA, and it's in the public domain and there is uh you know, no way to patent it, nor would we ever want a patent because we want to facilitate m DUMA research in the eighties.

When I started MAPS in nine six, there was another group founded by a fellow named Howard lots Off who had discovered that I Begain, another psychedelic drug, was tremendously helpful, uniquely helpful for helping people get through opiate addiction or obiit dependence. What I mean is that in a couple of days, under the influence of I Begain, you could get over your tolerance, to get over dependence on opiates,

and you're gonna have a psychotherapeutic psychedelic process. You can work on a bunch of the issues, and then with enough after care and integration and support that a lot of people could started a new direction in their life

free from opiates. So he was worried that there was no way to do this in a nonprofit way, so he started a for profit company called n d A International New Drug Application of NDA International, And as it turned out, several of the early researchers started suing each other for intellectual property for patents for use patents that

I began for OPI addiction and other dependencies. Any case, I saw these lawsuits about I P really be very, very destructive for the entire field, and that has basically blocked I began development. Now those core patents have expired, but I hired their same patent attorney and I said, I would like you to help us develop an anti patent strategy for use patents so that nobody, not MAPS, nobody could patent m d m A for any of the things that had had been used before PTSD or

any number of things so prior arts. So we tell stories on our website. People tell stories of m d m A useful for this or that, and then nobody can claim to it. And entered that idea. So when I started MAPS in eighty six, I had thought that m d M A would go generic and there would be no money making opportunities. It would be a low cost drug. But it was worth doing. It was essentially worth doing anyway. And there was this moment in two

thousand and fourteen. My wife was head of the Belmont Foundation for Education and they were having a gala, and I was going to the gala, and I thought, you know, she's in charge of this. There's a good food. I'm just gonna get superstoned, and I'm just gonna eat. I'm off work. And so while I was there, I ran across a patent attorney who I knew from Belmont, who had helped patent broo LSD. And what he said was

that there was this policy that I had overlooked. I took a class in food and drug regulation at Harvard Law School and it wasn't even mentioned. And what it is called is data exclusivity. So we have thanks to give to Ronald Reagan for this. So in Ronald Reagan signed a law to provide incentives for developing drugs that were off patent and the incentive is called data exclusivity.

And so what it means is that if you are the first to make a drug into a medicine that has never been made into a medicine before and it's completely not pentable, that you have exclusive use of your data for five years. And if you do pediatric studies, which the FDA is actually requiring us to do, if we succeed m DAMA sys, that therapy for PTSD and adults, which is eighteen years or over, we must do studies in twelve to seventeen year olds and you get six

months more data exclusivity. And data exclusivity blocks a generic competitor from having the FDA evaluate their application until the five and a half years is over, and it takes a minimum of eight months and potentially longer for the FDA to evaluate a generic manufacturer's license to make sure

that it's really pure and stable their drug. So we have this period in excess of six years of data exclusivity, and then later England, I mean, the European Medicines Agency made um similar data exclusivity law, but it's ten years data exclusivity in Europe. So the beauty of data exclusivity from our point of view is that the fundamental difference from it in a patent is that other companies can

develop their own data. We're not stopping anybody from doing anything, and so if another company gets uh their own data, they could get permission from FDA to market mptmacist the therapy for PTSD, just as we But we have such a lead and it's so expensive that we don't think there's going to be any competition. We think that the

competitors what they are going to do. And we even don't really call them competitor as we call them, you know, collaborators in this larger mission of mass mental health and spiritualized humanity. So we will have this period of data exclusivity and that's where the moneymaking comes in. That that we will be the only ones to be able to market anyway. The other beauty of data exclusivity is that we don't have to have nondisclosure agreements. We don't have

to keep the data private or proprietary. We just make everything public because we own the data from submitting it to the FDA, because we were the sponsor, and we then get the data exclusivity automatically. It's not even a question. It's an automatic opportunity to choose data exclusivity. So I see, so you can be quite transparent with everything you're doing.

And then meanwhile, once it gets approved, the revenue for n DMA, the public Benefit Corporation immediately will come mostly from the selling of n d M A and only in a small way from creating clinics or things like that. Yeah, or maybe not at all from creating clinics. We are thinking that we might want to have some centers of excellence, some clinics with large numbers of therapists, you know, expertly trained, and they'll become sort of research training and treatment sent ors.

