[Applause]
so 1943 albert hofmann
a swiss chemist was developing potential
medications for the treatment of
migraine when he’s accidentally exposed
to one he found a little odd and went
home but he had a pretty good idea of
what he’d been exposed to so three days
later he went back to the lab and took
250 micrograms of LSD in those days that
was seen as a minut amount to be taking
drugs and medications were administered
in the milligram range not the microgram
range but we know now that was a pretty
solid dose so as the effects came on he
realized the lab was not the right place
to be and so hot Tony’s bicycle and he
started riding home and he describes the
vivid imagery the beauty in nature and
he went on to self experiment with LSD
noting that it had these profound
effects but he didn’t know what the
clinical utility of it was so Ellis then
was sent out to researchers around the
world and it led to thousands of papers
being published demonstrating that LSD
assisted psychotherapy was effective in
treating a range of psychological
disorders one of those researchers was
Timothy Leary professor in psychology at
Harvard University
but unfortunately Timothy’s
methodologies got a little loose at the
end of the end there he was giving out
LSD to anyone that would pretty much
take it and so he was fired from Harvard
but there this this was a time of
Cultural Revolution young Americans were
taking LSD and mass and Leary became
their figurehead he was seen on national
television telling the youth to turn on
tune in drop out this was not a good
time for a cultural revolution the US
was at war with Vietnam and the
authorities noticed that
that was protesting the war we’re taking
LSD
so LSD was seen as a threat to the very
American institution and in 1968 it was
banned and this is the start of the war
on drugs it was them bandhans nationally
in 1971 the same year President Nixon
said that drugs a public enemy number
one the drugs he was referring to
psychedelics sadly it also meant the end
of psychedelic science with prohibition
came a propaganda campaign we’ve met so
powerful they’re being perpetuated into
present day one myth is that LSD may be
contaminated with the poison strychnine
so powerful is this myth but it’s
contained in the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders published by the
American Psychiatric Association where
it states that one of the dangers of
taking LSD is exposure to strychnine now
this is the diagnostic manual that
psychologists and psychiatrists around
the world use fortunately in its most
recent edition published in 2013
reference that this has been removed
because there’s never been any
strychnine detected there’s no evidence
the indicators strychnine would be
contained in LSD and yet still it was
published in this very distinguished
book there’s the concern that if you
take LSD gonna lose your mind in a
literature review of all the clinical
studies that were conducted before the
prohibition of LSD they found that less
than point zero one percent of people
that participated in the trials
experienced any symptoms of psychosis
either during or after their psychedelic
assisted psychotherapy and it’s
important here that I distinguish
between the medical application of
psychedelic drugs which I’m talking
about and the recreational use of those
drugs which we’ve become so familiar
with then in 1990 dr. Rick Strassman a
psychiatrist who was trained during the
era of psychedelic therapy and
dreamed of being a psychedelic therapist
was able to re-engage in psychedelic
research he was encouraged by his
supervisor to examine the drug
dimethyltryptamine because university
would know it was
dimethyltryptamine his possible potent
psychedelic night in to humankind
it’s used by shaman in South America to
enter the spirit world
it was encouraged to do some small-scale
blood studies just looking at the
metabolism of the drug but what he found
far more profound were the participants
experiences they reported being
transported to parallel dimensions where
there were entities communicating with
them eventually Strassmann wrapped up
his research because he felt it was
unethical to be pushing people off this
psychological abyss without knowing
where they were going but it was too
late
he’d opened Pandora’s box and we
subsequently have seen an explosion of
psychedelic research what’s now being
referred to as the psychedelic
Renaissance so what have we learned
we’ve learnt a lot about the brain but
what really excites me is a clinically
trained psychologist is mounting
evidence that psychedelic assisted
psychotherapy are effective in the
treatment for people who don’t respond
to current therapies for a range of
mental health conditions so let’s look
at the evidence we used to think that
psychedelics turned on parts of the mind
we’ve now learned what it actually does
is turn off a part of the brain called
the default mode network the default
mode Network is a series of neural
pathways that connect certain areas of
the brain together while preventing
other parts of the brain crosstalking
