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And the first study, the first study was, which one was that? The first study was looking at a high dose of psilocybin and comparing it to a fairly high dose of methylphenidate or Ritalin under very deeply blinded conditions. So it was a good study because you used an active placebo, so to speak. Did you have a placebo in there as well or was it methylphenidate versus psilocybin? It was just straight up comparing methylphenidate and psilocybin, but under deeply blinded conditions where people knew that in the course of two or three sessions, they would have at least one session in which they would get a dose of psilocybin. But they were also told that they could get, I think it was 13 other psychoactive compounds. We recruited in only people who had zero prior experience with psychedelics because allegedly the profile of subjective effects are so unique that people could unblind themselves. By taking in naive people, we also eliminated a potential recruitment bias of people who had good experiences. How did you convince the ethics committees that it was acceptable to do this at all and also the administrators at your university and second that it was acceptable to use naive participants? And do you think that in today’s climate, do you think that that study would now be possible? Well, let’s say if you hadn’t laid the groundwork for it. I think partly it was good luck and partly it actually speaks very well of Johns Hopkins and their ethic review procedures. So when I assembled that protocol with some help from the Council on Spiritual Practices and counseling from Bob Jesse, I actually thought that there’s probably less than a 50% chance it would even be approvable because of these ethical committees. It has to go through not only the Hopkins ethical committee, but FDA. And FDA hadn’t approved a study giving a high dose of a psychedelic to a psychedelic naive individual for, I don’t know, 25 plus years, decades. And so it was no means clear that it would even go, but it was so interesting to me. And as I said, I was losing comparative interest in the other things that I was doing that I thought, well, you know, why not? The ethical scrutiny that that got was unlike, as you might imagine, unlike any previous protocol or even any protocol since. It went through many levels of scrutiny within my institution, Johns Hopkins, including being looked at by the dean and the managing attorney’s office and whatever. And I have to say, I’m very proud of Johns Hopkins as an institution. It’s stunning that they did it. I can’t believe that they did it. What arguments did you marshal to put up against? Because I mean, it’s so easy for a committee, if they see risk, just to say no, because no is simple. The problem goes away and no one’s accountable for it. Yes, yes is complicated. And so like, how did you convince them this was a worthwhile endeavor, especially given your own skepticism at that point? Well, it really came down to a science and risk benefit ratio. I think the big risk that most institutions would have caved in on is a political risk, a reputational risk. You know, what? You know, to be associated with psychedelics like that. Look what Larry did for Harvard. Yeah, exactly. But the committee at Hopkins that looked at this really put the politics to one side and weighed the risk benefit ratio to the volunteers. What did they see as the benefit? Oh, in terms of just understanding the nature, let’s say we put it forward as a comparative pharmacology study. And so, and we had done a lot of work with comparative pharmacology. And in fact, I had a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to compare one of my specialties at the time was sedative hypnotics. And I had a grant that had proposed to compare ketamine, which is an NMDA dissociative anesthetic with some other compounds. And so I modified it to say, well, we were going to look at ketamine, but I think we’ll look at psilocybin. And instead of comparing it to a classic other set of… Okay, so there was some incrementalism there because ketamine is already like radically psychoactive, although perhaps not so much as a pure psychedelic, let’s say. So there was some incrementalism and you’d already got support from granting agencies and you had all your credibility behind you. Yeah. And so what we could argue is we’re looking at relative abuse potential here. Now the study as it’s published doesn’t read out as that, but that was really how it was designed as a classic comparative pharmacology study in which we could compare the effects of psilocybin to methamphetenadate in healthy volunteers. We could look at things like… Right. And so I can see that you could make a pretty straightforward valid scientific argument for that. You have methamphetenadate, which is a standard psychomotor stimulant, basically dopaminergically mediated, something like cocaine. And then you have this strange psychedelic and the reason they’re addictive is not, or if they are, and of course there’s tremendous discussion about that, but they don’t fit neatly into the category of other abusable drugs. And so that is an issue that’s worthy. It’s very hard to get animals to voluntarily take psychedelics at least regularly, whereas you can do it with cocaine with no problem. So I can see that you can make a basic science argument right there. And you said also abuse potential. Okay, okay, okay. Fair enough. I’m still stunned that they managed it, but it’s so interesting to see how much work and preparation and care at all sorts of levels had to go into that before it was made possible. And it’s also even possible that maybe that caution was warranted, because one of the things that really strikes me about your research program is that it hasn’t got out of hand, right? I mean, and that’s what happened in Harvard in the early 60s, when Leary started playing around, let’s say with LSD, which you don’t play around with. You’ve been able to really keep this within a tightly bound scientific box, while