From the Vault: MDMA, Part 2

air these m d m A episodes. Again, these are from so you know, they're a few years old, and the research into m d M A and its potential therapeutic uses has continued, so these do not reflect like the cutting edge of the research by any means. Uh. And likewise, you know, we've we've re aired, We've re aired a number of episodes featuring Christian. I just want to remind everybody that Christian is alive and well in the world, and you want to check out his his

ongoing podcasting adventures. He is still very much the co host of super Context, which is like a pop culture autopsy. I believe they describe it as such. Yeah, definitely worth checking out. All right, Well, let's venture once more into the vault. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stop works dot com. Hey, wasn't discussed tobow your mind.

My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. So we are in part two of our M d M A Spectacular, and the last episode we talked primarily about what m d M A is, when it was invented, who invented it, and what its physical effects on the body are, right UH. And so if you haven't listened to that and you want a little bit more background, I recommend that you go back and listen to it.

But what we're gonna focus on here today is primarily how it's being used in studies, or how it's been used really for the last thirty or forty years UH in studies on how to treat people for various things, from everything from mental problems to PTSD to answer yeah and UH. As As we set up in the last episode, you're basically dealing with two different phases, right. So the substances UH is first synthesized in the early twentieth century.

It's not until UH generally the what the sixties, seventies and eighties that you see it used therapeutically. You see people experimenting with its uh, the potential potential benefits outside of a recreational environment. But then it becomes enemy number one, right, it becomes caught up in the culture. Last episode, it was immediately placed on like the most restrictive drug list, so scientists couldn't even use it in their labs to study its. And this goes for various psychedelics as well,

such as a psilocybin. But then in recent years we've seen a resurgence. You've seen You've seen psilocybin, you've seen m D M A, all these substance coming back into the lab and uh and and professionals are able to actually explore them some more, look at these undeniably potent, powerful substances and say what what he or can we use? What can we change? What? What can we just try to to use in a proper environment and and out of it all generate some sort of positive effect. Yeah.

And so before we get into the real, you know, boiled down details about this, I want to remind everybody that the podcast isn't the only way that you can, you know, interact with us or see the things that we're looking at this week. We also are always writing on stuff to blow your Mind dot com. There's galleries, there's articles. At least once or twice a week we're putting stuff up there, and videos as well. So there's

all the old stuff to blow your own videos. But Robert, for instance, is currently working on the How Stuff Works Now series and as much as possible, we try to share those videos as well. Uh, and they're very stuff to blow your mind related topics, right, yeah, yeah, very

much weird science that sort of thing. And hey, uh, I know a lot of you listen to us on various aggregated programs, various apps and whatnot, but but there are certainly iTunes users out there getting us on iTunes and listen us to listening to us on your iPhones. If you get us through iTunes, show some love their help the algorithm and that's a great way to support the show without spending a dime. So all right, let's get into the pharmacological healing properties of m d M

A and this brings us back to Shulgun. Yeah. So Alexander Shulgan, who we talked a lot about in the last episode, also known as Sasha Shulgin, the Godfather of Ecstasy, uh, was also primarily responsible for bringing to the psychological community. Uh In in particular um his wife Anne. My understanding was that she was a therapist and she used m d m A and some of her therapy sessions with her patients. But he also uh introduced it to a guy named Leo zef in N seven who started using

it in psychotherapy and introduced other therapists to it. And so my understanding is that there is this kind of underground network of therapists who were using it in their research and in their studies. And this is before it was tremendously legal. Yes, obviously it's one of the areas you see mentioned a lot. Is it's used in couples therapy because ultimately, as as we try to drive home in the last episode, this idea that m d m A and ecstasy produce, this feeling of ecstasy is is

a buitiness leading it's more empathy and sympathy. It's more a feeling of openness. Again, I like to think of it as the self becomes permeable to the world and so it's able to improve emotional communication skills. So that was and boost empathy. So this is where psychotherapist would use it to say you have two individuals that they're having marital problems, they're having communication problems, they have all

this stuff bottle up inside. Well than in these cases, perhaps m d m A can be used to open the two up, to get them to talk about things that they're not talking about. So it's not a situation where like you having marital problems, take two of these and commy in the morning. It's like, let's let's have a rap session and let's take this. You will take this first, and this will enable the sort of open

communication we need. Yeah, I can't emphasize this enough. For all of these psychotherapeutic uses that we're talking about here, they have to go hand in hand with actual sit down in the chair, talk to a therapist counseling. Right. Definitely, it's not like you just take the m d m A and call them in the morning. Right, Like as we just said, it's it's got to be in conjunction with building trust with somebody that you can talk to

objectively about whatever the issues. It's the m d m A assisted psychotherapy, not psychotherapy assisted m d m A usage. And and we'll get into this more, especially with the PTSD stuff, but basically what it does The argument is is that it allows you to increase your trust for people if you have trouble trusting people, and it reduces

your fear and anxiety levels. So it's particularly good as I you know, as you just mentioned, for something like couples therapy where there's communication issues, if you have fear of not communicating something or you need to trust your partner more. That that's where the ideal lies in its usage. So, yeah, it was being used as early as the seventies, and you know, probably up until the mid eighties, right around

the time that it was made illegal in the United States. Uh, but you know that that was primarily like an underground thing. It wasn't like it wasn't like a man dated. It wasn't like in the D S M for whatever came out in the seventies, right, and so, uh, it wasn't until a more modern time, really, right around the two thousands, I want to say, where we started seeing M d M A show up again in psychotherapy trials. That's right.

And though the primary player here is an organization known as MAPS that's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and they're they're concerned not just with M d m A but with psilocybe and other substances. Um, And they continue to explore quote whether m d m A assisted psychotherapy can help heal the psychological and emotional damage caused by sexual assault, war, violent crime, and other traumas. So this is this is

one of the huge areas of exploration here. And oh and just to give a little more background on maps, um, they're it's a. It's They are operating in several different countries I think five right now, Canada, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, Israel, and in the US. Yeah, there are trials being done in the US. And I think I mentioned this at the end of last episode, but it bears repeating here.

It is super expensive to research system. Not only because of all of the restrictions that have to be placed on the facilities in which you are holding the m d m A for these trials, right, Like you have to build like like super like heavy door frames, right or like security systems that you normally wouldn't have for these places. But the medical grade m d m A is also quite expensive. It can cost up to a hundred and seventy dollars or seventy five dollars per dose.

So and that's like, as we were saying last episode, one dose is like a hundred, two hundred and fifty milligrams. Yeah. Again, think back to the fact that one of the reasons that it was shell for so long is that it was expensive to study. So even in the you know, the early twentieth century German chemisicists looked at it and uh, and they realized, oh, it has some sort of interesting properties,

but who has the budget to explore it? So before we dive deeper down to the psychotherapy thing, I think an interesting way to approach this is to add the criticisms up first, so then as we go through it, we can sort of say, okay, we're those criticisms valid

or not. Uh. And in the research, one of the major M d M A researchers who's published a lot of literature on this is a guy named Andy Parrott, who's i believe, out of the University of Swansea, and he, you know, has done a great paper that's on sort of just the the general twenty five years of empirical history of chemistry, right that the chemistry behind M d M A UM. But he does acknowledge that there's been some criticism U and mainly that it's not safe for

clinical use. Uh. And some proponents say that it needs to be used repeatedly for more than one or two sessions or otherwise it won't produce gains in those situations, right. Uh. And remember from the last episode, m d M AS effects are short lived, and uh, it doesn't exactly work like that. You know, as we said before, there's a chronic decline over time. The more you use it, the less positive effects are and the more the negative effects are.

So there's some concern about that with the tolerance levels. But there's also acute effects of m d M A that are unpredictable, which we talked about as well last time. They can both be positive or negative, right like that, for instance, that there's both positive and negative emotional responses, or or that there's some undesirable experiences during the sessions, and sometimes these undesirable experiences can last up to two weeks long. So that's kind of parrots argument is, you know,

let's let's stop before we do this. But Uh, there's also the idea of the neuro chemical depletion the serotonin uh and can lead to feelings of depression, anger, and paranoia anyways. Uh, and it's especially bad for those who have pre existing depression, and it could even predispose people who like, for instance, we're already depressed but had um you know, dealt with that issue, to a recurrence of

their previous psychological disability. So these are all of his essential like criticisms of I don't know that we're quite there yet for the psychotherapy thing. And he presents us with two scenarios in which he thinks that that this isn't going to particularly work out. And I'll read through the first one and we can respond to these as we go through the benefits of the psychotherapy and see