it’s active whenever you’re in a wakeful
state it becomes more active when you
engage in autobiographical narration you
know that little voice in your head and
it becomes hyperactive when people
experience depression and OCD so what
happens with psychedelics
is it actually turns the default mode
Network off so what does that look like
the picture you can see here is the
brain not on psychedelics and the brain
on psychedelics see all the inter
communication and connectivity that’s
happening between parts of the brain
that would never normally communicate
and it’s been hypothesized that this is
the reason that people experience
creativity and spiritual have spiritual
experiences when they take psychedelic
drugs but more importantly it’s been
hypothesized that this increased
communication and increased connectivity
in the brain could help treat people who
are treatment resistant with depression
because with all this interconnectivity
happening in the brain perhaps they can
overcome their entrenched beliefs and
see the world from a completely
different perspective and this has been
tested recently by a research group at
Imperial College London they gave people
psilocybin which is the active
ingredient in magic mushrooms to 12
people who are treatment resistant in
the context of psychotherapy the results
when given the psilocybin there was a
significant reduction in depression
symptoms and this was maintained for
many people at the three-month follow-up
what’s more interesting is because they
were doing brain scans at the time the
people that had those survived
significant reductions in in depressive
symptoms were those whose default mode
network was turned off the most
addiction is another area where we see
poor outcomes a group at johns hopkins
university conducted a trial of
psilocybin assisted psychotherapy for
the treatment of tobacco addiction the
results were astonishing
they found that 80% had quit smoking at
a six-month follow-up when you consider
the leading pharmaceutical today for the
treatment of tobacco cessation it’s only
effective for 25% of people this group
is now recruiting more petition
fencing conducting clinical trials
together further evidence for this
treatment meanwhile at New York
University they’re recruiting a hundred
and forty people to conduct a clinical
trial to evaluate whether psychedelic
assisted psychotherapy is effective for
people with alcohol dependence we’ve
also found that psychedelics can help
people die with dignity numerous studies
have been published now clinical trials
showing that when psychedelic assisted
therapy is provided to people who are
experiencing end of stage cancer they
see a significant reduction in anxiety
symptoms an increase in the quality
improving quality of their life and
their relationships with their
significant others improve another
disorder that’s extremely disability
ting is post-traumatic stress disorder
the current treatments we have are only
effective for 30% of people those that
don’t respond to treatment are at risk
of addiction of relationship breakdown
and suicide in the first clinical trial
of mdma-assisted psychotherapy for
people who are treat resistant with
post-traumatic stress disorder found
that there was a significant improvement
in fact 83% of participants no longer
met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD
after receiving mdma-assisted
psychotherapy and this was sustained for
three and a half years follow-up this
study has now been replicated in Israel
Colorado Canada Switzerland and the
sponsor of the trial the
multidisciplinary Association for
psychedelic studies has been able to
pull that data they have approached the
US Food and Drug Administration and now
have approval to conduct phase 3
clinical trials why is this significant
phase 3 clinical trials are the final
stage before a drug becomes a medicine
and so in the next few years
we will see MDMA as a medicine for the
treatment of PTSD in the u.s. so I
mentioned the number of countries Israel
Canada UK there’s other countries
engaged in psychedelic Renaissance as
well Brazil the Czech Republic even New
Zealand but there’s one country I’ve not
mentioned what is it why is there no
psychedelic research in Australia well I
can tell you it’s not through a lack of
effort in 2011 given that I believe that
these compounds these psychedelic drugs
could assist in the suffering of
hundreds of thousands of Australians I
helped form psychedelic research in
science and medicine Australia’s first
and only not-for-profit incorporated
organisation that has a mission to
initiate fund and facilitate psychedelic
research in Australia we’ve developed a
strong collaboration with maps and so
our first attempt was to conduct
basically the same troll that they’ve
been doing in the u.s. in Israel in
Colorado in Switzerland
except we wanted to focus on war
veterans the reason being was strategic
what kills more Australian soldiers than
anything else
he’d been you beat me to the punch it’s
not bombs it’s not so it’s it’s not