We have to work out all the compliance issues to see whether that's possible. But the main funds are going to come through the selling of m d m A as a prescription medicine. It's pretty relatively inexpensive to make

pharmaceutical medicines, most of them. And then the value or what you charge is based on the value to the offset the medical expenses, to the improved healthcare, to the society, to the individual, to the you know people now who didn't work obviously for all the intensive linds of people who are using m d m A outside this therapeutic context, I mean the way that you and I have in the past, and so many others, and where there's always

the problems of adulteration. I mean, just recently, there are a couple of reports I think out of l A of Fentinel getting mixed in which people tall with m d m A and people die as a result of that.

And I remember, even like you know, when m DMA became the owner's ecstasy and at some point ecstasy developed a bed name because it was no one as adulterated um and the m A. And then in fact people come up with Molly as if somehow Molly is now the pure d M A L. I think it was just the relabeling of of essentially an illicitly produced black

market drug of unknown potency impurity. But what I'm wondering is, is this process that MAX is engaged in, what are going to be the spill over applications for the broader, you know, tensive lines of people who are still presumably getting their M D m A off the black market and having to deal with issues of you know, potency impurity apart from their ability to access some forms of you know, drug quality testing. Will there be any implications there?

There will be. There will be because I think what we've seen from medical marijuana is that medicalization changes people's attitudes. They've been fed propaganda for fifty years, you know, as we talked about some of the dangers of marijuana. Marijuana does have dangers. M DMA does have dangers, but the propaganda has vastly exaggerated them, and the story is that these dry tend to be all risks and no benefits.

And I think that's why the prohibitionists have so fought research into medical marijuana research into psychedelics, because then you start telling a more nuanced picture, and under certain contexts, the benefits outweigh the risks. So what we've seen with medical marijuana is that as more states have endorsed medical marijuana, the support for marijuana legalization for non medical, celebratory, recreational adult use, however you want to call it, has grown.

And so I think we are now at this point in America where one hopes that maybe will have a law that will pass through Congress signed by the President that takes away the prohibition of marijuana federally and leads it to the states the way things happened with alcohol, So I think that we are going to see something

similar happening with psychedelics. That the more we move forward with medicalization, and then even though we're talking about is as only trained therapists will be able to administer at the patients only under direct supervision, MDMA will never be a take on drug, but people will start to understand that there are tremendous therapeutic potentials for this, but also a lot of potential benefits outside of medicine or outside

of religion. So I think that what we're already seeing is decrim Efforts for psychedelics that are taking place started in Denver, actually, which was the first city to make mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority. Then that went to Oakland and they expanded it to plant psychedelics, and then in Arbor and and all sorts of other cities have now

done that. And then the state of Oregon has passed at as an initiative, the organ Psilocybin Initiative, which is setting up a state legal system of trained guides who may or may not be licensed to do therapy that can give silicide. Been two a range of people, some of them who have clinical conditions, but others who just wanted for personal growth. And there's gonna be something similar on the ballot in Colorado, but it's going to be

beyond just psilocybin. It will again do plant psychedelics. Now I should say that there's this not md No, there's this romantic notion that that has proven true for the voters that if you say natural medicine, or you say plant based medicines or it's from nature, you get a lot more support than if you say, oh, and and there's also some good ones from the laboratory that they're synthetic, like LSD and M D m A. So the initiatives and the legalization efforts have so far left out uh

M D M A and LSD, which are laboratory based. They are, you know, semisynthetic. Those molecules do not appear in nature, but there's molecules that are somewhat similar that then you modify. So I think that what we will see, what UM basically suggesting is that if M D M A becomes commercially available as a medicine, what we need is a decade of the rollout of psychedelic clinics. And I think what we're gonna see is six or seven

thousand psychedelic clinics. In the course of that decade, we're hoping to train at least therapists, and that there will be these clinics all over America. And the reason I use that number just to show where it comes from, is that there's over six thousand hospice centers. So if you think where people go to have a different approach towards death, and I think every town that's big enough to have a hospice center is big enough to have a psychedelic treatment center. So I think we'll have six

or seven thousands of these psychedelic treatment centers. And the FDA and regulators respond to data, but people respond to stories. That's why this Netflix documentary is going to be so important. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. You're you're hitting on a lot of issues here. I mean, what I'm thinking is, I think you're making some very interesting analogies both with marijuana and with a broader psychedelics

and plant medicine thing. The way I look at it is what you're saying about medical Marona is exactly right. And it was part of our long term strategy right that by normalizing and legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, it would have a spillover effect in terms of public consciousness around the relative safety and benefits of marijuana, and looking in retrospect, it turned out that are strategic thinking around that back to the mid nineties turned out to be accurate. Now.

