Original subtitles

- This is your brain. This is drugs.

This is your brain on drugs.

- The German study suggests

that the U.S. Government's claim

that ecstasy causes devastating, irreversible brain damage

was a dramatic exaggeration.

- That's part of the reason I want to legalize it too.

Cause we can figure out: "Look, this is safe, it's the right dosage."

- There are people who think it's a bad ideia.

There are people who think smoking and drinking are bad ideas.

- Experts think that just one dose could mess up your brain for life.

- Researchers at a Norwegian University

have looked back at early medical trials of LSD

and found evidence it could be used to treat alcoholism.

- Psilocybin decreases the amount of activity that's occurring,

therefore decreasing activities associated with depression.

- a California state law

where medical marijuana appears to be helping so many people with cancer.

- They take ayahuasca as a medicine.

They say it's a medicine for the body and the soul.

- 1,000 deaths related to drug violence.

- We see the failure of the policy of prohibition in our society.

- It's the beginning of a very significant scientific

investigation of the actions of psychedelics.

- In the popular press, hallucinogens have been portrayed as a recreation,

an escape, or a dangerous invitation for abuse.

But there is another side to the story.

The truth is that more people die each year from using

simple pain relievers than from all illegal drugs combined.

And of those caused by illegal drugs,

the vast majority are caused by street narcotics such as cocaine and heroin.

Almost none are due to psychedelics.

- This is a glass of water.

It contains 100 gamma of LSD 25, one-tenth of a milligram.

Let us observe the effect some three hours later.

- I can see everything in color.

And the dimensions and all the prisms and the rays.

And everything coming down through you and moving.

- What does this all mean to you?

- I've never seen such infinite beauty in my life.

- There was great hope in the early 50s that

LSD was going to revolutionize psychiatry.

And in some sense that hope was not misplaced.

In the 1960s, drugs like LSD had moved out

of mainstream medicine into recreational use.

I think that powers that be, to some extent,

felt that things were getting out of control.

So that in the mid-60s there was a move to

try and put the lid back in the bottle, to get the genie back into the bottle,

to try and restore social control

that appeared to be on the verge of breaking down.

- Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement in the

Vietnam War in mass marches, rallies and demonstrations.

- If we're going to be able to prosecute wars in the

future, we can't have too many people taking drugs like LSD.

- When they would take it, they go, wait a

minute, why am I supposed to go fight in Vietnam?

Exactly, explain to me, what am I doing over there?

You want me to kill these other people, but they're just like me.

I'm killing a part of me.

You do see out of the box with LSD.

You do see past culturally imposed values.

You know, the whole goal was to sort of crack open the mind, break away from

the constraints of a culture that we felt was inhibiting the human potential,

that we might embrace a new realm of possibilities.

The upshot, though, was quite extraordinary, in that, in order to ban

a drug, you had to paint it as having extreme dangers linked to it.

And the biggest and most convenient danger to use

was the idea that you would get hooked.

In actual fact, you cannot become

physically dependent or get addicted to a drug like LSD.

To try to deal with something like this

in a straightforward scientific manner is really difficult,

because you're really dealing with irrational, fear-based reactions

that have nothing to do with what the drugs have done in the past

and what they can do in the future.

It's been 40 years, 50 years, essentially,

since all clinical work on psychedelics was shut down.

Despite the restrictions on research into LSD,

its dramatic effects on the brain had put scientists

on the trail of a new and intriguing neurotransmitter called serotonin.

Serotonin is referred to as a neurotransmitter system.

It's also referred to as a neuromodulatory system because it modulates

or regulates not only a lot of different kinds of processes in the brain,

but it also regulates the activities of other neurotransmitter systems.

Psychedelics have a similar kind of role in the brain,

although sometimes what they're doing

is releasing the control that serotonin has over certain areas of the brain.

So everything that's coming in through your senses, except for smell,

comes in the brain and goes through an area called the thalamus,

which is kind of like a gateway.

The thalamus decides what gets sent to the cortex, and the cortex,

these executive areas, is what puts together your whole sort of gestalt.

What is your reality?

Now, these two parts of the brain: the lower part of the brain,

that regulates the flow of information,

and the middle parts of the brain that provide the emotional interpretation

of the information, are linked through these serotonin circuits.

And so one of the things that these psychedelics do

is that they stimulate this serotonergic circuitry

that enhances the connections between the emotional brain

and this lower behavioral and informational brain.

So this is why I talk about these psychedelics as

really being better characterized as psychointegrators.

They function much like serotonin in integrating

the activities at the different levels of the brain,

but they do so in a way that changes the

serotonin's sort of repressive control mechanisms,

regulating us, from having too much information

to saying, "You get it all."

And this is part of the overwhelming experiences that people have,

but it's also why we get these intense insights,

these intuitive understandings,

the sense that everything is now all connected together,

because the brain really is being connected together

by the way these substances interface with the serotonin system.

What really got researchers interested in serotonin

and its functions was the fact that LSD resembled serotonin chemically.

Not only that, but LSD affected all of these various functions of serotonin

and was really used as a molecular tool to understand what serotonin was doing.

If you had a psychiatric disorder, say you were schizophrenic in the 1940s,

the general consensus then was, or the belief was then, that you

were schizophrenic because your mother had failed in some way.

You had not had a nurturing mother, she had not breastfed you.

There was no concept that what happened in your behavior

was in any way related to brain neurochemistry.

Among these drugs, the hallucinogens, are included

mescaline, a chemical taken from the peyote cactus,

psilocybin, extracted from a variety of Mexican mushroom,

DMT, synthesized from the compound tryptamine,

and of course, LSD-25.