still investigating and popularizing the reality of the mystical experience for the participants. Okay, so you started the study, you had nine people, what happened? Well, what happened is, is the story that actually changed my career direction, because the results, you know, I was interested in spiritual experience. I put in questionnaires into this study that had been used to measure naturally occurring mystical experiences, and Ralph Hood, who may have been a participant in the meeting that we went to. I think we met Ralph there, yep. Yeah, had a nice questionnaire. You know, but I wasn’t sure what to, entirely what to expect and whether the effects would live up to the, what struck me as exaggerated claims by the psychedelic and enthusiast populations. But indeed, what happened was, under these blinded conditions, and both the guides were blinded and the volunteers to what drugs were administered, other than on some session that get a dose of psilocybin. And, and what emerges, number one, that immediately during these sessions that are done after careful preparation, so they’re, they’re really curated experiences in which we meet with volunteers for eight preparation hours prior to the session. And then they come in, they take a capsule, we ask them to lay on a couch for the duration of the session, which can be up to eight hours, six to eight hours. We encourage them to use blindfolds so that their, so that their visual system is cut off. We have them use earphones through which they listen to a program of, of music. And so it’s an introverted kind of experience. Do they select the music or do you select it? We select it. What were your guidelines for selecting the music? Well, our, our main guide who played a very important role in our initial study was Bill Richards, and he had actually done psychedelic work at Maryland Research Center back in the 1970s. And so he had a strong bias toward Western classical music. And so our initial playlist was very strongly influenced in that direction. Since that time. Any particular composers? Like, was it heavy on Bach, for example? Well, not particularly heavy, but it, it, yeah, it covered, it covered a range of, of classical composers. Actually, I’m focusing on that because I mean, music and dancing are components of psychedelic experiences that stretch back tens of thousands of years. And so the fact that it’s easy to skip over these details in some sense, you had people lay down, their eyes were closed. Okay, so they’re not, they’re not having a sociological experience of psilocybin. They’re having an interior experience. And then you use music and God only knows what music does in the final analysis. But, and it’s certainly the case that, that, you know, there isn’t a tremendous amount of space between classical music and religious music. And so, so there’s also sorts of things that you’ve done that are implicit in the experiment that are integral in some, some indeterminate sense to the outcome. Now, these preparation sessions, eight hours, okay, what are you doing with people during those eight hours and why? Let’s see, the preparation is, is, is really developing rapport and trust with them. These experiences are, can be hugely disorienting and they, and fear, anxiety can arise in, at very strong magnitude. It’s very important that people feel safe and cared for. So I think of it that we’re trying to create a container around these experiences. They have to trust their, sometimes they’re called guides or sitters. They really have to implicitly trust these people to, to take care of them. You’ve probably heard by now that you should be using a VPN when you connect to the internet. But if you’re like me, adding an extra step to anything you do every day just sounds like a hassle. Well, let me tell you, if you knew how easy it was to protect your connection with ExpressVPN, you’d be doing it already. ExpressVPN is the easiest way to browse safely, securely, and it’s just better. ExpressVPN gets rid of all those things you hate about VPNs. It’s a VPN done right. First of all, it’s blazing fast. Lots of other VPNs slow your connection to the point where it’s not even worth it to connect. But ExpressVPN doesn’t lag or buffer. You can stream in HD with no issues and using it couldn’t be easier. Just open the ExpressVPN app, click one button and enjoy instant protection across all of your devices. The fact is, once you connect to ExpressVPN, you don’t even realize you have it on. No wonder it’s been called the best VPN by CNET. Right now, go to expressvpn.com slash Jordan YT. That’s E-X-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com slash Jordan YT and get three extra months free. Expressvpn.com slash Jordan YT. Okay, so you want them to be open and let it go and let it happen. And you say we’ll take care of you, but you can let it happen. Yeah, yeah, let it go. Be open, trust, you know, and we prepare them to not necessarily expect, but not rule out the possibility that what may emerge in during the session is something that they’ll find absolutely terrifying or anxiety producing. Okay, so they know that. Oh, absolutely. Okay, okay. And so I almost- How often do people encounter- I mean, the experiences are exceptionally profound and range across the full range of emotional significance. In fact, past the normal range is emotional significance. So how frequently in the experience is the negative end of the human experience magnified? Actually, quite frequently. So in our first study, about 30% of volunteers would have said, actually rated at the end of the study, that sometime during the experience, they had an experience of fear of or anxiety that they would rated extreme. Now, very often, those are short lived experiences. And to the extent that they drag out over long periods of the session, the outcomes are going to generally be less favorable. But I think it’s actually a very sobering statistic that in spite of all the selection we do, I mean, we’ve already screened out people for whom we don’t think we can