The difference, of course, is that when you're buying marijuana that's been approved and has stayed oversight, bodies making sure it's you know safe that the marijuana being produced illegally is not that much different. I'm it's got some pesticides in this and that, But the risks of adulterated marijuana are are really pretty diminimous. And even these reports about finital getting mixed in with marijuana appear to be either

nine bullshit right. So, I mean, you have the spill over in terms of the broader public consciousness, but the issues of an adulterated market were not that significant. When you look at the plant medicine stuff, and you hear some of the people in the plant medicine coalitions who are a little freaked out with all of the kind of medicalization, psychotherapeuticization of psilocybin, of mushrooms, of all these things, and they worry. But my sense is what you're saying

is exactly right. It's going to increase people's comfort around thinking about these substances and using them. That the issues of adulteration, especially when it's you're talking about mushrooms or things like that, or on mescaline when it comes from peyote or san pedro, are not that significant. But when it comes to m d m A, you are talking about stuff a white powdered drug that's being reduced illegally around the world where issues of potency and purity are real.

You know, when we look back at the history of the dozens or hundreds of people who have died from using quote unquote ecstasy over the years, it does appear that a substantial proportion of those was because the substances they were using were adulterated in some way. And that's

where I'm wondering. You know, as you succeed with getting m d M A approved hopefully by four you know, will there be some spill over in terms of the safety of m d M A mean, because you know, paradoxically, probably the safest thing that could happen from a public health perspective would be for legally produced m d m

A to be the facto diverted to illicit markets. But from a political and replatory perspective, that would be the worst possible thing that would happen everything you've been trying to fight for. So what I mean, apart from the public consciousness shifting in the positive way you talk about,

what about the market itself? Yeah, okay, let me just correct one thing with is that people can die from pure M d M A. And what's happened in raves is that sometimes with even with pure M d m A, what people do is they dance all night or they overheat and they don't have adequate fluid. A lot of these bars have seen that once people are in M DUMA, they don't buy as much alcohol, and so they have charged for water. Some egregiously have even turned off faucets

in the bathroom so you have to buy water. Um, so people can die from what's called hyperthermia from overheating. Does not happen in clinical research ever, never, never, because there's adequate fluid replacement and people aren't dancing all night. And so also sometimes people have heard the harm reduction message drink fluids, and so people will drink too much water and they die from what's called hyponitremia from thinning

their blood too much. And so the best harm reduction message there is that drink stuff with electrolytes, fruit juices or other things. Water is not the best. But I had to answer your question directly, here's the beauty of

our situation. M d M A has been used by tens and tens and tens of millions of people over the last forty years, so the one in a million or one in two million side effects have come to the surface because when the FDA evaluates a drug, usually it's been studied in only hundreds or thousands of people, and so when you put it out in the market and a million people take it, then you start discovering

more side effects. But we have this enormous body of information over more than forty years about m DUMA being used in the most risky circumstances, often adulterated, and there's over five thousand papers scientific papers on m DUMA or ecstasy. So if anybody really wants to look at what are the risks of m d m A from the scientific literature um, the investigators brochure and our reports are safety reports the FDA, which are also up on our website,

are really good resource. Also, we have what's called the treatment Manual, which describes our therapeutic approach. So if people want to understand the therapy that's used with the m d m A, they should read the treatment Manually. So I think that this idea of as m DUMA becomes medicalized and more and more people will hear stories about healing.

They will, of course know that those stories are about pure M d m A. We have trained therapists and others that help support people when they have difficult emotional experiences, and that's a really important part of psychedelic harm reduction. A lot of people still do not understand that M d m A was a therapy drug before it was a party drug ecstasy, and a lot of people approach these experiences as just I'm gonna take it. It's a party,