Albert Hoffman discovered LSD in 1943.

Sandoz began to send it out to psychologists and psychiatrists,

say here's something that produces a state like mental illness.

You can use it to learn about it, possibly use it as a tool to study mental illness.

So serotonin, which principally occurs in the gut,

was isolated and identified in about 1948, about five years later.

LSD was, you know, showed tremendous promise and

continued to show promise as a tool in neuroscience,

as a tool for understanding brain functions.

William James, the famous American psychologist,

made a distinction between two different kinds of ways behavior change.

He talked about the educational variety of behavior change,

where things occur incrementally.

we learn things, and that's how we normally think about behavior change.

And then he said, you know, there's a different kind of way

human behavior changes, and that's an all-or-none type of change.

Psychologists have used various terms to describe

conversion experiences, or quantum change, or epiphanies,

to kind of grab the idea that the human organism is

capable of having a profound shift of perceptual awareness.

Often in a psychedelic session, there is a sense that there is a

process unfolding that's just incredibly well-crafted, incredibly wise.

And it's not coming from the person who has ingested the substance

or the guide, it's coming from the depths of the unconscious itself.

People recognize very often the pain that

they've been running away from all their lives.

But they also recognize that central and indestructible part of themselves

that they've never seen before, at least that they've lost touch with.

And ultimately, that entailed feeling drawn into this transcendental,

mystical realm of the self, beyond the individual historical life.

And beyond that, to the profound unitive states that the Hindu

would call Samadhi, or the Christian might call the beatific vision.

A Sufi would call Fanaa, the profound awareness

at the very core of the mystery of what we are.

I'm reminded of a slogan or two I saw some students carrying once.

One said, "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers."

And another one said, "There is no they."

Right, exactly. And that's one of the components of the LSD experience.

The understanding that there is no they, there's no other.

It is all one.

This member of the mushroom family, this fungus,

is for the moment known only as X.

It was discovered barely weeks ago growing in a remote rainforest.

Science has not yet given it a name.

For science knows scarcely anything about it.

But it is felt that X might have one remarkable quality.

That it stimulates extrasensory perception.

Enabling the mind to become telepathic and clairvoyant.

Now that's a rather large claim.

Is it true or false?

The answer to that question took us on a unique and distant journey.

We suddenly found this, a way to explore a continent that

we didn't know existed and not many other people knew existed either.

Just like Marco Polo, in the 14th century, he went with his uncle and his father

to China and then came back and said stories about China.

People said, "Oh, you're hallucinating.

You're crazy. There's no such place,

You made that up.

You're fantasizing."

He said, "No, you could go for yourself."

So we suddenly found that there's a ship that can take you

to this other continent that you didn't know existed.

And there's all these amazing animals and people and trees and plants

and mountains and situations going on that you never heard about before.

And that are incredibly interesting,

that have all kinds of fascinating relationship to our own selves.

And give us insights into who we are

in a very interesting way and novel and productive way.

So we would take psilocybin and sit around in a group and talk to each other.

Now, later on, and nowadays, I wouldn't do that.

I mean, that's not a good way to do it.

You might sit in a group and take psilocybin, but you'd stop talking.

In psychedelic therapy, you put your eye shades on and

listen to music and pay attention to what's coming through from within.

Of course, then you do external talk in order to integrate

and understand your experience and bring back translation.

That's like you come back from the undiscovered country and

then you talk to other people who've also been there and say,

Well, what did you find and what did you find?

And maybe some people are specialists in the plants, others in the animals,

others in the people, the culture, the geography and so forth, like that.

And so it's like an expedition.

In the 60s, some people used mushrooms for the hallucinogenic effects.

Well, now those same so-called magic mushrooms are being

used to ease the pain and anxiety of cancer patients.

You know, I thought that the people that would come to us would be biased.

They would have been children of the 60s.

They would have done hallucinogens a lot in their youth.

And they would have been like groovy hippies or ex-hippies that came to us.

That has not been the case of the people we've treated so far.

Just sort of brave individuals who have enormous

amount of distress associated with having cancer,

who weren't biased in any way by these drugs.

They just were looking to get out of the suffering they were in.

When the individual is told that he or she has a limited life expectancy,

it is very common to have a great deal of anxiety

about the anticipated pain that might occur and anxiety about the unknown.

What does the passage to death signify?

There's also often a great deal of apprehension about what

will happen to significant others that will be left behind.

I was very skeptical at first.

I was very worried about taking people who were

dying of cancer and who were already anxious and about making them more anxious.

I spent a lot of time looking into the safety literature

and speaking to the groups at Johns Hopkins and UCLA

and actually hearing some testimonies of former

patients and even speaking to some former patients.

And I became more and more reassured that this was safe and that if

you screen patients properly that this was potentially very beneficial.

We saw a considerable indication that there was both a

short-term and a sustained over time alleviation of anxiety.

And here we're talking specifically about the anxiety, the

existential anxiety associated with their limited life expectancy.

A new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

suggests that the key ingredient in magic mushrooms, psilocybin,

may be the perfect aid for certain mental disorders.

Early research has shown that psilocybin is helpful

for terminally ill cancer patients dealing with anxiety

and possibly people with severe forms of depression.

The Good Friday experiment was an attempt to take

the tools of science to look at this question:

can psychedelics, in this case psilocybin, catalyze a religious mystical experience?

Because these people were divinity students at the time,

most of them were ministers after all these years.