develop rapport and trust. We’ve screened out individuals with borderline personality disorder, for instance. And so we’ve already selected a group of people who are open and curious. We’re giving them all this time and attention, yet about 30% will experience some significant anxiety during those sessions. What’s important is that it’s very, very rare for anyone who has a session under these kinds of conditions to report after the session that they feel as though their life satisfaction has been decreased. Most people, even if they have a difficult experience, will interpret that experience in a context of meaningfulness. And in some cases, it’s actually through the doorway of the most difficult portions of the experience that the greatest learning comes up. So let’s dive into that a little bit. I mean, I know historically, I know it appears as though historically when people were preparing for experiences of this sort that they would often undergo a process of ritual purification. And I’m going to just abandon the ritual part of that and assume that what they were doing was attempting some moral purification, that they were settling their accounts, that they were trying to ensure that they didn’t walk into the experience with with karmic, excessive karmic baggage that they could conceivably shed, that they were very careful to prepare themselves so that their consciences weren’t weighing on them any more heavily than they needed to. And when people undergo these negative experiences, but still emerge, let’s say, with the judgment that that was worthwhile, what’s the essential nature of the negative experience? I mean, it’s not contentless terror. It’s not that informed. It’s more personal. Well, the interesting piece of it, Jordan, is that it can take many, many different forms. So, you know, one example that we give is because psilocybin is so very often has a lot of visualizations attached to it, either either imagery and sometimes realistic imagery or patterns or whatever. And so we’ll say, well, for instance, if and this can happen, if during the session, a demonic figure, you know, comes up and starts to approach you, you’re your job is to be interested in curious about it, to recognize that this is a display of consciousness. We will often say there’s nothing in consciousness per se that can hurt you. And what we want you to be is interested in this. And so instead of reifying an image in your mind, so take the demon, instead of reifying it. And if you do, you’ll either choose to run from it, and then you’ll spend the entire session running from this demon that’s going to annihilate you until you’re exhausted and the psilocybin is gone. Or alternatively, you may choose to fight it. But by fighting it, you’ve also reified it. And what we really want you to do is be really interested in it and be curious about it. And so it’s terrifying. It’s a construct created by you for you probably deter to terrify you and be interested in it and, and curious about it. And it’s through that recognition through although the hair on the back of your head may be standing on end, you know, we would much rather have you approach it. And in effect, ask it what it’s doing there. What what what am I to learn from this? And what the guarantee is, is that what whatever the nature of that is, and it can take any number of forms, and it’s not necessarily a monster or just visual, but whatever it is, is not is not going to be static. I mean, unless you reify it, unless unless you make it static, if you actually investigate it, it’s going to start changing. And then initially, it actually might become more terrifying. But it can’t, it can’t and won’t continue to do that it’s going to dissolve and it may dissolve into something disgusting or beautiful or transcendent or silly. But it’s going to change. And and your job is just to stay with the experience and recognize that you’re empowered in a way to approach whatever it is that emerges in consciousness. And my my own sense, I’d be and I’d be very curious about how you interpret this from a clinical, psychological point of view. But my my sense of that is that that’s a hugely empowering experience for people to have that they have literally faced the dragon, they have faced the greatest terror, whatever form is taken. And they and they’ve come out recognizing that they’re they’re safe, they’re empowered. And that and that that can be a life changing experience in and of itself. Because after you really have been there with the with the demon, the worst demon of your dreams, and faced it down and looked it in its eyes and realized it’s actually nothing other than an object of consciousness, nothing other than yourself, then what is it in life that can put up an obstacle with that much fear for you? It’s it’s very much like a classic initiation ceremony. I mean, I mean, one thing that clinicians have agreed upon, regardless of their school of thought, let’s say, is that voluntary exposure to what to obstacles in your path that are threatening or disgusting is almost inevitably curative. And it seems that the rule is that that which you approach voluntarily shrinks as you approach it and you grow. And and if you run, the reverse happens. And you can play that out very straightforwardly if you’re a behaviorist, because if someone’s afraid of an elevator, then you have them stand 10 feet from the elevator, and then nine feet and then eight feet. And not only do they learn that what they learn is that they can withstand the fear. That’s what generalizes. And you don’t get symptom substitution the way the psychoanalysts thought because you’re probably not counter conditioning the fear. What you’re doing is showing the person that there’s more to them than they thought. And there isn’t anything more salutary than that. And that is precisely why you’re encouraged, let’s say in mythological stories to confront the dragon and get the gold. That’s the basic story. And it’s and the it’s very interesting how that becomes portrayed in a psychedelic experience.