I'm gonna have fun. And when difficult material comes up, if they have memories of difficult emotional situations too many times people think, oh, my experience is going bad, this is turning into a bad trip. Let me suppress these bad thoughts and bad feelings, and then they can't really do that. And then if they don't pay attention to that, now it's sort of moved up from the unconscious, it's more conscious, they get to end up worse off for

for months or years later. So I think the more that the idea that these substances when combined with therapy have tremendous therapeutic potential for people with post traumatic stress disorder and other major mental illnesses, that the recreational market. People will have more of an idea of what to do when difficult material comes into their awareness instead of

trying to suppress it. Hopefully they will open up to it, talk to their friends around them, create a safe space, you know, and try to go through and let out those feelings and let out and express those emotions rather than suppress them. So I think that there'll be fewer people caught unaware by difficult material when they take the drugs for parties then there are now, because still it's not as widespread as we like the idea that these

can have tremendous therapetic potential. But but I think the other big part of harm reduction is called drug checking. So the world's best example of psychedelic harm reduction at a festival is the Boom festival in Portugal. And so we we started the psychedelic harm reduction efforts at Boom in two thousand and two, and we started working at Burning Man in two thousand and three. But because Portugal has decriminalized drugs, you know, it was a tremendous decriminalized

possession for ones on usual. They did not decriminalize the transfer, sale or things like that. Yeah, that's right, Yeah, yeah, and it was just a tremendous success. So at Boom they have thin layer chromatography on site to identify what really is in these illicit drugs before you take them, and so it would be really important over time, particularly with fentanyl being you now to adulterate a lot of different drugs. They have drug checking to be accepted as

a standard part of harm reduction. And when you look at the number of people that have died of opiate related overdoses over a hundred thousand I think it's a hundred and seven or something thousand in America in one year,

a lot of that is adulterated with fentyl. So we really need drug checking until we get to the point of having full legalization where even the drugs that are sold for non medical purposes are pure and people could rely on their peer And I think, of course with this over those crisis of the acceptance by the public and even by law enforcement of fentanyl testing strips has grown very substantially, and that will spill over obviously to

things like testing psychedelics and m DMA and such. And I need to bring this issue up obviously that even in the psychotherapeutic regulated context. There are risks, and I think you had to deal with this, right. There was the to of of some of the therapists who were associated with the m d m A studies, Um, you know, getting accused of sexually inappropriate behavior. Right. I think New York Magazine did a big expose on this stuff. And

you're having to deal with this stuff. And I know MAPS is you know, obviously takes all sorts of precautions. So what more can you can you? I mean, I know you may be limited by lawyers and this and that from what you can say, But what can you tell people to reassure them when they're reading these reports about their being forms of you know, unethical behavior bicychlotherapists. And we're not just talking about Shaman's down in the

jungles in South America. We're talking about in the US and in Canada, you know, trained psychotherapist doing things that are inappropriate. Yeah. I think it was a real tragedy that had happened. You know, we're very sad for the person that had happened to and we have instituted a fair number of measures we think going forward, particularly as we move into post approval use if we get that far to try to minimize that. So what we are aware of that this has only happened at one time

out of over about three and sixty patients. It may have happened more, but we're not aware of it. And we think with all of the media attention about it that that you know, we encourage if it did, haven't anybody else that they should come forward? The unethical sexual misconduct began after the therapy was over. In that one particular case, we immediately fired those people. They're not working

with us. We informed all of the therapists how serious of a transgression this was, that anybody else of course, would get fired if that happened. We put out a public statement. We even changed our informed consent form and add a sentence about how beware if you are a patient and started developing feelings, you know, sexual feelings for the therapist. I think going forward, you know, we we have really made even more prominent in our training about

ethical behavior. We have a code of ethics, and we're talking about having a patient bill of rights that would be given to all the patients in research but also now post approval, mostly post approval. I don't think we haven't quite ready yet, but this idea of this patient bill of Rights, which makes it very clear we're to complain to if there's anything that is happening that it feels inappropriate. Either at the tip, did it freak out the FDA at all or slow the process of proceeding

with Well, this happened around five years ago. We did report it to the FDA, to Health Canada, to all the regulatory agencies as soon as we heard about it. I don't think that it did freak them out. Again.