if see if his criticisms are right. Yeah. So if we don't launch into picking them apart right away, understand it. That's the reason. Yeah, Okay, So parents, first scenario is that you have a Special Air Force soldier who's discharged from the army because he has PTSD is traumatic stress disorder. His therapist says, let's try this m d M A assisted therapy. Oh, but the drug stimulates the re emergence of the soldier's unpleasant war experiences, and this includes feelings

of aggression. The soldiers trying to control these while he's at the clinic. However, later that evening, this is the scenario, mind you, he violently attacks a stranger in the street. Following his arrest, his lawyer argues that this aggressive act has been triggered by the m d m A assisted therapy session. So okay, so so sorry. Parrot is basically saying, Okay, this guy could potentially go out and assault somebody due to the negative feelings that get dredged up by this

therapy induced m d m A session. Okay, I have so many responses to that. I'm gonna clear for a minute, all right. The second scenario that he lays up is called involves a hypothetical case of a female rape victim. Uh. He says. After the first m DUMA assisted therapy session, the client feels much better, but the games do not

injure over time. Following a second session this m d m A assisted again, there's a brief period of of relief, and then a third session is requested, but the therapist explains that she can't clinically recommend it to the client. Now Quote seeks out their own illicit supplies that ecstasy slash m d M A. The only time she feels good is when she is on m d m A, and she becomes an habitual user. However, with reducing efficiency and increasing midweek blues, her chronic anxiety, depression, and low

self esteem steadily worsens. M M Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, that seems counterintuitive even in and of itself, right, and the idea that this person would become a habitual user given what we know from Parrot's own discourse about m d M A and that most people don't use it more than ten times. Everything we discussed in the first episode seems to to poke holes in that argument and a lot of the research for that game in

Parrot's own writing. So I'm not quite sure about this, but let's let's see if it matches up as we go along. Okay, Now, this is the thing that ties into a criticism of scenario one, but also just important to to look at going forward is that when it comes to the treatment of PTSD, there is and there

is an urgent need for better treatment methods. So this is just this isn't just a situation of a bunch of scientists or even an organization saying hey, we've got to find a way to make m d M a practical This is not what you Harrelson wearing a jacket around, right. This is this is there a professional saying, hey, we need a better tool here, we need a better methods, and we need need better drugs to help these individuals.

There's a potential answer here, let's explore it. So to piggyback on top of that, I think it's important that we sort of just quickly prime and established what PTSD is, right, Like, it's a term a lot of us throw around, and I've heard people say before like, oh, I have PTSD, you know, And Uh, this is what PTSD is. Uh, is a manifestation of trauma physically in your body. It's common in victims of war and abut it involves shaking, sweating, crumbling,

anxiety and flashbacks. And basically what we're looking at here is the psychological scars having physical repercussions. Right, So they're physically affecting a person's body. So that's what we're talking about here for treatment is being able to get get them to integrate past that physical trauma rather mental trauma manifesting physically. So here a couple of quick points that come directly from MAPS about m d m A assisted psychotherapy,

they said. They say an Indie May assisted psychotherapy INDIEMA is only administered a few times, unlike most medications for mental illnesses, which are often taken daily for years and sometimes forever. UH and MAPS is undertaking a roughly twenty million dollar plan to make m d m A into a Food and Drug Administration approved prescription medicine by one now Here are just a few up pointers as well

that come from Ingrid Pacy, who I mentioned earlier. There's a fabulous bit with her on the CBC radio show Ideas again their three part series A High Culture, which I highly recommend for anyone who's interested in just the overall uh re emergence of psychedelic research over the past a few decades and in some of the you know, the the the concerns they're in. But Ingrid Percy is

a psychiatrist. She's a lead investigator of mb m A assisted therapy for treatment resistant post traumatic stress disorder at the University of British Columbia. So she points out that from phase one studies around the world, we know that m d m A seems to lower fear, particularly for

treatment resistant PTSD creating a window. And it's interesting she says window because because references a window at that I believe was the hundred milogram YEA creates a window during which the trauma can be considered and discussed without the associated fear getting in the way. So it's about sort of allowing the monster to come out so you can look at it and deal with it and and and

perhaps exercise it. Right. According to pascy M d m A, psychotherapy usually begins with feelings of relaxation, easing of muscles, and among PTSD patients you often see the flashes of the past trauma that then emerge and it can even be a strong bodily experience. So we mentioned this in the last episode about how how taking ecstasy can produce uh, these very strong negative feelings can can pull those out