And many of them reported that they had had non-drug mystical experiences

in their life after the Good Friday experiment.

And that gave them a point of reference to compare to their drug experience.

And these people compared it in a way that it was,

again, either identical or very similar to.

But they determined in their view that their

psilocybin experience was genuinely mystical.

The experience that day demonstrated to me the reality

of God's presence in all the world and in all experience.

If our eyes are opened and we are able to perceive

and take that in, and by eyes I mean our spiritual inner awarenesses.

I would say, yeah, it did change my life.

When they started talking about what the implications

of that experience had been for their life,

that's when I started understanding what to me felt like

one of the keys to the 1960s, to the cultural revolution of the 60s.

They felt that they were motivated to be part of the civil rights movement,

the anti-war movement, the women's rights movement, the environmental movement.

The hippies in the 60s. We had a racial bias a lot of places,

but the hippies were black, white, yellow and every other color, because

those barriers came down in people who took psychedelics.

Those cultural barriers were gone and they could see through that.

It was a transparency and they said, well, he's just like

me. She's just like me. We're all part of this thing.

And if they had mystical experiences, it was even more profound

because they realized everything is all apart. Everything is all one.

When you have this unitive mystical experience,

because it's unitive,

you identify with people that you might normally not.

So that there's a deeper part of ourselves,

deeper than our country, deeper than our nationality,

deeper than our religion, deeper than our gender,

deeper than our skin color, deeper than our sexual orientation.

That there's this core element that binds us together.

The hallmark feature to the mystical experience is one

in which there's just a sense of the interconnectedness

of all people and things, a sense that all is one.

And that experience is accompanied by this noetic sense

that the experience at its core is more real and more true

than everyday waking consciousness.

Lucid dreaming is you're dreaming, but you're conscious that you are dreaming.

So suddenly you're having a dream and you go:

"I'm having a dream."

And you're aware that you're having a dream within the dream.

Psychedelics have been suggested to produce an effect like that.

And if you look at the electrical state of the brain in a waking normal person,

and you see a lot of activity in the frontal cortex,

because that's where all the information is coming in to be processed.

So when people take a psychedelic and have that mystical transcendent experience,

the brain is still functioning and conscious,

but it's getting no data from your feeling, touch, the body.

The body is gone.

So now you just have this basically pure consciousness.

So what happens then?

Yeah, I don't know.

I think it's incredibly interesting.

We still don't know.

And these drugs are the tools that will enable us to figure it out.

We've asked the question, where does it work in the brain to produce its effects?

And how do the changes it produces in the brain lead to these remarkable experiences,

both of alterations in sensation,

but also alterations in feeling and emotion

and the sense of being more at one with the universe.

And what we found was completely surprising

and exactly the opposite of what we predicted,

because we found that psilocybin

turned off blood flow in key parts of the brain,

such as the prefrontal cortex,

such as the posterior cortex and the thalamus.

And when you look at those parts of the brain,

you realize that they actually are the parts of the brain

which control and integrate

the way in which the brain processes information.

They're the kind of gatekeeper regions,

the nodes which regulate what you do and how you feel.

And by switching those off, we kind of liberate the rest of the brain

so that it can do other things.

And that's why you get the expansion of consciousness.

The core of what we found in our studies in healthy volunteers at Johns Hopkins

is that there is this quantum change, if you will,

in terms of perception of life and self and attitudes and moods and behavior.

Most people are still endorsing that this experience

is among the most personally meaningful

and spiritually significant experiences of their entire lives.

So we can now actually study the mystical experience -

or "transcendent experience", maybe a better term for it,

transpersonal experience -

with pharmacological tools using scientific tools.

I think that's a huge accomplishment

and a huge sort of break from the way it's always been.

We're just relearning how to let it be okay

to call these things real, to call these practices real again.

Seeing that these kinds of experiences can be occasioned

and that they're producing reports

of long lasting attributions of personal meaning

and spiritual significance really got my attention.

I was diagnosed to have terminal cancer a few months ago

and naturally there's a lot of fear and anger and pain,

emotional pain that surrounds something like that.

It has allowed me to open up and have

communication with my family that I have never been able to have before.

This morning the Drug Enforcement Administration

is announcing its intention

to place the drug known as MDMA or by the street name Ecstasy

under emergency controls in Schedule 1.

There were trials where a DEA administrative law judge

heard hours and hours

of testimony and made the decision

that Schedule 3 made the most sense.

It would be a prescription medicine and there would be a lot of restrictions on it,

but it would be much, much easier to do clinical research with it.

But the DEA did not take

its own administrative law judge's recommendation

and they went ahead and put MDMA in Schedule 1.

And what's interesting is MDMA has been in Schedule 1 for 25 years now,

and it's just as easy to get as it's ever been, if not more.

It's become a very popular drug of abuse.

Millions of people around the world are taking this drug recreationally.

One thing that you see is that when you're taking a known quantity

of a known substance in a medical setting or a therapeutic setting,

it's very safe.

Because this drug is illegal,

when somebody buys Ecstasy, they may be getting MDMA

or they could be getting any number of chemicals

that are not bad for you, are horribly bad for you.

Because of prohibition, the issue of drug substitution

and counterfeit pills and things like that is very much an issue.

That's one of the problems with the way drugs are approached in this society.

Kids don't learn about using these things in a safe and wise way.

When MDMA first came into public awareness,

the government officials were calling it another hallucinogenic amphetamine.

And I knew a lot about what the structures of hallucinogenic amphetamines look like.

And I thought, that doesn't make sense that that's a hallucinogen.