The f d A is they don't regulate psychotherapy, you know, they regulate drugs, and so this is kind of a conundrum for them about, you know, how to do this where the treatment is primarily psychotherapy, but it involves a drug in this case m D m A or another case of psilocybin or ketemine, you know, to make the

therapy more effective. Although I should say that ketamine was approved without psychotherapy s ketemine, So I think that, um, what we are seeing is that this is a problem that goes beyond psychedelic psychotherapy to psychiatry and psychotherapy itself and all sorts of other kind of situations where there's

a lot of you know, close contact between people. So I think that what we are needing to do is when when you think about a drug and from the point of view the FDA, you look at you balance the risks and benefits, and so yeah, this is one of the risks. We don't think it's common. As I said, we only are aware of it of happening one time in the you know, roughly twenty years since we started doing this kind of work. Well, well, let me I

see this thing. Part of the m d m A protocol involves always having a male and females therapist, and you've made the point that, in good part for cost and accessibility, that it should be sufficient if just one of them is a licensed therapist. But in this case, the scandal that resulted was what the other therapist, the fellow was somebody who had let his license lapse and therefore could not be held accountable by an oversight board in the same way that the licensed therapist could. So

I mean, where are you on that issue now? I mean, do you is there ways of ensuring that people who are not licensed by you know, a psychologist board of some source, or therapist board of some sort can still be held accountable, or you still adhere to the issue that let's keep it the way it is for issues of cost and accessibility. Well, I I do believe that we should try to keep with a two person team for individual therapy. I do believe that the second person

should not be required to have a license. The person that does have the license is held responsible, and so right now the female therapist who did have a license is having challenges with her licensing board. So there are

people that are held responsible. I think that it's probably less likely to happen in two person teams, and even less likely in group therapy, even though again this unethical sexual misconduct came sexual after the therapy was over, when the cameras were off, and after that was all done. So the major ethical issue wasn't what happened in the moments of therapy, which one can see on its old videotape. The real issue was about one of the therapists getting

involved sexually with the patient in subsequent period of time. Yes, I would say that the other part the essence of our method, which again I don't think was followed by this therapist team fully, is this idea that there's this inner healing and intelligence sort of what comes up has a certain wisdom to it when people are under the influence. But that fundamentally what we're doing is helping people heal themselves.

So in traditional psychiatry, when you think about Freud and Friday and analysis, you know, you've got the therapist that's listening, the person is on the couch, and then the therapist every once in a while will give an interpretation. The therapist is the healer and they find what's going on in the person's unconscious during this free association process. But our approach is really designed to empower the patient to

heal themselves. So I think there's a certain aspect of that theoretical orientation that empowers the patient and it doesn't make the therapist into the source of all the healing or the drug either. UM. So I think it is an issue is how do we create safe spaces and how do we do that once this um, you know, moves outside of a research context, UM and you know, I don't think there's any perfect solution. I mean, I'm

thinking about this case also. It was dealing with a patient whose traumas involved you know, sexual abuse as a child and rape and I'm wondering if it's particularly challenging when the PTSD you're trying to deal with has this sexual component to it. I think it can be. Yes, yeah, I mean that's where it's even more important that we have this safe space. And now, not all of our teams are male female. We've actually had some all female teams. I'm not aware if we've had two male teams, but

that might have been the case. But I do think that it's very delicate when people have been traumatized that they don't get redraumatized by the therapy. Now, some of the existing therapies prolonged exposure cognitive processing therapy, where they involve people talking about their traumas. It's very difficult for people because these traumas are so emotionally powerful and painful that often people drop out of those therapies, so that that's not the same kind of re traumatization that we're

talking about by unethical sexual contact. But but you know, the md m A can help people deal with emotions that would otherwise be overwhelming. So I think that there is this concern that that you know, a valid concern that we should try to minimize to to zero. Going forward any of these situations in the future, and so we are doing our best to do that. A different

subject here. I mean, you've been so enormously successful at raising money for this work, especially in recent years, and a lot of it has been from very wealthy individuals, um and and but I know, you know, one thing I ran into in my last years of raising money for the marijuana reform marijuana legalization ballot initiatives was that as the industry started growing up, the wealthy philanthropists started

to say, you know, I'm less interested. So many people are making money from this, why don't you go to those those guys? You know, overwhelmingly the vast majority of the funding from sixteen had come from people who were philanthropically interested in this, not from people who are interested in is self interested for a profit way now, you've obviously gone through a similar transition. It was overwhelmingly, you know,

philanthropic money you were raising. But in recent years, with the for profit side and having companies like the Tie or Compass that have multibillion dollar valuations, uh and other ones that are you know, very well financed, you must be running into the same thing where the philanthropists are saying, you know, go to the money guys. Now we're not in it for the money. They are. Is that what's happening and how you dealing with it? Well, that's a