bullets it’s suicide this is an epidemic
we thought with this would gain public
support and we submitted the research
protocol to an independent research
committee they had no problem with the
methodology they didn’t have a problem
with administering MDMA to war veterans
with post-traumatic stress disorder that
had not responded to treatment but they
were concerned that it wasn’t being
conducted in an academic environment so
we sought out a professor who would come
on board as the chief investigator he
was based at a Victorian University and
last year we submitted the protocol to
that Victorian University’s Ethics
Committee before it reached the ethics
committee
the deputy pro vice-chancellor stepped
in and vetoed it she said we’re not
conducting this sort of research at our
University and we believe this is the
result of academic conservativism so
what do I mean by that well when you
think of people who use illicit drugs
most people don’t experience harm yet
the research we conduct is focused on
this small group who do experience harm
it’s been described by Mugford as the
pathological paradigm of drug use drugs
are not illegal because they’re harmful
they’re perceived as harmful because
they’re illegal and only only research
that perpetuates that perception is
funded by the government and this is a
major barrier to conducting psychedelic
science in Australia because we want to
demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of
these potential of these illicit
substances further there’s vested
interests in people who are delivering
and investigating the conventional
treatments they say they work meanwhile
institutions are getting significant
government funding to perpetuate the
idea that illicit drugs including
psychedelics are harmful this has not
led us to give up in the past six months
we’ve published the first two papers on
psychedelic science in the Australian
scientific literature we hope that this
will increase the awareness of academics
increase the awareness of healthcare
providers so that we can have another go
and get mdma-assisted psychotherapy and
other psychedelic research underway in
Australia because if we don’t act now
and if we don’t start a psychedelic
science program in Australia hundreds of
thousands of Australians will continue
to
Safa war veterans continue to commit
suicide or MDMA becomes a medicine in
the US so they fly to the u.s. to get
treatment how long will it take before
Australia joins the International
psychedelic Renaissance thank you
[Applause]
so 1943 albert hofmann
a swiss chemist was developing potential
medications for the treatment of
migraine when he’s accidentally exposed
to one he found a little odd and went
home but he had a pretty good idea of
what he’d been exposed to so three days
later he went back to the lab and took
250 micrograms of LSD in those days that
was seen as a minut amount to be taking
drugs and medications were administered
in the milligram range not the microgram
range but we know now that was a pretty
solid dose so as the effects came on he
realized the lab was not the right place
to be and so hot Tony’s bicycle and he
started riding home and he describes the
vivid imagery the beauty in nature and
he went on to self experiment with LSD
noting that it had these profound
effects but he didn’t know what the
clinical utility of it was so Ellis then
was sent out to researchers around the
world and it led to thousands of papers
being published demonstrating that LSD
assisted psychotherapy was effective in
treating a range of psychological
disorders one of those researchers was
Timothy Leary professor in psychology at
Harvard University
but unfortunately Timothy’s
methodologies got a little loose at the
end of the end there he was giving out
LSD to anyone that would pretty much
take it and so he was fired from Harvard
but there this this was a time of
Cultural Revolution young Americans were
taking LSD and mass and Leary became
their figurehead he was seen on national
television telling the youth to turn on
tune in drop out this was not a good
time for a cultural revolution the US
was at war with Vietnam and the
authorities noticed that
that was protesting the war we’re taking
LSD
so LSD was seen as a threat to the very
American institution and in 1968 it was
banned and this is the start of the war
on drugs it was them bandhans nationally
in 1971 the same year President Nixon
said that drugs a public enemy number
one the drugs he was referring to
psychedelics sadly it also meant the end
of psychedelic science with prohibition
came a propaganda campaign we’ve met so
powerful they’re being perpetuated into
present day one myth is that LSD may be
contaminated with the poison strychnine
so powerful is this myth but it’s
contained in the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders published by the
American Psychiatric Association where
it states that one of the dangers of
taking LSD is exposure to strychnine now
this is the diagnostic manual that
psychologists and psychiatrists around
the world use fortunately in its most