My laboratory actually published the first biochemical work on MDMA

in 1982 before anyone even called it ecstasy or knew what it was.

We showed that it released serotonin.

Amphetamines themselves, amphetamine or methamphetamine,

release principally a transmitter called dopamine,

and also norepinephrine, but also release a certain amount of serotonin.

MDMA has mostly its effect on serotonin.

It releases serotonin, but also releases norepinephrine and also releases dopamine.

So in some respects, it's working like methamphetamine,

but the profile is somewhat reversed.

MDMA is not a hallucinogen.

It really is unique in psychiatry.

There's no other drug like it.

Because it is this massive serotonin agonist,

it basically floods the synapse or floods the brain with serotonin.

It's almost like an immediate-acting antidepressant

or an immediate-acting anti-anxiety medicine.

They're called anxiolytics. Something that decreases anxiety is an anxiolytic.

And in psychiatry, all the anxiolytics are sedating.

So there is no immediate-acting, non-sedating anxiolytic in psychiatry,

but MDMA is an immediate-acting, non-sedating anxiolytic.

30, 45 minutes after somebody takes MDMA,

most people become very relaxed and happy and content.

They're also awake, alert, completely conscious,

cognizant of everything that's going on.

They have enhanced memory for the experience,

and there's also enhanced memory for early repressed traumas.

So it's particularly well-suited to psychotherapy,

to being a catalyst for psychotherapy.

We see it right now for post-traumatic stress disorder,

for veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq.

There's a great need for treatments that the current medications,

the current psychotherapies, only work partially,

and only work in certain subjects.

So the need is growing for the psychedelic medicines.

One of the problems with treating PTSD

is that people either have too much anxiety

or too much emotional numbing

in order to be able to revisit the trauma in a therapeutic way.

And what MDMA seems to do

is to allow people to face their fears

without being overwhelmed, but yet have an emotional connection.

We just recently completed what's called a Phase 2 clinical trial

of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treatment-resistant PTSD.

We would encourage them to spend a good bit of time

focusing inward without talking.

And we had headphones with a program of music and eye shades.

We had an agreement with everyone

that if nothing about their trauma came up,

then we could bring it up, but we never had to do that.

It always came up spontaneously, but not necessarily right away.

We encourage people to be open to the idea that

their own inner healing intelligence

would bring whatever experience needed to come.

It seems that MDMA helps people stay

in that what's called an optimal arousal zone.

So one other unique thing about MDMA is that it induces, in most people,

a heart opening and a sense of connectedness

and empathy with other people.

That may be because it enhances

oxytocin release in the brain,

a hormone that is involved with bonding.

So I suppose,

in a world where more people were undergoing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,

you would have more people who were happy and relaxed

and more trusting of other people and more caring and more empathic.

My take on it in general is that it somehow

allows access to an experience

that is a kind of fundamental, inherent capacity that people have.

People seem to have more empathy for others and for themselves.

It seems as if it removes the obstacles to accessing that sense of empathy.

In the old time, you could go for 10 years for meditation

and then once, if you were lucky on the way,

you would realize, ah, that's what Jesus or Buddha meant.

Now you can do it in six hours in ecstasy.

It will not keep, but you get the insight.

And if then you are serious, you can start to work with that insight.

But first, the door has to open.

It would not be the best use of it if people get the idea that

the only way you can feel better is to take the drug again.

I think that gets into a pattern that's not useful.

Psychedelic is a beautiful help to open the door

as long you are ready to accept it is not the solution.

It's an interesting compound. We need to know more about it.

We need to understand the risks and benefits.

And the only way you're really going to understand it is to do clinical research.

Marijuana, the dried leaves and flowers of the

Indian hemp weed, is used in the form of a cigarette.

Marijuana smoking, experts point out,

can make a helpless addict of its victim within weeks,

causing physical and moral ruin and death.

Should you ever be confronted with the temptation

of taking that first puff of a marijuana cigarette,

don't do it!

One of the most remarkable aspects about cannabis

is that the plant itself contains hundreds and hundreds of different compounds,

many of which are likely to have therapeutic value.

Now mostly we focus on THC, which is of course

the component of cannabis that makes you stoned.

But there's another very important component called cannabidiol.

But cannabidiol itself is also a relaxant drug.

It's recently been shown to reduce anxiety.

It may also promote sleep.

Early man began to use psychoactive potions.

In the cave paintings, you can see the signs

of an altered state of consciousness.

Initially, of course, ancient people didn't have any

understanding of things like THC, chemical molecules,

these types of things, or effects on the brain.

And the effects of plants like cannabis, opium, coca, mushrooms, cacti,

were all generally seen as magical effects that came to them through the gods.

So cannabis has a very broad range of actions,

and it's been around for 4,000 years,

so it's not surprising that its utility

has been widely experienced and widely tested.

It was very popular with Queen Victoria in England in the 1800s.

She used it to treat period pains.

She used it to treat the pain of childbirth.

And in fact, it was a legal medicine in Britain until 1971.

And then when young people started using it, it was banned.

I certainly think we have made mistakes in penalizing people for medicinal use.

We saw some cases that were absolutely ludicrous,

people who were raising it for those purposes,

who've been directed to use it.

I think we should open up this whole can of worms.

And I would hope that the Justice Department could work with this committee,

and work with members of Congress and other advocates

as to how better to assess the use of marijuana.

Can they come up with even one positive thing

as a result of prohibition of marijuana?

And if they start saying, "Oh, it's to keep the

drugs away from our children," they're wrong.