great question, Eithan. So in MAPS history, we've raised over about a hundred and thirty five or hundred forty billion dollars in grants, mostly donations and a few grants, and we've reached this point where we needed a substantial amount of money in a short time to really prepare for commercializa sh and so we did develop a new approach which we're calling a regenerative financing, and it's through a group called Vine Ventures, and it's our first effort to

actually reach out to investors. But it's different than your traditional kind of venture capital where you try to get ten x returns. So it's for mission aligned investors where what we promise to do is share revenue a percentage of the revenue. So we have created this Vine Ventures deal to raise seventy million dollars and it's for six point one per cent of North American revenue for eight

years after commercialization. There's a waterfall situation, meaning that as we return more and more to them, they get a lower and lower percentage, so we think it's most likely to be two x or three ax, but not beyond that. And then after this eight year period it just completely disappears. And because it's about a share of the revenue, and

this is I think a really crucial point. There's no ownership, there's no control, there's no board of director seats, and on top of it, they don't care if we use a lot of the revenue for patient assistance programs, or for drug policy reform, or for other things that might not bring them back more money. So that it's about a revenue share. And we're probably around million or so

of the seventy million so far raised. Um there's a fair number of the donors that didn't want to be involved because they didn't want to switch from donors to investors. And so my hope is that once we complete this seventy million dollar raise, which we think will happen in the next month or so, that we are going to need still a substantial amount of money. You know, as

you succeed, your ambitions increase. So, as I said, we're wanting to globalize the patient access to m d m A, We're wanting to do all sorts of humanitarian projects, and so we're gonna need a fair amount of money to to do the research in Europe, to really do the commercialization in the US, there will be a point where we hit what we're calling a sustainability point, and that's where the income from the sale of m d m A, the profit from the sale of m d m A,

covers all of the costs and then starts generating more money for more research, for more drug development, and also for moving some money to the nonprofit for drug policy reform, and also for you know, patient assistance programs. Patient assistance programs are particularly difficult in our situation because when you see a add on TV for a pharmaceutical drug and it says, if you can't afford the drug, you know, talk to us. We can give it to you for

freer low cost um for us. If we give people a dm A for free, it doesn't do them any good unless they can afford the therapy, and the therapy could be ten dollars. So how do we really provide patient assistance and equitable access to people that can't otherwise afford it? For a large number of people, we're gonna need to give them the m DMA for free, but also pay their therapists. Well yeah, I mean, is it

the hope that health insurance will start to cover this stuff? Well, they will, but we've got one third of people in America will accorded to one third don't even have insurance, and often they have underinsured. So I think my hope is that after we have completed the seventy million dollars, I would like to do the rest with philanthropy, to go back to the philanthropic model and instead of saying here, if you invest, this is what we can return to you,

to really go back to the story is here. If you donate, here's the change that we can make in the world. And even though it will end up generating resources that we will be using for more research, manitarian projects based and assistance, Prince joke post for him, wouldn't you rather have us use the resources for that instead of giving back to investors. So I think the Vine Ventures deal came at a crucial time. It's a courageous and novel way of raising funds with this royalty financing.

So Rick, I gotta tell you, I could just keep going here. I've loved having this conversation and you know, I'm sitting in a closet with no air conditioning. But this I've loved catching up with you, you know, and having our conversation get recorded for Psychoactive listeners. So what you've done, your focus, your commitment, your obsessiveness, your ethical values. Uh, it really is extraordinary. Rick, So you know, God bless with all this stuff. Thank you, Thank you very much.

That's very sweet. 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 podcast. 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 Natalman. 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 Naedelman. It's produced by Noham Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman. Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to

A Brio s F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert BP. Next week I'll be talking word perhaps the most famous tobacco company executive in the world. His name is Andre Collins Apolos. He is currently the chairman of the board of Philip Morris International, before that chief executive office there, and he's been a leader within the tobacco industry in making the transition from cigarettes to non smokable nicotine alternatives. I said many times also to investors, the margin we make on

this products, Spoke three products is better than cigarette. So we don't only have a model incentive. We have a financial incentive to sell these products. And they're better because we convinced the regulators around the world to give us better tax treatment than on cigarettes, and they understand that if you have a better product, you need to incentivize

both manufacturers and consumers to switch to this. It okay, So I think it makes sense to us not to sell cigarettes, subscribe to Psychoactive now, see it, don't miss it.