recent edition published in 2013
reference that this has been removed
because there’s never been any
strychnine detected there’s no evidence
the indicators strychnine would be
contained in LSD and yet still it was
published in this very distinguished
book there’s the concern that if you
take LSD gonna lose your mind in a
literature review of all the clinical
studies that were conducted before the
prohibition of LSD they found that less
than point zero one percent of people
that participated in the trials
experienced any symptoms of psychosis
either during or after their psychedelic
assisted psychotherapy and it’s
important here that I distinguish
between the medical application of
psychedelic drugs which I’m talking
about and the recreational use of those
drugs which we’ve become so familiar
with then in 1990 dr. Rick Strassman a
psychiatrist who was trained during the
era of psychedelic therapy and
dreamed of being a psychedelic therapist
was able to re-engage in psychedelic
research he was encouraged by his
supervisor to examine the drug
dimethyltryptamine because university
would know it was
dimethyltryptamine his possible potent
psychedelic night in to humankind
it’s used by shaman in South America to
enter the spirit world
it was encouraged to do some small-scale
blood studies just looking at the
metabolism of the drug but what he found
far more profound were the participants
experiences they reported being
transported to parallel dimensions where
there were entities communicating with
them eventually Strassmann wrapped up
his research because he felt it was
unethical to be pushing people off this
psychological abyss without knowing
where they were going but it was too
late
he’d opened Pandora’s box and we
subsequently have seen an explosion of
psychedelic research what’s now being
referred to as the psychedelic
Renaissance so what have we learned
we’ve learnt a lot about the brain but
what really excites me is a clinically
trained psychologist is mounting
evidence that psychedelic assisted
psychotherapy are effective in the
treatment for people who don’t respond
to current therapies for a range of
mental health conditions so let’s look
at the evidence we used to think that
psychedelics turned on parts of the mind
we’ve now learned what it actually does
is turn off a part of the brain called
the default mode network the default
mode Network is a series of neural
pathways that connect certain areas of
the brain together while preventing
other parts of the brain crosstalking
it’s active whenever you’re in a wakeful
state it becomes more active when you
engage in autobiographical narration you
know that little voice in your head and
it becomes hyperactive when people
experience depression and OCD so what
happens with psychedelics
is it actually turns the default mode
Network off so what does that look like
the picture you can see here is the
brain not on psychedelics and the brain
on psychedelics see all the inter
communication and connectivity that’s
happening between parts of the brain
that would never normally communicate
and it’s been hypothesized that this is
the reason that people experience
creativity and spiritual have spiritual
experiences when they take psychedelic
drugs but more importantly it’s been
hypothesized that this increased
communication and increased connectivity
in the brain could help treat people who
are treatment resistant with depression
because with all this interconnectivity
happening in the brain perhaps they can
overcome their entrenched beliefs and
see the world from a completely
different perspective and this has been
tested recently by a research group at
Imperial College London they gave people
psilocybin which is the active
ingredient in magic mushrooms to 12
people who are treatment resistant in
the context of psychotherapy the results
when given the psilocybin there was a
significant reduction in depression
symptoms and this was maintained for
many people at the three-month follow-up
what’s more interesting is because they
were doing brain scans at the time the
people that had those survived
significant reductions in in depressive
symptoms were those whose default mode
network was turned off the most
addiction is another area where we see
poor outcomes a group at johns hopkins
university conducted a trial of
psilocybin assisted psychotherapy for
the treatment of tobacco addiction the
results were astonishing
they found that 80% had quit smoking at
a six-month follow-up when you consider
the leading pharmaceutical today for the
treatment of tobacco cessation it’s only
effective for 25% of people this group
is now recruiting more petition
fencing conducting clinical trials
together further evidence for this
treatment meanwhile at New York
University they’re recruiting a hundred
and forty people to conduct a clinical
trial to evaluate whether psychedelic
assisted psychotherapy is effective for
people with alcohol dependence we’ve
also found that psychedelics can help
people die with dignity numerous studies
have been published now clinical trials
