 But I don't believe that there's going to be anything that's going to take away your PTSD because every time you start talking about all this bullshit that we've been talking about in this room, my fucking memory banks just start flooding back in, right? I had to live with it for such a long time and I tried to wash it out of my mind. I tried fucking everything. There's nothing that you're going to forget. I got in the Army when I was 19. In 1964, I was in country in 1965 and 1966 in Vietnam. I was a helicopter mechanic. One of my best friends, I saw him decapitated by a helicopter blade and that was the one that got me. I think I was 22 when I got out. I knew something was not right emotionally and I couldn't put my finger on it. PTSD is basically a collection of symptoms that happen to people after a traumatic event such as sexual abuse, rape, war, accidents, that kind of thing. It can be really debilitating for people. There's a significant instance of suicide and there's a lot of suffering and disability that comes from living with that. Someone described PTSD as having a big broken heart and I think that's a pretty good description. You bury those emotions that make you human. Well, historically the treatments weren't terribly effective. A lot of supportive counseling, a lot of groups discussing feelings and what's far better is treatments that involve exposure. Depending on what literature you look at, probably around half the people are not well served. Also, pharmacology, Zoloft and Paxil and other medications kind of help to decrease the intensity of symptoms like anxiety, but they don't tend to get at the root of the problem and really cure the disorder. I got to the point where I had so many drugs, I just put them in a big bag and threw them away. I said, I don't want to be drugged for the rest of my life. I was kind of, I'd say desperate, I just wanted to do something in front of my own to commit suicide and I was just tired of kind of carrying the baggage and I saw this clip on CNN. This is the place where we do the study, this is where we meet with people and then this is where we do the MDMA sessions. Intense psychotherapy, including eight hour sessions after taking a capsule of MDMA of ecstasy. MDMA is methylene dioxide methamphetamine. It produces a reduction of activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of the brain. It enhances activity in the frontal cortex where people put things in context. It releases oxytocin and prolactin, which are hormones of bonding and affiliation and love. And the remarkable thing that we've learned about memory is that when you remember something, you have to reconsolidate the memory. You're basically recreating the memory so that if this memory is linked to fear and under the influence of MDMA, you can bring back the memory but the fear response is dampened down. Then when you reconsolidate the memory, it doesn't have that fear to it and you've been able to put it in context as then and not now. Well it's certainly understandable that people don't necessarily realize that this could be a potential therapeutic tool. A lot of people don't know the history. Most people don't understand that MDMA really began as a therapy drug in the middle 70s and early 80s. And then from that, some people realized that they could make a lot of money selling it in more recreational settings and more public settings. And so it was just inevitable that there would be a crackdown. The conclusion of the administrative law judge that did the DEA hearings was that it did have medical utility and it should be in Schedule 3, meaning you can't sell it in bars but doctors can use it. And the DEA administrator overruled that and put it in Schedule 1 anyway. And I felt it was important that we look into this further. No controlled research had been done. We designed a study in which people would have 8 hour all day sessions with me and Annie in which we'd give them MDMA and then spend the day with them, helping them process what came up. I had a very chaotic childhood and because of that I was exposed to a lot of random abuse, sexual abuse. As a child I had a lot of symptoms. I was anxious, I had sleeplessness, I had vomiting, irritable bowels. But I didn't get any real medical attention until I was like 20. Conventional psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, rapid eye movement therapy, drugs and medication, anything that came through I would try it with complete abandon. And it seemed like the more I tried I would uncover more and more stuff would come up to the surface and then it would start to just get worse. The first study was inactive placebo compared to MDMA. So some people got inactive placebo with all the same therapy, the same all day sessions, exact same approach. I got placebo so I was not changed even though this was the best of the best of the best. I knew that I could come back and I would be getting the medicine two months later. Now that's when everything changed. Well in our first study basically in a nutshell 25% of the people that got the therapy with placebo were basically free from PTSD at the end compared to 83% with MDMA. So 83% no longer met criteria for PTSD. There's thing called a CAPS score that rates how sick you are. After this last treatment we did my CAPS evaluation. I came back for the two month follow up to do the CAPS to see what the results of it were and he comes back and sits down and he says, Rachel you don't have post traumatic stress disorder anymore. You don't have it. When I first heard about the study I signed up right away and I was like, I got to thinking about it. I mean it was like 2400 miles of logistics, there's cost involved. Then I broke it down and I said well what do you got ecstasy of therapists? Hell I live next to a college town. It's a no brainer. The treatments that are sold to us at the VA are high in number and varied in legitimacy and MDMA is one of them. If a veteran said listen I saw this on CNN and this is something I really want to do why aren't you offering it? It might work but we don't have the data to support that. This was my own thing. What they were doing was 2400 miles away I said I've got to deal with what I have and I didn't have any compunction about it whatsoever. Fortunately I had a friend of mine's son. He met some guy in Sacramento who was going down to Los Angeles to score a big bunch and I was able to get some and it worked out beautifully. The first time I did it was like this blanket of warmth and glowing. I felt alive again in touch with my feelings and stuff. Music was incredible under the influence. Then after I did the first session by myself I felt a noticeable difference. I got in touch with somebody I knew as a therapist and explained to them what I was trying to do and then I did three three-hour sessions. It was extraordinary. I did three sessions I couldn't do in 30 or 40 years. Right now we're in what the FDA calls phase two which is a number of small studies and then hopefully in a couple years we'll be able to move on to phase three which means two to three hundred people each in multiple sites and you need two of those to then apply to FDA for approval as an indication as a treatment. If it keeps going well what we think is going to happen is it would be approved not that you can give a prescription and people can pick it up at the pharmacy but that it would be approved for use in specially licensed clinics. Last year the VA spent around five and a half billion dollars on disability payments for over 275,000 vets. They perceive this as a crisis. There's 22 vets on average committing suicide every day. So while the VA has certain therapies that they've developed there's a pretty strong awareness that there's a substantial number of people for whom these therapies do not work. These treatments are cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure. We know that these work. It's hard to then say okay now that we finally got something that is very effective in 65 to 80 percent of cases let's try a far out type of treatment. If somebody were to come along with a treatment that has a lower side effect profile, lower nutrition, same effect size, easier to do well then we'll do that. What I fear though and what I don't like to see and what basically just pisses me off is when people forego the effective evidence based treatments for the peripheral type treatments that don't have any real evidence they don't have a great outcome and then they give up on any treatment and that bothers me a lot and that does happen sometimes. The real issue is does this help people or not? And if it does, if they're suffering from PTSD and this is a tool that can help them we should develop it. And even though there's a short term cost that some people will seek it out on their own and may find impure drugs or not be sufficiently supported that's not a reason not to develop it into a medicine. In fact it's a reason to develop it as quickly as possible. There is so much enthusiasm from medical students, residents, young therapists that are interested in this field. I mean just in the last four years I think the amount of enthusiasm and people wanting to do this and open to it has really changed. It's funny I tell people about this and you know veterans and stuff like that and it just it goes right over their head and that they don't understand it but you know I sure did I picked up on it right away and you know when it starts the word gets out I think things will change. So what are they treating almost now that you're studying? Well they're looking at using MDMA to cure PTSD basically. I don't think there's a cure but that would be fun. There is a cure. Maybe one day. You