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to get back to where that research left off. But Dennis says that the therapeutic potential is clear. The challenge is how to take these substances, which have long been reviled and prohibited, and reintegrate them into medicine, particularly when drug companies rely on profits from consumers who take their drugs every day instead of the three or four times it takes to get the same or better benefits from a psychedelic.

      Yet we must find a way, because, as Dennis puts it, not only are psychedelics therapeutic for individuals, but used in the right context they would also be therapeutic for societies and ultimately for the whole planet because they tend to make us more compassionate. He believes that this was one of the reasons the government wanted to suppress the use of LSD in the 1960s; people were taking LSD and saying, “You want me to go to Vietnam and kill those people? Why would I want to do that?” That is particularly ironic because there is compelling evidence that the CIA actually did introduce psychedelics into the United States, although I believe the outcome today is not what it anticipated.

      Dennis and I agree that a society of people who are less interested in killing others is a good thing. So does Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit research and educational group that he started in 1986 to do the important work of developing medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the use of psychedelics and marijuana. You might not expect someone with that job description to have a PhD in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Rick works to progress the research and education behind the benefits of psychedelics and marijuana primarily as prescription medicines, but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people.

      Like Dennis, Rick grew up in the 1960s, but he believed the propaganda that one dose of LSD would make him permanently crazy. Yet he was studying the psychological mechanisms of what was going on in the world and the dehumanization of the “other”—the core belief that can cause people to fear and then work against and kill other people. It started him thinking that if people could be helped to experience their sense of connection with others, it would lead to more peaceful discussions and negotiations. Of course, that led him to LSD, which made him feel connected, as if he were going beyond his ego. He realized that psychedelics were incredible tools with major therapeutic and political implications, and when the government cracked down on those drugs and criminalized the people who sold and used them, Rick became an underground psychedelic therapist. Then he began to work on bringing psychedelics back up from the underground.

      Today, MAPS is a nonprofit pharmaceutical company working to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines. It is making an effort to work within a very rigorous scientific context to make the drugs available as prescription medicines to be taken only a few times and only under supervision. They often work with veterans through a three-and-a-half-month-long treatment program. During that time, patients take the drug once a month combined with weekly nondrug psychotherapy for about three weeks before their first dose and then again after each dose to help with the integration. It’s essentially an intensive psychotherapeutic process that’s punctuated occasionally by powerful experiences with hallucinogens that bring traumas and experiences to the surface, where they can be fully explored and worked through so that healing can begin.

      Another guest I spoke with on Bulletproof Radio is the three-time Emmy Award–winning journalist Amber Lyon. Amber is a former CNN investigative correspondent who used psychedelics to treat her own PTSD. Amber is a filmmaker, photographer, founder of the news site Reset.me, and host of the podcast Reset with Amber Lyon, both of which cover potential natural therapies and psychedelic medicines. As a journalist who covered war zones and child sex trafficking, she began experiencing many of the same symptoms of PTSD as soldiers facing combat. She had absorbed the trauma she had witnessed, was having trouble sleeping, and was hyperaroused. If she heard a loud noise, she’d start to panic. That began affecting her career and her entire life.

      Amber knew that she needed help, but she didn’t want to go the prescription drug route after having reported on the negative side effects of prescription medications throughout her career. She started researching natural medicines, and a friend suggested psychedelics. At first she was suspicious. She had always thought that psychedelics were dangerous drugs. But when she began reading anecdote after anecdote of people who had been healed of mental health disorders, including PTSD, by psychedelics, she began to believe that they could help her. She went down to Iquitos in Peru and attended a ceremony with about fourteen other people led by a shaman. In a yurtlike structure, they all consumed ayahuasca at the same time and then stayed together and discussed their experiences the next day to integrate what they’d learned.

      Amber found it to be a beautiful and profoundly healing process. Within twenty seconds of consuming the ayahuasca, she realized that there was so much more to the universe than she had been experiencing. It also allowed her to process a lot of the trauma that she’d stored in her body. She felt a presence in front of her sucking dark forms of energy out of her body. One took the shape of a thirteen-year-old sex-trafficking victim she’d interviewed for a documentary. Another was in the shape of an animal she’d seen covered in oil during an oil spill. Those forms departed from her until all of the trauma she’d been carrying had left her body.

      Then she was able to go back in her mind and watch a movie of her life to see where her own trauma had started, which was in childhood during her parents’ tumultuous divorce. She relived and reprocessed those experiences, moving them from the “fear and anxiety” memory folder in her mind to the “safe” folder. That was tremendously healing.

      Like Amber, I tried ayahuasca in Peru. That was back in 2003, when I was fat, burned out from working in Silicon Valley, and slowed by mold poisoning I didn’t know I had. The traditional medical approach had failed me, so I began looking into alternative ways to improve my mood and cognitive performance. I ended up in a guesthouse in the Peruvian Andes, asking the owners in horrifically broken Spanish to connect me to an ayahuasca shaman. Back then it was hard to find someone who would agree to do so with me, a gringo. Now I notice a huge difference in Peru, where locals are lined up offering “ayahuasca tours.” It’s more important than ever to be careful about whom you trust with this experience. I knew the shaman I found was good when he asked me whether I was taking MAO inhibitors or other antidepressants that interact with Banisteriopsis caapi, one of the plants used to brew ayahuasca. You could die if you try ayahuasca while on certain antidepressants.

      At dawn the next morning, the shaman led me to a hill overlooking the Sacsayhuamán ruins, just outside the capital of the ancient Incan Empire. He set up a tent and pulled out a little bag of stones, which he set around us in a circle while he chanted. I was skeptical of the stones and the chanting, but I was willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy the experience. The first cup, to my surprise, he poured into his dog’s mouth, explaining that his dog always journeyed with him. He drank the next dose and then gave a double dose to me. (I’m six feet four and weighed around 260 pounds at the time.)

      I don’t remember much about the few hours that followed, just fleeting images and a feeling of freedom I had never experienced. I did come away from the experience with enormous, bounding energy. For my whole life up until that point, I’d had to push so hard to do everything because I was always tired. All of a sudden that was gone, and that feeling lasted for several months. On a deep level, it helped me understand that we are more than just meat robots. There’s more in there, and what we think, feel, and do must be in alignment. That made me focus on creating alignment in my life. Then again, so did many other things that weren’t drugs. In my case, the things I experienced helped me to understand that I needed to work on my physical body as well as the emotional side and that the two were inseparable.

      It comes as no surprise to me that more and more people, especially high-powered executives, are “coming out of the closet” about their use of therapeutic psychedelics. If you have a mission in life and you’re stuck spending two-thirds of your time dealing with childhood trauma that instilled a pattern into the way you interact with the world, why would you spend all of your time and energy using low-powered techniques to heal when you can choose from an array of faster techniques that can get you to the point where you can see your programming? Yes, they are certainly scarier and even more risk

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