"Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century"

Presented by MAPS in collaboration with: the Heffter Research Institute, The Counsil on Spiritual Practices & The Beckeley Foundation

Sponsor a video from Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century and have your name appear here.

Andrew Weil M.D. The future of Psychedelic and Medical Marijuana Research

Hello, good afternoon

and hi to all you folks in far away Rhode Island

It's a pleasure to be here. I thought I was gonna be here virtually,

but Rick Doblin arranged to get me a ride down from

St. Rafael and a ride back to the San Francisco Airport immediately after my talk

so I'm happy to be here in person

Now, I should say at the beggining that I'm

in some ways not the best person to give you any

prognostications or thoughts about where things are going because

when I did human esperiments with marijuana in 1968

I thought that marijuana would be legalized in ten years

I thought it was just a matter of getting truthfull information out to people because the

laws and attitudes were based on such wrong assumptions

about marijuana and about psychedelics

but I quickly learned that's not the case

In fact people believe what they wanna believe and don't believe what they don't want to

despite what the facts are and what the evidence are

and I've seen the same thing again in trying to change the medical paradigm

and trying to change medical education

there are many people that believe that the way to change things

is by doing research and producing data

I can tell you in medicine that's not the case

we even have very good data showing that doctors don't change their practices

based on the results of randomized control trials

The Integrative Medicine center that I founded and directed in the Arizona

in the University of Arizona College of Medicine

is now a center of excellence at the University of Arizona

and a world leader in training physicians and health professionals

in a new model of medicine

I'll talk to you about that in a moment

and the reason that we were able to do this was the support of one man

Jim Dolan who was the dean of the college of medicine

who was the first medical school dean to go out and support something of this kind

he retired a few years ago and said that

his proudest accomplishment was the Integrative Medicine Center

and he also said that, and I think this is a lesson for all of us

the way doctors and medical scientists react to new information

is more a function of it's source than it's content

that if information comes from an unfamiliar source the instinctive reaction is

one of defensiveness, exclusion and reaction

against it. And the example that he liked to use, which I think is very apt

is that the observation that aspirin was

an anticoagulant and might be useful on preventing heart attacks

was first made on the 1950's

by a general practitioner in southern California

this was the time when tonsillectomy was universal

you couldn't make it through adolescence with your tonsils and adenoids

if you were in a middle class family

and it was common practice to give kids aspergon to chew, a chewable form of aspirin

and this doctor noticed that kids that chewed aspergon had more and longer bleeding than kids who didn't

so he though maybe aspirin is a blood thinner and he began

taking it himself and noticed that when he cut himself shaving that the cuts bled longer

so he gave this to a number of his patients, satisfied himself that this was a reasonable

hypothesis, which he published on a journal of general practice

with the suggestion that aspirin might be usefull as a preventer for heart attacks

it took 30 years for cardiologists to recognize the validity of that hypothesis

and test it. The reason was that it was proposed by a general practitioner, not by a cardiologist

and was published in a Journal that cardiologists don't think much of

now that's within the realm of medicine, imagine when information about these things

comes from more distant and more foreign sources

like shamans in exotic cultures

And I think this is what we really have to understand

that the reason that the drugs that we're interested in

provokes so much controversy

the reason that they've stimulated the kind of backlash that

has forded research and clinical use

is fundamentally emotional and irrational

it's not something you can deal with through argument and scientific information

It's a matter of changing the culture and attitudes

The problem with marijuana is that it has still not

outgrown its associations in this culture

with ousiders, deviants, subcultures that are not considered part of the mainstream

it entered north american society through two routes

through black jazz musicians in the south, New Orleans

through mexican migrant workers that came in through the southern border

in the 1950's it was associated with beatniks

then in the 60's with this massive counterculture that grew up

it's those associations of marijuana that cause mainstream America to react against it

and this continues to persist

I'm delighted to see that there is now opening in the world of psychedelic research

I mean something clearly has changed there

it hasn't yet changed with marijuana

that's unfortunate. I'm very disappointed that our president

has not done more to support the change in the medical marijuana list

applause

but we have an opening at the moment with psychedelics which

which is both surprising, welcome, is something we wanna work with and

and I'm very pleased to see the kinds of research that have been done

I also have to tell you that over the years as I've looked at the potentials and dangers

of psychedelic drugs and their possibilities for clinical applications

I've been somewhat puzzled by several things about it

first of all, in purely medical terms

these drugs, specially the indol psychedelics

have probably the least toxicity of any pharmacological agents that we now

as you know, there have been no deaths reported with LSD, directly caused by it's

pharmacological action, except in one elephant. I'm sure most of you know that horrible story

if not you can look it up

The striking absence of toxicity of these agents

combined with their tremendous power to alter perception, and the mind-body access

certainly recommends them for research in clinical use

but I have to tell you that I've been puzzled, by the way I should say that the other category of

psychedelics, the phenetilamines, have somewhat greater toxicity

because of their adrenergic stimulant properties

that puts them into a somewhat different class, but still these are quite safe agents