of an interce. So that's where I assume Parrot is getting his scenario to of which the soldier has experienced such a negative emotions being recalled. Yeah, and that but that what where I can't I'm having difficulty following him is the logical extension of that to going out and assaulting a person on the street, right, because he's saying, well, you're gonna pull You're gonna pull the monster out of the closet, and then the monster could win. Well, yeah,

but part of what are you gonna do? Just leave it in the closet. I mean, the idea here is we've got to we've got to face these traumatic experiences, right, and that m D MAY assisted psychotherapy can potentially allow us to do so in a safer way with reduced fear um and and during all of this, the therapist

or monitoring vital signs. Umah. Really, it's kind of the best case scenario to be doing m d m A in right, because you're not like, like we talked about last episode, like the some of the bad side effects like the overheating or the chewing on your teeth. They're running about music. Yeah, all of that kind of stems out of the dance culture, not because of the drug,

but because of the environment that you're in. Right. Yeah, So you know this is again it's about using it therapeutically with a therapist, using it as a way to open that window, to to gain access to things that are normally going to be too too buried or or to fear ridden to tackle and this is this is really key here. Again. One of the major issues is that there we need better tools, we need better medications

to treat PTSD. And according to two percy um you see about a thirty success rate for conventional multi year PTSD therapy, but so far with m d m A PTSD therapy you've seen they've seen an eight five percent success rate. Wow, okay, well that backs up some of the other stuff that I read, which said that there were significant gains found on There's a there's a scale that's used to measure somebody's level of PTSD. It's called

the PTSD scale. And after using that, after using m d m A in therapy, using the PTSD scale, they found that there were great gains over time. And in fact, when they did placebo trials telling people that they were doing m d m A when they weren't, they found less games. So the the evidence does seem to show that this works. Um it also, you know, the aim here is is to help these people with their debilitate symptoms.

It's it's when they haven't responded to other therapies, and it's this isn't like oh, let's just try this, you know, this is this is a situation where it's resistant to their last resort. Yeah. Uh, you know. The other treatments are anything from talking, to exposure therapy, to the things that cause the PTSD to all these daily medications that we could be using. Uh. One therapist says that they think that it works because of m d M as

unique properties. And we talked about this last time. It's both a stimulant and a psychedelic, right, so they said, quote, the stimulant gives people confidence and the psychedelic allows people to reflect on themselves and their experiences in a different way. This combination helps them confront painful memories. And then in two thousand nine there was an article by a Norwegian psychologist named I Believe this is palurine Yo Hansen, and

he argued that it works through several mechanisms. Basically, the m d M A is increasing the levels of oxytocin in your body. And this is the call it the cuddle chemical. Um. I think you guys might have talked about this previously on the episode It's released during breastfeeding, not in the episode on the show and stuff to blow Your Left at five years one of yeah, the

most frequently mentioned uh, properties of the body. I feel, So it increases our oxytocin and what that does it prevents the brain's emotional processing center from overpowering our higher thoughts, so it quells fear and it encourages trust, just like we were talking about earlier. So, um, you know we mentioned m d m A has to occur in conjunction with psychotherapy. You aren't just taking m d m A. And it's not like you immediately go into therapy and

you're taking m d m A with the therapist. You need to establish trust with this therapist through a series of sober sessions before you do these m d m A sessions. And usually at the most I think it's like three sessions, which kind of makes sense along the lines of what we know about people taking m d m A, its effects and their efficacy. But then also,

you know the uh contradicts. I want to say, parents first example of of the potential UH subject where this wouldn't work for them, right, and that they've become sorry it was their second example where the girl becomes an addict, right, Um, so they only use it for three sessions at the most. All right, we're gonna take a quick break and we come back. We're gonna we're gonna roll through some other potential uses. M d m A as a cancer fighting agent.

Uh is potential uh aid in couples therapy and even away to ease an individual uh to the death point. All right, we're back. So we set up for this a little bit in the in the previous episode. The potential for for e m d M A to help us fight cancer, which is this is one of the this is an area of m d m A research that is uh. He kind of stands up part from the rest because it's so it's not attached to the

most apparent properties of the drug. Right. In fact, So the funny story, yesterday I was getting my hair cut and as the first time I was getting my haircut by this particular hairdresser. She asked me what I did for a living and what I was working on right now, and I told her was researching empty m A uh and and she said, oh, that's fascinating, And I said

it can be used to help people with cancer. And her immediate thought was, oh, yeah, that makes sense, like if they're in pain, it would make them feel happy. And I was like, oh no, I mean yes, there are instances where they've been using it therapeutically that way.