showing that when psychedelic assisted
therapy is provided to people who are
experiencing end of stage cancer they
see a significant reduction in anxiety
symptoms an increase in the quality
improving quality of their life and
their relationships with their
significant others improve another
disorder that’s extremely disability
ting is post-traumatic stress disorder
the current treatments we have are only
effective for 30% of people those that
don’t respond to treatment are at risk
of addiction of relationship breakdown
and suicide in the first clinical trial
of mdma-assisted psychotherapy for
people who are treat resistant with
post-traumatic stress disorder found
that there was a significant improvement
in fact 83% of participants no longer
met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD
after receiving mdma-assisted
psychotherapy and this was sustained for
three and a half years follow-up this
study has now been replicated in Israel
Colorado Canada Switzerland and the
sponsor of the trial the
multidisciplinary Association for
psychedelic studies has been able to
pull that data they have approached the
US Food and Drug Administration and now
have approval to conduct phase 3
clinical trials why is this significant
phase 3 clinical trials are the final
stage before a drug becomes a medicine
and so in the next few years
we will see MDMA as a medicine for the
treatment of PTSD in the u.s. so I
mentioned the number of countries Israel
Canada UK there’s other countries
engaged in psychedelic Renaissance as
well Brazil the Czech Republic even New
Zealand but there’s one country I’ve not
mentioned what is it why is there no
psychedelic research in Australia well I
can tell you it’s not through a lack of
effort in 2011 given that I believe that
these compounds these psychedelic drugs
could assist in the suffering of
hundreds of thousands of Australians I
helped form psychedelic research in
science and medicine Australia’s first
and only not-for-profit incorporated
organisation that has a mission to
initiate fund and facilitate psychedelic
research in Australia we’ve developed a
strong collaboration with maps and so
our first attempt was to conduct
basically the same troll that they’ve
been doing in the u.s. in Israel in
Colorado in Switzerland
except we wanted to focus on war
veterans the reason being was strategic
what kills more Australian soldiers than
anything else
he’d been you beat me to the punch it’s
not bombs it’s not so it’s it’s not
bullets it’s suicide this is an epidemic
we thought with this would gain public
support and we submitted the research
protocol to an independent research
committee they had no problem with the
methodology they didn’t have a problem
with administering MDMA to war veterans
with post-traumatic stress disorder that
had not responded to treatment but they
were concerned that it wasn’t being
conducted in an academic environment so
we sought out a professor who would come
on board as the chief investigator he
was based at a Victorian University and
last year we submitted the protocol to
that Victorian University’s Ethics
Committee before it reached the ethics
committee
the deputy pro vice-chancellor stepped
in and vetoed it she said we’re not
conducting this sort of research at our
University and we believe this is the
result of academic conservativism so
what do I mean by that well when you
think of people who use illicit drugs
most people don’t experience harm yet
the research we conduct is focused on
this small group who do experience harm
it’s been described by Mugford as the
pathological paradigm of drug use drugs
are not illegal because they’re harmful
they’re perceived as harmful because
they’re illegal and only only research
that perpetuates that perception is
funded by the government and this is a
major barrier to conducting psychedelic
science in Australia because we want to
demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of
these potential of these illicit
substances further there’s vested
interests in people who are delivering
and investigating the conventional
treatments they say they work meanwhile
institutions are getting significant
government funding to perpetuate the
idea that illicit drugs including
psychedelics are harmful this has not
led us to give up in the past six months
we’ve published the first two papers on
psychedelic science in the Australian
scientific literature we hope that this
will increase the awareness of academics
increase the awareness of healthcare
providers so that we can have another go
and get mdma-assisted psychotherapy and
other psychedelic research underway in
Australia because if we don’t act now
and if we don’t start a psychedelic
science program in Australia hundreds of
thousands of Australians will continue
to
Safa war veterans continue to commit
suicide or MDMA becomes a medicine in
the US so they fly to the u.s. to get
treatment how long will it take before
Australia joins the International
psychedelic Renaissance thank you
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: