Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcuGYKvvJEc
the jurgen experience and i think one of the problems from the 60s was this idea of you know one dose miracle cure that's all you need yeah and i think what we've come to understand is that it's not that way occasionally it can be but mostly it's not and you need this support afterwards and you need to integrate it and what we've also learned from neuroscience is that you're actually neuroplasticity that these psychedelics help you rewire your brain in new ways but you have to reinforce that it's just not automatic it's not about the drug it's about the therapy that the drug helps make more effective and people have placed undue confidence you could say in the drug itself you need a new pathway once you've gotten off of your old pathway the psychedelics jolt you into this new realm but if you don't have a new pathway then you you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone and if your comfort zone is alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your life and taking pills and you're going to go right back to that yeah there's one example of one person where it was like a one dose miracle cure it's really rare but i'll just explain a bit he was a veteran and had ptsd i talked about tony macy during my ted talk but he had this sense that he had been disabled with ptsd for years because of friends of his that had been killed all the violence that he saw when he was in iraq and under the influence of mdma he had this realization that there was something good about the ptsd he was getting a benefit from it which was it was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died that he was connected to their memory and that he was suffering it was a way to be bonded still with them but then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his
friends who had died and to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life they didn't have life anymore they would want him to live as fully as possible and he realized there's another way to honor his friends which is to to live and he thought what am i going to do with the rest of my life and in that moment he cured himself of ptsd then he said i'm taking opiates for pain but i don't really think i'm taking it for pain i'm thinking more about it as an escape i don't need the opiates anymore and then he said i don't need this mdma anymore either i'm done i want to drop out of the study this was his first of what was going to be three mdma sessions wow and he dropped out and we said sure it's all voluntary but if you we'll just do the outcome measures that would help us and he agreed to do that and at the two-month follow-up no ptsd and then around 11 months when we have the 12-month follow-up he started thinking well maybe i'd like another mdma experience i said well we can't quite do that if you're out of the protocol you've dropped out but at least it's only for ptsd this study let's see what your scores are at the 12 months and no ptsd and that was about nine ten years ago i've been in touch with him recently he's doing great but it was this realization that he was able to make under the influence of one experience of mdma that enabled him to reinterpret the way he could be loyal to his friends who had died that's amazing and it makes sense it completely makes sense that that would be one of the reasons why a soldier would have ptsd you talk to soldiers that experience combat duty one of the things they say is there's this insane profound connection with their fellow soldiers yes and when one of them is killed and they survive they have this survivor syndrome this survivor's guilt yeah and it it haunts them you know and if
they could honor the fallen soldiers by living their best life and not being in constant trauma it'd be better for everybody catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience