Psychedelics: Past, present and future | Mark Haden | TEDxEastVan

This TEDx talk explores psychedelics in history, the current research and a possible future model of post-prohibition regulation based of the model of public health. Mark Haden has worked in the field of addiction services for 28 years and is an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia in the School of Public and Population Health. He is an instructor at the University of British Columbia and has published studies on drug control policy in several Canadian and international academic journals. He works closely with the Health Officers of British Columbia on position papers related to market regulation of illegal drugs and in 2013 was awarded the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal for his work on drug policy reform.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

I have been standing in front of audiences

for 30 years talking about drugs.

And I often start my
presentations with an apology.

Specifically, I apologise for the lies
of past drug educators,

including myself.

And I acknowledge we've told three lies.

We've exaggerated the harms of drugs,

we've never acknowledged
the benefits of drugs,

and we've never talked about

the dominant model
for controlling drugs in our society,

which is drug prohibition,

which has failed us all so badly.

(Applause) (Cheering)

Now, for much of my career,
I've talked about that last point,

the failure of the war on drugs,

but today I'm going to talk
about the benefits of drugs.

Specifically, I'm going
to talk about psychedelics.

Now, psychedelics have been
around in human culture

since before recorded human history.

And we can see at least four
communities, cultures today,

that have woven the psychedelic experience
into the fabric of their culture:

there's the curandero's use
of psilocybin mushrooms,

there's the ayahuasca use
in the Amazon basin,

there's the Huichol use of peyote,

and the shamanic use
of Amanita muscaria in Siberia.

Now, on the surface,

how the container of safety is created
with these cultures

with this psychedelic
experience is all different.

But if you look at how the experience
is integrated into the culture,

that is actually quite similar.

They're used for healing,

everything from psychological
to physical issues.

They're used for
a celebration of transitions

everything from seasonal changes
to puberty rites.

And they're used for spirituality

to connect the individuals and the culture
to the cosmos as a whole.

If I wanted to use one word
to describe that,

what I would say is
the word would be 'pro-social'.

Psychedelics have
always been used to connect

people to their culture
and to the universe.

So it was historically unprecedented
what happened in the 1960s

when psychedelics got linked
to an antisocial message.

It had never happened before.

Tim Leary said, 'tune in,
turn on, and drop out',

and the subsequent social backlash
has caused immense human suffering,

and it goes on today.

And admittedly, there were some other
cultural issues going on at the time,

but certainly, that disconnect
message was profound.

And the media participated
in the spinning of the web of illusions:

'LSD-Fed Ape Rapes TV Actress';

(Laughter)

'LSD Made Me a Prostitute';

'Girl Gives Birth to Frog'.

(Laughter)

Even the science of the time
was suppressed.

For 40 years, scientists couldn't do
what they needed to do,

which is measure stuff.

Now, can I think of any other time
in human history

when science is either being
suppressed or criminalized?

Well, as matter of fact, I can.

In 1616,

and then for the subsequent 143 years,

the science of the telescope was banned.

It was illegal for people to report

what they saw through
the lens of the telescope,

specifically that the earth was not
the centre of the universe.

LSD is to the study of the mind,

what the telescope is to astronomy
and what the microscope is to biology,

according to Stanislav Grof.

Well, psychedelics are back.

(Laughter)

This is the Canadian
Medical Association Journal,

the conservative voice
of Canadian medicine,

with a number of articles,
exploring the psychedelic renaissance,

the explosion of research
that has happened in recent years.

That's really what I want
to talk to you about.

But to be really clear,

what I'm talking about here is
skilled, trained, competent professionals

using pure substances
in ways that are well supervised.

I'm not talking about impure street drugs

used by unsupervised,
irresponsible adolescents.

So how do researchers think
about psychedelics these days?

Because they break them
into three categories.

The first are the classics:

LSD,

mescaline,

dimethyltryptamine,

and psilocybin.

And these offer researchers
a variety of attributes

that are worthy of investigation.

For example, spirituality.

Now, it's kind of neutral spirituality

because Buddhists find the Buddha,

Christians find Christ,

and atheists and agnostics
find the entire universe.

And this particular aspect
of these medicines is quite useful

for situations like end-of-life anxiety.

When we are dying, and we're anxious
about the experience,

and we take a dosage of psilocybin,
and we meet our maker,

and we're told, it's okay, we can relax.

We're just coming home.

It tends to reduce
the stress of that transition.

The classical psychedelics also offer
a disorientation of the ego,

which can be very helpful in things
like treatment for alcoholism.

They also increase the permeability

between the unconscious
and the conscious mind;

they allow us to have access
to our unconscious

in a way that we don't normally.

Now, if you really think
about the human experience,

a lot of our lives
are lived unconsciously.

For example, driving a car.

Our conscious mind
is thinking about the radio,

and what we're going to have for lunch,

and the conflict we had
with our spouse, or whatever.

We don't think about our feet.

Our unconscious mind is driving the car.

We live our lives with lots of tape loops
that just happen automatically.

And if something bad happened
to us in childhood,

and it's replaying itself
consistently in our adult life,

and causing problems for us,

it’s very hard to access
because it's unconscious.