It's easier for our young people to get marijuana than alcohol.

If they're going to say, "We're going to reduce violence.

We're going to perpetuate the rule of law," they're wrong.

It's doing the absolute opposite.

60% of all of the drug cartels' profits in Mexico

come from the sale of marijuana,

with all of the drug-related violence that goes down there.

It isn't the drugs that are causing the harm. It's the drug money.

The federal government officials say this all the time.

There's no study showing that marijuana is an effective medicine.

And you know something? They're right.

However, it's beyond hypocrisy for them, because it's

the federal government that controls the marijuana,

and numbers of reputable groups, the Centers for Disease Control,

the University of California, and others, have requested to conduct the studies,

and they've been deprived of that authorization.

So there's no research because the government hasn't allowed the research?

The government affirmatively does not allow this research to take place,

and then they sanctimoniously say:

"Well, there's no research that shows it."

It's beyond hypocrisy. I view it as chutzpah.

Cannabis is less harmful to the health than alcohol or tobacco.

And therefore, it is completely out of order

that it should be in this high prohibited category.

Tobacco, to the best of my knowledge, is the

only substance that we sell in the United States

that when used as directed causes death.

Right. Absolutely.

Shouldn't we be incorporating tobacco into our drug policies?

Oh, certainly. Certainly.

And that argues more and more for it being a

public health issue rather than a criminal issue.

I think the ultimate threat of these substances when it comes to modern society

is their ability to break consensus trance

and throw people into looking at things in a novel new way.

Society went through a massive upheaval.

There was a sexual revolution.

People started protesting wars.

And the government themselves directly sought a relation

between this and drug use, particularly cannabis use.

Now, this is one thing I want. I want a Goddamn strong statement on marijuana.

NIXON: Can I get that out of this sonofabitching Domestic Council?

HALDEMAN: Sure.

NIXON: I mean one on marijuana that just tears the ass out of them.

I see another thing in a news summary this morning about it.

It's funny thing, every one of the bastards

that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.

What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?

what is the matter with them?

I suppose it's because most of them are psychiatrists,

all the greatest psychiatrists are Jewish.

By God, we are going to hit the marijuana thing.

And I want hit it right square in a puss.

I want to find a way of putting more on that.

More work with somebody else with this.

HALDEMAN: Yep!

NIXON: I want to hit it, against legalizing and all that sort of thing.

We must wage what I have called total war

against public enemy number one in the United States,

the problem of dangerous drugs.

Drugs are menacing our society.

They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, and his son Ronald Reagan Jr., in an interview,

when questioned about his mother Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign,

and his father's support for the war on drugs,

said in relation to marijuana,

"It's not marijuana the mildly mind-altering substance.

It's marijuana the antithesis of the state.

At the time I had no reason to believe that there was anything sinister going on.

This estate looks like a nice place to raise a family,

but this seemingly safe suburb was hiding a dangerous secret.

Police finding five cannabis grow houses on two neighboring streets.

I'm a bit scared.

Chelsea and her family live in the area, but are

now moving out solely because of the drug raid.

I've got rental agreements. I'm going to find another place to live.

"Yeah, cannabis has had a rough time over the last century or so.

And one of the real problems I think we have now

is that medicinal cannabis is only available in some countries,

still not available in the United Kingdom."

And that's a serious loss and it's a detriment to many of our patients.

We've done research on the different constituents of cannabis.

THC, which gets you high, CBD, which is an amazing compound,

which is anti-psychotic, anti-axiolytic, anti-diabetic.

It's a very good compound.

It's been grown out of the crop

because the crop has been modified

and grown so that it has as high THC as possible.

It's a tragedy that our youth can only get that type of cannabis, more or less.

There's a lot to be learned about that and I think

it can be a real problem for kids

using it in a way that doesn't have that kind of set in setting.

There's a lot of learned knowledge which can

more easily be passed on in a regulated system.

On one hand, we decry the scourge of drug abuse.

On the other hand, we say that you should take drugs.

Instead of dealing with a behavioral problem,

instead of implementing novel things such as parenting,

kids are a behavioral problem

so they can be medicated so that they're no longer a problem.

As a result, we have a whole generation that

has grown up to rely on drugs

and so then they find out that the drugs that are prohibited

actually work much better than the pharmaceutical drugs.

They're often more effective and so they can see no reason

not to use those substances.

While autism is not a qualifying medical condition like

cancer or severe pain, in Alex's case, the seizures are.

His parents give him a liquid form of the drug and after a few

months of treatment, the Eccles say they saw a dramatic improvement.

He went from hitting himself, blood in his face,

within an hour, hour and a half,

he would be playing with toys, using his hands,

something that at that time was almost unheard of.

They're not advocating the use of medical marijuana for all autistic children,

but they say "walk a mile in their shoes",

and the treatment might not seem so extreme.

Seniors are the fastest growing group taking up pot.

A warning, this report does contain drug references.

I don't believe in drugs,

but then I've also never been someone who suffered from pain.

Marijuana kept me alive.

I've talked to so many people, elders, who said

"I never thought I would do anything illegal in my entire life."

"I'm a little old lady who's followed every rule I've ever heard of."

"But when my husband was suffering from chemotherapy,

I found myself hunting for marijuana."

"And I had to go across that line to find it."

"It made me realize that not all the rules are here to protect us."

"And that sometimes we have to look beyond those

boundaries to find what we're actually entitled to have."

And CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent

Dr. Sanjay Gupta joins me now. Sanjay, welcome to you.

Thank you.

You've been looking at this for a year and I want to remind you that

in 2009 you wrote a Time Magazine article entitled 'Why I Would Vote No on Pot.'

You've changed your mind.

If you look at all the papers that are written in the United States

about marijuana, the vast majority of them are about the harm.

We fund studies on harm. We don't fund studies on benefit nearly as much.

So it gives a distorted picture.

But I didn't look far enough. I didn't look deep enough.

I didn't look at labs in other countries that are doing some incredible research.

I didn't listen to the chorus of patients who said

not only does marijuana work for me,

it's the only thing that works for me.

I took the DEA at their word when they said is it a

Schedule I substance and has no medical applications.

There was no scientific basis for them to say that.

The science is there. This isn't anecdotal.

This isn't in the realm of conjecture anymore.

For a long time we've just ignored these papers.

But this was a drug that was used for thousands of years.

'Ayahuasca' and 'yage' are indian words for banisteria caapi.

The literal meaning of 'ayahuasca' is vine of the soul.

This powerful hallucinogen has been credited with the ability

to transport human beings to realms of consciousness

where telepathy and clairvoyance are commonplace.

The ayahuasca ritual is about to begin.

What I was into was looking at how Amazonian Indians

think about their resources and use them

to be able to argue against the World Bank,

and other international development agencies

that were enacting these big deforestation projects

that would take land away from people.

This was about human rights and ecological destruction

and trying to make the world a better place.

So I had a vested interest in showing that these people were rational,

but the problem was, when asked,

they said that their knowledge about the plants

came from the hallucinations of their shamans.

Well, after circling around this question of the origin of their knowledge,

finally one guy said:

"Brother Jeremy, if you want to know the answer to that question,

you have to drink ayahuasca."

He said "it's a television of the forest,

and you can see images and learn things."

So, you know, I decided to check it out.

Pasteur tried it and all the great scientists,

they try it on themselves. That's one of the beautiful things about science.

Open, heart...

It's not such a radical proposition to see plants as being teachers.

In fact, it's only the alienation of Western science from our roots

that creates that apparent split.

I mean, for thousands of years,

around the world, medicine was based on plants.

These psychoactive chemicals, in some way,

are a co-evolutionary mechanism,

a way that, you know, and here's where we get away from science and into speculation,

but a co-evolutionary mechanism by which

the community of species,

or at least the community of sentient species,

has evolved to talk to this primate, if you want to put it that way.

A way to share the gnosis, share the knowledge.

A famous botanist once said:

"Plants have substituted biosynthesis for behavior."

Animals interact with their environment and deal with their environment

primarily through behavior.

You know, the flight or fight reaction, all of this stuff.

We move around. If we're threatened, you know, we get up and run away.

Plants can't do that. They're stuck in one place.

So they mediate their relationships with the environment

through chemistry. That's why they're such great chemists.

And if you are an animist,

a person who sees the spirit of plants at work with agency,

meaning the ability to choose to interact with another species.

Suddenly the whole relationship becomes much more complicated

because now they can be used as an agent essentially to form a symbiosis

with this hypertrophy-brained primate.

And so suddenly the whole evolutionary relationship,

the co-evolutionary equation has changed.

The plant has an incentive to form a relationship with human beings.

I think it's very significant

that we talk about the shaman's experiences as an out-of-body experience.

That the experiential self, what we may call the soul or the spirit

or just our cognitive point of reference,

becomes detached from the body.

And so now we have the capability to look at the world in a way that is

more than just the body-based limitations

that we originally evolved to use to understand the physical world.

There is a sense in which

in your mind you rise above yourself or outside of yourself and you can see.

You see films about yourself.

Once you drink you see

and once you see then you can't unsee.

Just like they say, you can take this stuff

and it shows you these spectacular images that teach you things.

There's a wisdom in the psyche that becomes more and more apparent

of just what a particular person most needs to experience

in order to mature psychologically and spiritually.

It is often like that is just what I needed to know,

perhaps not what I wanted to know,

but just what I needed to know at that moment.

Those cultures where ayahuasca is part of the culture,

no one uses it frivolously.

The kids don't go off and party with it.

It's used in a very respectful way,

with elders, shamans, people that know how to use it,

guiding and having a safe set in setting.

The mindset of the subject and the therapist

and the setting in which it occurs

makes a huge difference.

So I think that's very hopeful

because you're seeing a sort of a migration together

again of shamanism, which has always

essentially been a form of psychotherapy,

in which the use of these substances is an integral part.

And now that's coming together

with clinical psychiatry and clinical neuroscience.

So I think that's very encouraging

because it forces us to acknowledge

that mind and spirit and soul

are all part of this equation.

It's true that ayahuasca has become

surprisingly popular in the Western world.

What's surprising about it is it's not necessarily

an enjoyable experience. It's a purge.

It can make you vomit and so on.

I mean, you know, it's not exactly a party drug.

I must say, you wouldn't drink ayahuasca out of ceremony.

It's not anything that you do lightly.

And you want to be doing it with people who have been there before,

who are helping you, and who know what they're doing.

But I remember after one of these sessions,

kind of innocently saying to the men who I had been up all night with,

I said, 'My God, this stuff is really incredible.'

I mean, it's terrifying.

Some of the visions, you know... Don't you guys get scared?'

And they just said, you know, 'Yeah!' You know, it scares the heck out of us.

The idea is sort of rip through the placenta of ordinary consciousness

to achieve some kind of illumination.

But nobody said the journey was supposed to be pleasant.

It's nothing I particularly

either look forward to or enjoy very much when it happens.

