Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEOXc9ufQjE
The Joe Rogan Experience we are now at a place where we recently announced that our second phase three study was uh successful and was confirmatory our first phase three study was incredibly successful and to give you a sense of how successful and we published this in nature medicine the FDA looks at statistical significance so there's efficacy and safety so efficacy is determined by basically statistical significance and you have to have 0.05 which means 1 in 20 chance that it's random that it's not from what you think it was you know that your intervention your experiment said yes it's statistically significant that means it's 1 in 20 or lower chance that it's your finding is random and you have to have two of those and the and so if you have one in 20 and then you multiply them another one in 20 it's one in four hundred chance that that these two independent studies have produced results that are random and then the FDA will approve it our first study was one in 10 000 chance that it was random it was just incredible now how do you do that how do you get that's great statistical significance you get it because you have um a big difference between the two groups and you also have not that much variability so what it means is the people that got MDMA pretty much of them got major benefits and the people that got the therapy without MDMA so I should say the people got therapy with MDMA did great pretty not very much variability it doesn't work for everybody but we had 88 percent responders we had 67 percent no longer had a diagnosis of PTSD these are severe PTSD patients that um at PTSD an average of 14 years one third over 20 years and then we had um just another 21 had uh what's called clinically significant response and uh they still have PTSD but over time they might get better if they could have had a fourth session they might get better so and we had a great safety record we had nobody attempt we had actually nobody in the MDMA Therapy Group tried to kill themselves tried to hurt themselves we enrolled people that have previously attempted suicide we did have one woman try to kill herself twice
during the study but she was in the placebo group she got therapy without MDMA we had another woman it was so difficult for her to confront her trauma that she checked herself into a hospital to not self-harm she also was in the placebo group so the results were phenomenal and science the journal science one of the most important uh journals in the world in science at the end of every year they publish a list of what they think are the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year and they chose our study in nature medicine as one of the world's top 10 breakthroughs of the year it was it was phenomenal and we had special um appreciation for what science was willing to do because you talked about beforehand about holes in the brain so 20 years before science had published this article that they never should have published and this was by researchers at Johns Hopkins that had been funded by the national and Son drug abuse and what they claimed is that MDMA could hurt dopamine this was a study in primates and they said oh my God MDMA can hurt dopamine and it could cause Parkinson's and that this could be a real danger now this was around 2002 2003 and they had um since 1985 it had all been about MDMA supposedly hurting serotonin and causing holes in the brains from serotonin and we had done studies in primates before with these same researchers where none of the primates died from overdoses that there didn't seem to be any problems with dopamine but the The Narrative of the the anti-drug people the nationalism drug abuse about serotonin neurotoxicity was sort of diminishing people weren't showing problems and so what they were saying was well you're reducing your cognitive reserves and so you don't show problems now but when you get older you're going to show problems so the time bomb theory do they have evidence of this no and not only do they not have evidence but a lot of older people took MDMA and they were fine so if they had had this you know decline of Aging age-related decline so it does drop your dopamine levels right or certain levels in a short term yes yes yes yes yes yes yes it does but it doesn't do this kind of damage to the brain in that way they
recover within a day or so and there's mitigation techniques like with 5-HTP we don't use those but people do use those so I don't use those because we don't think it's necessary so what we we first proposed we in 1992 is when we got permission for the first study with MDMA and people had been using 5-HTP after MDMA but there's there is a benefit to using 5-HTP it boosts your serotonin levels quicker correct yes yes it can be helpful but what we do in a therapy context so the FDA we said should we try administering with 5-HTP or something like that they said um they said don't do that you know let's do everything under observation and see what the problems are and if you need if you see problems then we should figure out how to mitigate the problems so the key thing that we do is to say to people that when you take MDMA it's a two-day experience it's not a one-day experience and the second day is for rest and for reflection and they have no obligations no appointments nothing that you need to do just take the second day and and rest and that's where people would take five hdp if they wanted to but we don't see this uh dip in mood any more in the MDMA group than in the group that gets therapy without it so this people talk about suicide Tuesdays or you know this this the depression after you've used up serotonin um but I think the rest part is part of the therapeutic process and it so we have never felt the need to recommend that people do five HTTP I don't think it's a bad idea to do I mean if people wanted to do it it can be helpful but we just feel that the rest is just as helpful and it's more therapeutic so what but they're not mutually exclusive no no we could do both yeah for sure for sure but but we don't in the research we have we haven't found the need so but what science had um yeah so so this idea of serotonergic neurotoxicity and holes in your brain and Time Bomb theories just wasn't working anymore it wasn't persuading people wasn't persuading the FDA so Nida funded this study uh una McCann and George McCurdy and it was in primates and as it turned out a bunch of the primates died of overdoses and um and they published the paper in science that said that MDMA could cause Parkinson's