But no, like let's recap from last episode, there's that apotosis effect in which programs cell death actually attacks the cells in your liver and retina when you take M d M A. H. So let's remember that that's what they're using here to try to take take cancer out there, trying to kill the cells and cancer. It's not just as like a you know, sort of like a pain

reducer kind of thing. Yeah, So we've known since around two thousand six that ecstasy, M D M A and antidepressants such as prozac have the potential to stop cancer cells the catches. Then, in order to kill the cells, who have to drop an absurd amount of ecstasy as

in a highly lethal dose. Um. Like just to refresh, we were talking in the previous episode about how you're talking about, uh, the average dose being in in then like a hundred hundred and fifty, right, and if you get into one or one point five grams, you're getting into into a deadly amount, potentially deadly amount. So in two thousand eleven, researchers from the University of Birmingham and

the University of Western Australia UM looked into this. They were they were basically looking to ways at ways to tweak ecstasy, uh, to tweak m d m A at the atomic level, swapping out some of the atoms in its chemical composition to increase its cancer fighting power by a factor of a hundred. So to put that in perspective, that means that you could have a single tablet of modified ecstasy, they would have as much cancer fighting power as a hundred tablets without boosting the unwanted effects of

the drug. So because because the amount of this is my understanding, the amount of m d m A needed to start attacking the cancer cells is like a hundred grams, right, and so to that would totally kill you. Yeah. Yeah, that's like a hundred times as much as would be a hundred times a very strong dosage. Yeah, So they need to make it more powerful so you can take less of it to attack the cancer but not have

the negative side. Yeah. So basically taking the synthetic substance and tweaking it even more to encourage the properties you need and discourage the properties that are going to kill the patient. And this is exactly the kind of thing that Alexander Shulgin would have promoted and wanted I think his his his studies of these psychedelic compounds to be

used for going forward, you know. I mean his hope was that they would be studied educationally so that we could find these kinds of uses for the Yeah, exactly, to go back to the roadmap scenario, it's saying, hey, there's this road and uh, you didn't know it, but there's a little turn here to the left, and it leads to a potential cure for cancer. So when you get into exactly how this works, uh, you really get bogged down rather quickly in the chemical and biochemical details.

But the basic explanation, as rolled out in that paper is the theory behind it is the drug is attracted to the fat in the membranes of cancerous cells, and it makes the cells quote a bit more soapy, which can break down the membrane and kill the cell. Unfortunately, cancerous cells are more susceptible. So again they hope to

hope to refine this. Last the most recent stat I saw was they're hoping to make it possible by But again that was that that that was when they were rolling up that particular it said they thought they're about a decade away. I'm curious where they're at with it right now as Yeah, hopefully we'll get an update in the near future. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we see something come out in the next year or so. Yeah. So yeah, So, all right, we've covered PTSD cancer. What

else can we use this for. Well, we already mentioned couples therapy and about how it was rolled out with apparently some level of success in the eighties, But there's actually a two thousand fifteen study that was published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and they set out to examine how m d m A might be used to improve communication about a spouse in therapy. So this is interesting.

It seems to be the key key here. That's not about as much about oh here, you both take MDMAIN will also together, but it's about getting an individual to share their own feelings and open up about what's bothering them. So yeah, I could imagine based on the stereotypes surrounding m d m A again, people hearing this and going oh okay, so they take ecstasy and it makes them want to have X, which was subsequently or they want to love each other, they feel more open, they feel

more sympathetic. That's not again, ecstasy is a misnomer. Uh. And this isn't all sexual. This is more about communication. Yeah, and you know, I I do have to say that, you know, it's it's it's totally believable that you would have two individuals who have a connection with each other while they're on m d m A and then afterwards they realize, well, as my normal self even with the inside of what I had conversing with this individual, I

no longer feel that connection. But again, this entails a therapist being present and using the information that you bring forth. So yeah, right, we don't recommend that like couples just do this in their kitchen together. Yeah, certainly not the kitchen. Um So, so we've discussed m DMA's ability to increase sociability. The drug alter speech production and fluency as well, and

according to the study, it may influence speech content. So what they did is they rounded up thirty five healthy individuals with prior in d m A experience UH completed UM to session with UH within subjects double blind study during which they received one point five milligrams of oral m d M A and they also had a tiney that's a very small amount one point five that is, so then they would after the substance had taken hold um whatever limited hold it would have given the dosage.