Psychedelics can help with that.

Psychedelics also offer -
the classic psychedelics offer

what I call 'the portal effect',

which is the 'Wow,
that was incredible!' effect.

It's a bit like climbing Mount Everest
or graduating high school;

you have a sense of
accomplishment and transition.

And that's very helpful
in many conditions.

The second group of psychedelics
are the empathogens;

3-MMC, MDA, MDMA are examples.

And what they do is they bond people
and increase empathy.

That's really useful to bond a therapist
to somebody who wants some help.

That connection is really important.

It could be facilitated
with these medicines.

They also take away fear.

So if a soldier who's been
in battle in Afghanistan

comes back to North America

and is replaying that trauma
again and again,

normal therapy can't access it,

partly because it's unconscious,

but partly because
anything it gets close to,

it has a huge fear response.

And MDMA specifically takes away that fear
and allows the tape to be reworked.

It appears MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
maybe the best treatment for PTSD,

post-traumatic stress
disorder, that exists.

And then there's everything else.

Things like ibogaine,

which appear to be incredibly helpful

for heroin withdrawals,

opiate addiction,

this 2C-B, this salvia, and this ketamine
that seems to be helpful for depression.

Now, my own area of academic interest
is articulating post-prohibition models

for the regulation and control
of all currently illegal drugs,

based on public health principles.

You might have noticed,

drug prohibition is slowly crumbling

under the weight
of its own ineffectiveness.

It does not protect our communities.

It does not protect our families.

And it does not protect our children.

So it will end.

And I ask the question,
'What are we going to replace it with?'

peering through the lens of public health.

So the goal of a public health approach

is to maximize the benefits
and minimize the harms.

I've already talked about some benefits,
so I'd like to talk about harms.

The harms from all drugs
can be broken into three categories:

dependency, toxicity, and behaviour.

Dependency -

I worked for the addiction
services for 30 years.

Nobody ever walked in my office
saying, 'I can't stop taking LSD'.

(Laughter)

It never happened!

So the dependency potential
for psychedelics is really low.

Toxicity -

The last time you took
a prescription drug,

if you took six times the dosage,
you probably did yourself harm.

That one to six ratio is very
common for most drugs.

With LSD, it's in the thousands.

In fact, Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD,

said it was one of the least
toxic substances on the planet.

So dependency is very low,
toxicity is very low,

so all of the harms from psychedelics
come from one thing,

which is the behaviour,

which is essentially lack of supervision.

Now, indigenous communities
have known this for years.

They've always provided the experience
in a very tight container of safety,

where they're highly
supervised experiences.

How researchers
are thinking about this today

is they think about the words,
or they talk about the words:

'set', which is expectations;

'setting', which is the environment;

'dosage', which is
what you take and how much;

and 'safety', which is the umbrella term.

So set, setting, safety, and dosage

are carefully structured
by the research community today.

So in a post-prohibition world,

if the goal is to maximize the benefits
and minimize the harms of psychedelics,

people would have access
to the psychedelic experience.

So long as they were supervised,

there was a container of safety
built around the experience,

and somebody was in charge.

A trained competent, skilled professional,

who is licensed, would be allowed
to offer the experiences to others

so long as set, setting, dosage,
and safety were managed.

And it wouldn't matter
what the environment was:

It could be indigenous healing circles;

it could be psychedelic psychotherapy;

it could be multi-day dance festivals.

It doesn't matter,
as long as somebody is in charge.

I would like to reflect
on the human predicament today.

We're in trouble as a species.

Global climate change
is affecting all of us.

There's a concentration of wealth
at the top of the pile

that is unprecedented in any society,
so few people control so much wealth.

There's a huge amount of violence
and religious extremism.

And we live in these
really strange societies

where somehow we've equated
happiness with buying stuff.

So if I really think about those problems,
they're problems of disconnection:

we are disconnected from the earth;

we are disconnected from each other;

we are disconnected from a true sense
of meaning and purpose in our lives;

and we're disconnected
from healthy spiritual experiences.

The good news is psychedelics
are all about connections.

These two images are very powerful.

They're depictions of the human brain
based on neuroscience.

The one on the left
is the normal human brain.

The parts of the outside of the circle are
the different parts of the human brain,

the visual cortex, for example.

Notice that the visual cortex talks
a lot to the visual cortex,

and not a lot to the other
parts of the brain.

The image on the right is the human brain
under the influence of psilocybin.

Notice the rich range
of new connections that are formed.

Psychedelics are all about connections:

connections with self -

we have access to our unconscious minds

in a way we do not
normally have access to;

connections with each other -

that's the empathogen research;

connections with a sense
of meaning and purpose to life -

there's a lot of research done on that;

and connections with a sense
of true spirituality -

indigenous communities
have known that for centuries.

Isaac Asimov said,

'One of the saddest aspects of life now

is that science gathers knowledge faster
than society gathers wisdom'.

We as a human species need to grow up.

We need to take advantage of

and learn and work with
the knowledge that we already have.

And perhaps, just perhaps -

something that could
help us mature as a species

and maybe even assist with our survival

is mature, skillful, wise use
of psychedelic medicines.

Thank you.

(Applause) (Cheers)