Name: Rick Doblin Debunks Myths and Details Breakthroughs in MDMA Research
Uploaded: 2023-03-31T18:47:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rick Doblin Debunks Myths and Details Breakthroughs in MDMA Research' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Rick Doblin Debunks Myths and Details Breakthroughs in MDMA Research' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-31. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience. We are now at a place where we recently announced
that
our second Phase III study was successful and was confirmatory. Our
first Phase III 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 your finding is
random.
And you have to have two of those. And so if you have 1 in 20, and
then you multiply them another 1 in 20, it's 1 in 400 chance that these two
independent
studies have produced results that are random, and then the FDA will approve it.
Our first study was
1 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 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 that got therapy with MDMA did great, 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 had PTSD an average of 14 years, one-third
over 20 years.
And then we had just another 21 percent had what's called clinically
significant response.
And they still have PTSD. But over time, they might get better. If they could
have had a fourth session,
they might get better. And we had a great safety record. 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 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 phenomenal. And
we had special 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
Society of Science. It was a study on 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 real danger. Now, this was around 2002,
2003. And they had,
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 narrative
of the anti-drug people, the National Institute of 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.
Did they have evidence of this?
No. And not only did 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, they
would look great.
But it does drop your dopamine levels, right? Or serotonin levels.
No. In a short term. 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.
Why don't you use those?
Because we don't think it's necessary. So what we, 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,
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 rest.
And that's where people would take 5-HTP if they wanted to. But we don't see
this dip in mood
anymore in the MDMA group than in the group that gets therapy without it. So
this, people talk about
suicide Tuesdays or, you know, this depression after you've used up serotonin.
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 5-HTP. 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, we could do both. Yeah, for sure. For
sure. But we don't
in the research. We haven't found the need. So, but what science had... Yeah,
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, Una McCann and George
Riccardi, and it was in primates. And as it turned out, a bunch of the primates
died of overdoses. And
and they published the paper in Science that said that MDMA could cause
Parkinson's that could hurt
dopamine. And the editor of... Science is published by the American Association
for the Advancement of
Science. The president of that was Alan Leshner. 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 NIDA,
got him over a billion dollars a year. So he published a press release 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 knew that we'd given MDMA two
primates
for research, and nobody died of overdoses. None of them did. So we wrote a
letter to the editor.
And we questioned it. They didn't give it the way people take it, which is orally,
as well. And so we kept... How did they give it?
They gave it subcutaneously. So they injected it sub-Q. And so we ended up
forcing them in their
minds to try to replicate their results. Can I pause you for a second? How did
these primates
die of overdoses? They would just have like heart attacks or something like
that.
Is that common with humans? No, no. So here's how this continues.
Okay. So also, you get more neurotoxicity in
crowds for some reason when animals or people are 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.
But they kept defending it in public. And finally, a year later, they said that...
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 they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute
in North Carolina. They
provide all the Schedule I drugs for all the NIDA funded researchers. So the
Hopkins people blamed the
people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the
bottles.
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 the high watermark 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 claim 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 trying to
listen to it.
Do you think it's accidental sabotage or do you think it?
I don't, I think that the researchers 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 that there was prior primate
studies where
dopamine hadn't been damaged. So the other thing is in the late 18, 1980s,
early 1990s,
we were trying to talk about MDMA, serotonergic neurotoxicity. And so I went to
George Riccardi,
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 monkeys,
in primates? And he said he did. And again, there was no evidence of overdoses
or dopamine. 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
recommend, try to get other
people to volunteer for it unless I did it myself. So I was the first one to
get a spinal tap.
And it was really hard. But 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 of 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, um, which by the way,
DeSantis is now
trying to kill, um, and has fired the president. It's the most, um, it's the
honors college of the
state of Florida. And, um, it is. Why is he trying to kill it? 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 sixties 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,
um, because George Soros
actually, even though he's the boogeyman, he, for a lot of the right wing, he,
he funded the Central
European University in, uh, 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, uh,
intellectual narratives. But,
but anyway, I was at New College School and we were, uh, 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
tap showed that there was no problems with dopamine. It was, there was a little
bit less, uh, 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, these researchers
should never have, um, ignored their prior data. They were just so willing to,
um, demonize, uh, MDMA to
get more grant money.

Rick Doblin Debunks Myths and Details Breakthroughs in MDMA Research

The Joe Rogan Experience. We are now at a place where we recently announced
that
our second Phase III study was successful and was confirmatory. Our
first Phase III 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 your finding is
random.
And you have to have two of those. And so if you have 1 in 20, and
then you multiply them another 1 in 20, it's 1 in 400 chance that these two
independent
studies have produced results that are random, and then the FDA will approve it.
Our first study was
1 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 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 that got therapy with MDMA did great, 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 had PTSD an average of 14 years, one-third
over 20 years.
And then we had just another 21 percent had what's called clinically
significant response.
And they still have PTSD. But over time, they might get better. If they could
have had a fourth session,
they might get better. And we had a great safety record. 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 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 phenomenal. And
we had special 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
Society of Science. It was a study on 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 real danger. Now, this was around 2002,
2003. And they had,
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 narrative
of the anti-drug people, the National Institute of 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.
Did they have evidence of this?
No. And not only did 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, they
would look great.
But it does drop your dopamine levels, right? Or serotonin levels.
No. In a short term. 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.
Why don't you use those?
Because we don't think it's necessary. So what we, 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,
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 rest.
And that's where people would take 5-HTP if they wanted to. But we don't see
this dip in mood
anymore in the MDMA group than in the group that gets therapy without it. So
this, people talk about
suicide Tuesdays or, you know, this depression after you've used up serotonin.
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 5-HTP. 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, we could do both. Yeah, for sure. For
sure. But we don't
in the research. We haven't found the need. So, but what science had... Yeah,
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, Una McCann and George
Riccardi, and it was in primates. And as it turned out, a bunch of the primates
died of overdoses. And
and they published the paper in Science that said that MDMA could cause
Parkinson's that could hurt
dopamine. And the editor of... Science is published by the American Association
for the Advancement of
Science. The president of that was Alan Leshner. 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 NIDA,
got him over a billion dollars a year. So he published a press release 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 knew that we'd given MDMA two
primates
for research, and nobody died of overdoses. None of them did. So we wrote a
letter to the editor.
And we questioned it. They didn't give it the way people take it, which is orally,
as well. And so we kept... How did they give it?
They gave it subcutaneously. So they injected it sub-Q. And so we ended up
forcing them in their
minds to try to replicate their results. Can I pause you for a second? How did
these primates
die of overdoses? They would just have like heart attacks or something like
that.
Is that common with humans? No, no. So here's how this continues.
Okay. So also, you get more neurotoxicity in
crowds for some reason when animals or people are 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.
But they kept defending it in public. And finally, a year later, they said that...
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 they got these bottles from a group called Research Triangle Institute
in North Carolina. They
provide all the Schedule I drugs for all the NIDA funded researchers. So the
Hopkins people blamed the
people at Research Triangle Institute and said they switched the labels on the
bottles.
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 the high watermark 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 claim 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 trying to
listen to it.
Do you think it's accidental sabotage or do you think it?
I don't, I think that the researchers 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 that there was prior primate
studies where
dopamine hadn't been damaged. So the other thing is in the late 18, 1980s,
early 1990s,
we were trying to talk about MDMA, serotonergic neurotoxicity. And so I went to
George Riccardi,
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 monkeys,
in primates? And he said he did. And again, there was no evidence of overdoses
or dopamine. 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
recommend, try to get other
people to volunteer for it unless I did it myself. So I was the first one to
get a spinal tap.
And it was really hard. But 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