They engaged in five minute standardized talking tasks during which they discussed a close personal relationship, and they found that both analytic methods that they employed revealed that m d m A altered speech content relative to pulci abou. The drug increased use of social and sexual words, consistent with reports that m d m A increases willingness to disclose. Okay, so that lines up with what we know from the PTSD thing, right, It makes me trust people, it makes you,

you know, you're more permeable, yourself is more permeable. And using the machine learning algorithm that receichers, researchers found that m d m A increased use of social words and words relating to both positive and negative emotions. So, in other words, it helped them open up about how they felt about this other individual, what the problems might be. And and and that is why it seems like it could

be very useful in indima assisted psychotherapy. So I guess like the big problem here though, is how illegal it still is, and that it's really difficult to conduct trials like this, especially in a place like the United States. Right. So, but some of the articles that I was reading about both the PTSD thing and the cancer studies were saying that they think that that there's going to be m d m A approved by the f d A, the Federal Drug Administration again, like maybe in the next ten

years or so. Yeah, and it seems like the same prognosis with Canadian law. This is just me here, but my my worry here is that what happens when this gets beyond peer reviewed publications, science journalism and and you know, and radio programs and podcast What happens when this becomes a political football and we have individuals saying, oh, well, you're about to allow our psychotherapists to start giving ecstasy

to people. What happens? Then? It kind of reminds me of another stuff to blow your mind related thing, when you did that video last week about the god helmet, and there's a lot of response on social media when we posted that video. I got the impression that a lot of people just read the headline and didn't watch the video, but they were basically I give a primer

on what the god helmet is. Well, this was basically we're talking about cranial electromagnetic stimulation affecting various portions of the brain. If very basically turning things in your brain on and off in order to see how they affect. Electrical stimulation, slide electrical stimulation to see how it affects your experience of reality. Right, And uh, there was some research involving this that's saying that you know, by changing the way that you perceive reality, it might be able

to help people overcome racism, for instance, right. Uh. And both the responses to that on our our social media channels, a lot of people were very angry because they saw that as kind of like mind control, right, almost like in a fascist kind of sense. So I could see the same thing happening with M D m A. Right, It's like, oh, these these therapists, you know, they're the activist therapists are going to try to reprogram our brains,

so we're just like them. Well, I mean the thing is that both of these situations, whether you're talking about you know, electrical stimulation of the brain or pharmacological stimulation of the brain, you're dealing with a psychedelic effect. You know, you're you're taking your normal consciousness experience and you're tweaking it a bit, you're changing it. You're changing your perception of self, uh and reality in at least a very

limited way. And that that can be frightening, that can be illuminating, And that's that's the whole that's psychedelia as a whole door for a lot of experiences and a lot of emotion. Think of it like sort of along the lines of um drawings. Okay, so let's say like you're looking at a drawing, and if you know what one point perspective is, it's kind of how Wes Anderson shoots a lot of his movies, right, Like, you've got a center point and everything stems out of that center

point coming at you. But then you can switch to two point perspective or three point perspective, where you're looking at multiple angles, or you're looking up or down from like a skyscraper or something like that, right, And that's like a very basic metaphor for what's going on here. It's just changing the perspective with which you can look at the world with. Yeah, I mean, one might be heard to say something along the lines of I've never

thought about myself that way before. I've never thought about uh, this individual in this particular way before. And again, this isn't us condoning like go out and do m d m A right now, or us saying don't do m d m A right It's it's neither of those things.

But I do think that it's interesting within a restrictive environment, using it in conjunction with therapy, and especially uh, you know, in a clinic like this, where there's somebody on hand in case like you have a bad reaction or whatever, right rather than being in a farm in the middle of the woods where there's a secret rave going on. Now.