compared to most of the drugs that are routinely prescribed in medicine today

What puzzles me about psychedelic research over the years

in contrast with my own experience with them

is that almost all of it has focused on psychological potentials

initially with things like helping people with end-of-life issues, or with PTSD

my interest has always been in what we call the psychosomatic potential of these drugs

that is their potential to change bodily processes

and physical disease as a result of, or taking advantage of the mind-body connection

so, let me say a word about integrative medicine and the philosophy of medicine that I teach

and have always practiced

in the popular mind integrative medicine is

the intelligent combination of conventional and alternative medicine,

but really that's a very narrow definition of it, the much broader way of looking at it

which I firmly believe represents the future of medicine and a solution to our current health-care crisis

it's working fore some very big changes in conventional medical thinking

the first is to restore the focus of medicine on the health and healing

and to acknowledge, respect and take advantage of the human organism tremendous

potential for self-diagnosis and self-regulation, regeneration, repair, adaptation

to me that's the most wonderful feature of human biology, that our

bodies have the ability to know when they have suffered injury or damage

to repair themselves, and this is not mystical, this is biology

you can observe this on any level of biological organization, from DNA on up

the DNA is a huge macromolecule that's on the border between life and non-life

has the potential within it to know when it has been injured by an ultraviolet ray

and immediately begins to elaborate specific repair enzimes to repair the damage

and that same potential you can see whetter you look to organeles, cells, tissues, organs and

the whole organism, and that's where good medicine should start

The second broad principle of integrative medicine is our insistence that

human beings are more than physical bodies

we are also mental-emotional beings

spiritual entities, community members

those other dimensions of human life are incredibly relevant to understanding health and illness

if you cut them of and only look at the physical body

not only do you cut yourself of from an understanding of the real causes of health and illness

but you also limit your treatment interventions

to those directed at the physical body which are the ones that tend to be most expensive and

most invasive and most productive of harm and often quite limited in their ability to change

physical conditions. The third principle of integrative medicine is that

we pay attention to all aspects of lifestyle

to understand health and illness

and I think this is where integrative medicine really shines in delivering true preventive care

and health promotion, something that's very relevant to the health-care debate

that we're looking through

and also integrative medicine places great emphasis in the practitioner-patient relationship

which has suffered horribly in the present era for-profit medicine

throughout history and in most cultures

that relationship has been recognized as special, even sacred

something magical can happen when a medically trained person

sits with a patient and simply allows that person to tell their story

that alone can initiate a healing response before any specific treatment suggestions are given

and also over the years that has been the source of the greatest emotional reward of practicing medicine

and it's complete undermining in the era of manage caring for-profit medicine

is one reason why so many physicians today are unhappy and so many are leaving

or have left the practice of medicine

and then finally integrative medicine is willing to look at all therapeutic options out there

specially those that don't cause harm and show reasonable evidence of efficacy

there's so much that's not even on our radar screen of conventional medicine that we can bring in

among them the targeted use of psychedelic therapy

Now, what has puzzled me in looking at

this focus of psychedelic research on the psychological

and the omission of the physical

is that in my own experience, both in my personal life and working with patients

and discussing this with great many users of psychedelics

I have observed, seen, experienced, collected many individual case reports of

quite spectacular healing reactions of serious diseases

and these healing reactions were catalysed by a change in perception

that was triggered by a psychedelic experience, sometimes deliberately by a

therapist who guided the session in a certain direction

sometimes quite fortuitously

and I'll just give you a couple of examples of what I mean

the first one is something that I have published

some years ago 60 minutes did an in-depth piece on me which was supposed to be friendly and wasn't

and I told the interviewer this story which was incidental and in three days of interviewing about integrative medicine

and they sent out a press release with this as the headline, this was the story that they used so

and the story was that Dr. Weil claims that LSD cured his cat allergies

all right

it did, and here's the story

I was very allergic as a kid, in all sorts of ways, I had hay fever, I've got hives in response to various drugs and things

I was allergic for a lot of my life, and one of the allergies I had was to cats and

whenever a cat got near me my eyes would itch, my nose would run, if I touched the cat

it's got much worse and if a cat licked me I've got hives where it licked me

I had in my mind a mindset that I was allergic to cats and therefore

I didn't want them in my presence, and if a cat came near me

I would either push it away or withdraw myself, so there was a deep

ingrained defensiveness in my interactions with cats

one day, when I was 28, and was making a lot of changes in my life

I took LSD with some friends, I was living in a countryside in Virginia, it was beautiful springday

I was in a terrific space, everything was wonderful, the world was magical

everything was alive, and into this scene a cat bounded

and jumped in my lap and I had a split-second of the habitual reaction and

suddenly I decided this was silly, why did I have to do this?

so I started petting the cat, playing with the cat, the cat licked me, I had no reaction to the cat

I have never had a reaction with cats since!

and that was almost fourty years ago

applause

Now, that's pretty spectacular

As a physician I would love to know what happened there

and I would love to know how to make that happen in another people

Anyway, I'll tell you one that's even more spectacular which I haven't written about