But after it happens, there's a kind of clarity and a lightness that's powerful.

Because what's being purged actually

is psychic contents that you've been holding on to.

You're purging anger. You're purging pain.

You're purging some false story about the self.

What faster way, if you're a Westerner,

to sort of find an antidote to

shopping, materialism and lack of meaning

by having this experience?

What we have witnessed here

is the survival of a tradition

almost as old as man himself.

What we had done, Lieutenant,

was to establish definitely,

for the first time, through careful experiments,

that man at present is using only a fraction of his

brain capacity, especially in the field of awareness.

And that certain drugs are powerful devices for

expanding this awareness toward its real possibilities.

Brother and sister together we'll make it through.

Oh, yeah.

Someday a spirit will take you and guide you there.

And I'll be there just helping you out.

Whenever I can.

Everybody's free.

Everybody's free.

Oh, to feel good.

The successfully marketed serotonin antidepressants

which came into consumer use in the 1980s

were sold as mechanical fix-its.

In the marketer's dream, the complex system of self and environment

was distilled into a pill

to be cheerfully swallowed on a daily basis,

offering the promise that you would return

to the persona of a productive and contented citizen.

This idea that we can somehow medicate ourselves into a state of happiness.

This encourages drug dependence,

and it encourages people to not really examine

the foundations of the problem that make them feel bad in the first place,

because you can simply mask the symptoms.

It's not like any individual is wrong to do that.

It's the picture that's wrong. The individuals are suffering, clearly.

We have to have compassion for people looking for

solutions to their personal problems

in whatever way they can.

But it doesn't seem that medicines that

dampen your desires and dampen your identity and

dampen your caring about this world

are good medicines for the individual or for the planet.

Overburdened by their HMO schedules,

doctors no longer have the time

to work through serious issues with their patients.

Their only recourse is to issue a quick prescription.

That's one of the problems why it's difficult

for drugs like LSD or other psychedelics

to be integrated into the medical model.

It's an experience. A therapist has to actually sit down with the person,

and talk with them.

Depression and other types of mental illnesses

are understood to be chemical imbalances in the brain.

It's very rare that when an SSRI is prescribed

that actually measurements are taken to

establish that there are chemical imbalances.

I don't think that chemistry explains depression.

So the idea that depression can be

related simply to some biochemical changes,

I think it's a very inadequate theory.

Beneath depression are basically traumatic experiences.

From our perspective that's a symptom

that we have seen most frequently changed very profoundly.

We have seen people coming out

of deep depression lasting several years, sometimes after one session.

The companies are not interested

to hear about a treatment that may need just to be given once or twice

that could make a huge difference to people.

As far as the dominating culture,

the pharmaceutical industrial government complex,

it's not that they don't want you to be on drugs.

They want you to be on drugs.

They just want you to be on corporate drugs.

But what about the pharmaceutical companies?

Couldn't they make a lot of money

by turning all these substances into pharmaceutical products?

All of these drugs are off patent.

MDMA patented in 1914, it's in the public domain.

LSD first synthesized in '38, it's in the public domain.

Psilocybin was first synthesized in the '50s, it's in the public domain.

Marijuana as a plant, these things are in the public domain.

The corporate government approach is:

if we can't patent it, let's prohibit it.

All you do by banning these things preemptively

is you create a black market,

you create an opportunity for somebody to get very rich

by dealing in what is now a prohibited substance.

And you motivate intrepid psychonauts to experiment even more.

There are many people who are using substances,

all kinds of different substances, legal and illegal.

Just give me something.

Let's just forget who I am and what's going on.

And medicine is the opposite.

Let's explore who I am and let's understand it.

Psychedelics open up the door to our inner psyche.

So we have human experiences under the influence of a psychedelic

rather than a psychedelic experience

that's somehow or other intrinsic to the drug.

A flood of findings with drug addicts and convicted felons

showed that these substances could recondition behavior,

enabling them to make dramatic changes in their lives.

After participating in one of these experiments himself,

Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill Wilson became convinced

that LSD could cure chronic alcoholism.

In a series of studies conducted between 1954 and 1960,

Dr. Humphrey Osmond proved him right,

treating 2,000 alcoholics with LSD under carefully controlled conditions

and achieving a success rate

that had never been duplicated by any other means.

We've turned the corner on drug addiction in the United States.

Drug addiction in the United States is under control.

First of all, the word addiction itself comes from the Latin word 'addictus'.

An addictus was somebody who owed somebody money,

couldn't pay it back and had to become a slave to them.

So addiction always implies slavery.

That of course includes drugs,

but also includes shopping, sexoholism, addiction to power,

addiction to wealth, addiction to violence, addiction to work.

Anything that we try and use to fill the internal void can become addictive.

On top of that, of course, we live in a society that values externals.

Everybody gets the message that they're not adequate because those

perceptions of not being adequate is what drive a lot of consumerism.

So this society, automatically and unconsciously,

generates insecurity in almost everybody,

which of course is an alienation from the self,

which of course it's a source of internal distress and pain,

which again leads to addictive behaviors.

The serotonergic hallucinogens in particular,

they're classified as drugs of addiction,

but they don't induce addictive syndromes

in any way that we can measure them,

either in animal models or in human models.

And in fact, in a way they're misclassified as having high addictive potential.

And the reality is when used under the right kind of constructs,

they can actually be used to treat addictive spectrum disorders.

These drugs are illegal and one remembers Professor David Nutt.

I mean it got so many headlines at the time he was sacked

by the former Home Secretary for his advice

saying that ecstasy and LSD were less harmful than alcohol.

Should perhaps people view this in the context that

there is someone perhaps

who just generally wants less regulation of some of these drugs?

Well, this is a very specific application of the drugs.

It's a medical application and

these are preliminary results

and so we're interested in the potential of the drug.

So really it doesn't directly implicate the policy issues.

We're more interested in

being able to research these drugs for their potential benefits.

No theory of neuroscience,

no theory of the brain and how the brain is related to consciousness

will ever be complete

if it doesn't take these phenomena into account.

I went to London a couple of years ago

where there are some psychiatrists really trying to open up

just even looking at what the old research with LSD has shown,

what the old and current research on MDMA has shown

and they're just trying at that level.

No one's doing any research.

They're just trying to reintroduce

the fact that these drugs were used,

had great therapeutic results

and for some reason the whole thing was shut down and squashed.

For various complicated and misplaced reasons,

these substances which historically have always been totally sacred,

at the center of the cultural evolution of man,

they've been shoved in the bag of illegality.

The powers that be have held that these things should not be allowed.

They're still illegal

generally, not all of them, but many of them.

They're held outside, not in other countries necessarily,

not in every country.

The countries where their traditions know

that part of their innate character of their people

and their relationship to the land comes through these medicines.

Why would they make them illegal?

They would tear the people away from their own history,

from their own land, from their own sense of nature, from their own health.

Our decisions that our governments make

about the applicability of these substances

for the treatment of very important medical problems

are not based upon scientific evidence.

They're based upon a prohibitionist attitude that say:

these are dangerous drugs without any medical uses whatsoever,

in spite of the fact that we have evidence that these substances have been used

for medical purposes for tens of thousands of years.

But because of government regulations,

we're denying major aspects

of our population access to medicines that they dearly need.

One day if these drugs are rescheduled,

of course it would have to be used in carefully controlled settings

by trained and skilled people

who had undergone, let's say, psychedelic psychotherapy training programs

and there had to be oversight and regulation.

If it becomes approved for medical use,

that's going to involve a societal change in the medical profession,

learning how to use these properly.

The future of psychedelics on the immediate front

is getting them accepted into clinical use,

maybe establishing centers or

training clinicians who can use them in psychotherapy

and having places where people can go,

and have these experiences,

whether they have specific mental or physical problems

or whether they just want to go for spiritual exploration of consciousness.

And it's possible and I think it would be very interesting

to use them not just for disease states,

but to enhance human growth, spiritual growth

and being more empathic and connected

and perhaps better human beings.

If we look at our world, we are intellectually, technologically

vastly overdeveloped with very primitive emotions.

And that's why the world is at risk.

That seems to be the message that one gets from psychedelics is,

you know, wake up!

We're potentially the salvation of the planet

and also potentially the destruction of the planet.

And it may be that messenger molecules are a way to try to

initiate this dialogue.

I think the people who would benefit most of all are professors.

I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with

fixed ideas and with a great certainty about what's what.

And to realize that the world he has constructed is by no means the only world.

That there are these extraordinary other types of universe which we may

inhabit and which we should be very grateful for inhabiting, I think.

Psychedelics, they help people become aware of the

multidimensional nature of the universe and of themselves.

We're talking about transformation at every

level: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.

This rediscovery of the scientific study of psychedelics

is opening the door to the study of many aspects of spirit.

And I think science will be much richer for it.

In order to use these medicines, you have to be

rebel enough against a taboo to look at the taboo.

And the whole nature of a taboo

is that it's an area of culture where

we're told, Don't look there. It's not good to even look there.

We have no real clear idea of

all the different people that have been influenced by psychedelics.

Kary Mullis, who invented polymerase chain reaction for which he won the Nobel Prize.

Steve Jobs has written in his autobiography about how LSD

was one of the most important experiences of his life.

Psychedelics have catalyzed in many people a creative process

that has led them to make major profound discoveries that have

changed the face of the world.

There always seems to be one ingredient in the recipe of social change,

that our generation has tried to expunge from the record.

And that's the fact that millions of us lay prostrate before

the gates of awe, having taken some psychedelic substance.

The critics would always say:

"Don't take these drugs, because they're going to change your life forever."

What they didn't understand is that was the entire point.

I think it's unwise to be so scared

of the possible risks of these drugs,

which there are possible risks, there's risks in anything.

I mean, there's risks in driving a car, there's risks in crossing the street.

But to be so scared of them as to make them illegal

and inaccessible to anyone and not even want to research them

or not even want to think about them,

why would we do that?

Are we so sure that we can solve all the problems that confront us,

that we want to throw away a possible tool

that can expand consciousness,

that could possibly give us some

more insights and some more

possibilities of how to resolve the difficulties that we're facing?

I think not.

We had this conflict in the '60s

when psychedelics went wrong.

What I think is even deeper is when psychedelics go right,

not only would these drugs have the potential to be useful in psychotherapy,

they had the potential to be useful in the evolution of the human species

and that they could make a major contribution to the survival of the planet.

Eternity in an hour.

It's almost impossible, of course, as all the patients say, to describe it.

There are the colours and the beauties, the designs, the beautiful way things appear.

People themselves, dull people, but I thought dull,

appear fascinating, interesting, mysterious, wonderful.

But that's only the beginning.

Suddenly you notice that there aren't these separations,

that we're not on a separate island

shouting across to somebody else

and trying to hear about their saying and misunderstanding them.

This thing's flowing underneath.

We're parts of a single continent.

It meets underneath the water.

And with that goes such delight,

the sober certainty of waking bliss.