The final example of m d m A therapy and m d m A research that we want to mention here is the possibility of using m d M A to treat individuals who are having a hard time with with their with their impending death, with with with fatal life you know, fatal conditions, life threatening illnesses, uh as they approach the death point. And there have been some other studies that involve pocybin and it's use magic mushrooms psocybin as as a way to help people deal with

that scenario. It's not just the pain we're talking about here. We're talking just gravity of understanding your aiality, Yeah, thinking about yourself and the grappling with mortality and the basic heavy human stuff. So the the main individual here is uh San and sell Most psychiatrist Phil Wolfson, and he's currently studying the use of m d m A assisted psychotherapy to ease anxiety in eighteen adults diagnosed with life

threatening illnesses. Now, all of these individuals have a prognosis life expectancy of at least nine months there can they currently have severe anxiety related to life threatening illness. So his goal here is to see whether patients suffering from crippling anxiety, fear, or depression over a terminal diagnosis can confine relative peace via m d m A assisted psychotherapy sessions.

So it's kind of the same scenario we've talked about with these previous psychotherapy examples, helping them open up about what's happening, help them gain a little perspective on what's happening, and in doing so, perhaps find a place of peace. Right, see it from a different angle, one with less fear. Yeah, But again, Wolfson's study is just getting off the ground here.

UM just started up this year, so hopefully we'll we'll hear more of the details in the years to come, and you know, some of the core findings, and there's clearly got to be a lot of more research done in all of these areas before we're just doing this, you know, casually, especially in the sense of like predicting that the f d A is going to approve m

d M A for these ride public use. And I think, I mean casual is a good thing to mention because I think the underlying truth here is that it's such a potent and powerful substance that it should never believe, never be done casually. Like I would argue that even

in a recreational environment, it's not something to take lightly. Yeah, I mean the research that needs to be done right now is on all kinds of things, like why individuals have such strong physiological ab reactions to it, right, Like we talked about the first episode, there's very occasionally individuals who have like cardiac arrest or seizures or something that's not a common side effect of this, But why is

it happening to these some individuals? Right? Other things like why is there such a variance in the mood reactions. Why for some people is at all positive, but for other people there's positive and negative, or others it's just negative.

You know what's going on there? How do other drugs in conjunction work with m d M A right, especially like when you think about UM PTSD patients who are already taking daily medication for their PTSD, how's that interacting with the m D I mean, even Sasha Shulgin in his research parties would tell his his friends, Look, don't take any medication for like three to five days before you come over here. And then you know, we just need to figure out the chronic tolerance development as well,

to like nail that down. Why is it that when we take m d M A human bodies basically over time, probably like between one dose and ten doses, over time the positive effects lesson in the negative effects get worse. Indeed, How to close out here, I just want to throw out a quick quote. This comes to us from from Alan Watts the late British Buddhist and Encounter Culture um icon.

I'd say um wrote a lot spoke a lot about about Buddhism and h and also a certain amount about about about other other modes of religion, and also about a lot of the counterculture of stuff that was happening at the time time he was alive. This particular quote comes from nineteen seventy and he's he's probably commenting more

directly on on overt psychedelics PS, psilocybin and LSD. But I think this holds true for a lot of what we've talked about regarding m d m A. He says, psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation, in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments like microscopes, telescopes,

and telephones. The biologist does not sit with I permanently glued to the microscope. He goes is away and works on what he has seen. And I think that that matches up rather nicely with the with the goals of

m d m A assisted psychotherapy. I do, yeah, And I kind of have always thought of Alan Watts as being sort of contemporary of Sasha Shulgin's as well, to the kind I wonder if those guys ever met, but they're kind of like on the same team, Yeah, exactly them and the two of them in Timothy Leria here on the Psychedelic Avengers. Uh. So, I think that's about you know, what we've got here on M D M A. But I'd really like to hear from you the audience some more about this because I'm sure there's a lot

of things we didn't cover. The literature in this is dense and two days studying all this stuff leading up to it, and I there's no way we could even touch the surface. You know, there's just so much that's being studied in it right now. So I'd love to know if there's things that we missed, or there's things in particular that you you know about that are in trial right now or being studied right now that we would be in interested in coming back to in a

future episode. Get in touch with us over social media. That is one of the best ways to let us know about these things. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and don't forget that you can always talk to us on periscope every Friday at noon. Yeah, and if you would like to hear us take This approach is sort of one to approach with with other substances such as h such as marijuana. We've ever done any content on marijuana and medicinal marijuana that would probably be h an

interesting topic. Let us know if you'd like to hear afect. The idea for this episode came out of us talking about the instances of synthetic cannabis in the news. Yeah, and hey, you want to get in touch with this directly, you want to cut out stuff to blow your mind? Dot com and all the social accounts, you can just email us at and blow the mind at how stuff works? Got so more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Ya about two four four four four first five fo