that could hurt dopamine and the editor of uh the science is published by the American Association for the advancement of science the the president of that was Alan leschner he used to be the head of Nida and he fanned the fears of MDMA and he did that in Congress and it was great because then he got more money for night I got him over a billion dollars a year so he published a press release uh about this article and it said that taking MDMA was like playing Russian roulette with your brain right so it didn't seem right this article we we knew that we'd given MDMA do primates for research and nobody died of overdoses none of them did so we we wrote a letter to the editor and um we questioned it they didn't give it the way people take it which is orally as well and so we can't give it they gave it subcutaneously so they injected it Sub-Q and so we ended up um forcing them in their minds to try to replicate their results okay pause you for a second how did these primates die of overdoses um they would just have like heart attacks or or something like that um is that common with humans no no so so here's how this continues so so they they also you get more neurotoxicity in crowds for some reason when animals or people or uh together than when they're alone and when the temperature is higher there's more neurotoxicity so they tried giving more MDMA to primates with higher temperatures more crowded in the cages and they couldn't replicate their results and they but they kept defending it in public and finally a year later they said that um and this was super embarrassing they had to retract the study because they were puzzled why they couldn't replicate the results and so they took some of the tissue from one of the animals that had overdosed and died and they discovered that they had mistakenly given methamphetamine instead of MDMA and that the bottles they said that were labeled MDMA actually had methamphetamine in them and so these they they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute in North Carolina they provide all the schedule one drugs for all the night of
funded researchers so the Hopkins people blame the people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the bottles the the people from Research Triangle Institute said they never do that they always test it they have quality control they think that it got switched something or other at the site at Johns Hopkins the National Institute of drug abuse didn't want to find out what was going on or if they did want to find out they never made it public so it's never clear how did this happen but they had to retract this data and retract their papers and it was um the high water mark of neurotoxicity fears and at the same time Peter Jennings was doing a documentary called ecstasy rising and this was the first documentary that really had a bunch of people talking about the benefits and he also talked about this problem with the methamphetamine the other thing about methamphetamine versus MDMA is that you know for people that know about Adderall and other things 10 15 milligrams is a hefty dose but MDMA it's 125 milligrams is a full dose and so they were giving the wrong drug in MDMA quantities and that's why they knocked off a bunch of these primates and that's why they they claimed that they saw this dopaminergic problems and so ever since then and that's been 20 years ago now do you think do you have speculation that was sabotage somebody sabotaged it somewhere I don't think it was from research triangles do you think it's accidental sabotage or do you think it I don't I think that the researchers um wouldn't have done that intentionally but maybe somebody in the lab did it or something but I do think that the researchers were fundamentally irresponsible to put the paper out because they should have known um that there was Prior primate studies where dopamine hadn't been damaged the the other thing is in the late 18 1980s early 1990s we were trying to talk about yeah mdma's serotonergic neurotoxicity and so I went to Georgia cardi the same researcher that did the primate study with the methamphetamine instead and I said I want to buy you some monkeys you've just done studies in rats can you study this in in monkeys in primates and he's he said he did and again there was no evidence of um
overdoses or domain also this was before brain scans came in and so the most sophisticated way that was available at the time to look at what's going on in the brain was to do spinal taps and to take spinal fluid and look for metabolites of neurotransmitters in the brain and I felt like I could not um recommend uh try to get other people to volunteer for it unless I did it myself so I was I was the first one to get a spinal tap and it was really hard but the the imagery that I did and again this is kind of this idea about storytelling so the story I was telling myself as this big needle is going into my spine to try to draw out the spinal fluid was that if a woman could give birth to a child I could at least give birth to my spinal fluid it was like way less painful much shorter but I could do it and so the imagery was I'm giving my birth to my spinal fluid to these researchers so that we can understand what's really going on with MDMA and hopefully make it into a medicine and it didn't hurt terribly and there was spinal headaches that you get afterwards so a couple days afterwards I had headaches but I felt like I could um enroll other people I can encourage other people to do it so I was going to new College in Sarasota Florida which by the way DeSantis is now trying to kill and has fired the president it's the most um it's the Honors College of the State of Florida and it is why is he trying to kill her um it's just uh what he's doing to public education I mean this was the symbol of the most what he called the most woke School in a bunch of transgender people a bunch of open-minded people um it started as a private school in the 60s merged with the state when they ran out of money so he fired the president he stacked the Board of Trustees and he's making he wants to turn it into a conservative school he's doing it for political purposes to try to show that he's anti-woke and that he is um wanting to he what's going on in public education in Florida is is really
frightening um George Soros is actually interested in trying to help out at new College because George Soros actually even though he's the boogeyman for a lot of the right wing he funded the central European University in Hungary as as after communism and it was killed also by Orban in Hungary so you go after public education as a way to try to control intellectual narratives but but anyway I was at new College's school and we were experimenting with MDMA and so I got about 35 people or so to get spinal taps not just from new college but from from all over and um the spinal taps showed that there was no problems with dopamine it was there was a little bit less serotonin metabolites but also lower serotonin has been linked to risk-taking behavior and so taking drugs is risk taking Behavior particularly when they're heavily criminalized so it was not evidence that it was serotonin neurotoxicity from MDMA but it cleared dopamine so these researchers should never have ignored their prior data they were just so willing to demonize MDMA to get more grant money