Monthly Archives: November 2020

Retired MMA fighters Ian McCall and Dean Lister (from left to right, top right corner) attended a ... [+] plant medicine ceremony where they drank tea containing up to five grams of magic mushrooms, in this still image from a recent segment of HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

A segment on a recent episode of HBOs Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel begins with former NHL player Daniel Carcillo describing his plan to kill himself. Hes one of four athletes in the episode who after retiring from full-contact sports had been both physically and mentally traumatized by the long-term effects of repeated concussions, and has now found relief with psychedelics.

Carcillo, former NFL player Kerry Rhodes, and former UFC fighters Ian McCall and Dean Lister are part of a growing movement of people using plant medicines like ayahuasca and magic mushrooms to help heal post-traumatic stress disorder and the symptoms of brain trauma.

On the outside, it seemed like Carcillo, a two-time Stanley Cup winner had it all: a wife and children, a comfortable home, and a successful career in the worlds premiere professional hockey league. But truthfully, Carcillowhose on-ice reputation earned him the nickname car bombtold correspondent David Scott hed never felt more dead inside.

Pierre-Edouard Bellemare of the Philadelphia Flyers fights with Daniel Carcillo of the Chicago ... [+] Blackhawks on March 25, 2015 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Carcillo earned the nickname "car bomb" for his tendency to get in fights.

Depression is just one of multiple symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a condition of the brain that is associated with repeated blows to the head. Other symptoms include memory loss, confusion, personality changes, and erratic behavior. A definitive diagnosis can only be made in an autopsy, but a 2017 study showed CTE was found in 99 percent of former NFL players and 91 percent of college football players studied.

Diagnosed with seven concussions throughout his 12-year professional hockey career Carcillo says he likely experienced hundreds more, and went down multiple avenues trying to improve his mental health. After trying psychotherapy and different SSRIs, he opted for something outside Western medicines realm of treatment: ayahuasca, a South American brew revered by Indigenous cultures as a powerful medicine and containing the psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT.

Im just trying to look for more peace of mind, less suffering, he says to the cameras from the Peruvian jungle before attending the ceremony. Four hours later, he emerges feeling changed, and calls it the most amazing experience of his life.

Months later when HBOs production team visits Carcillo, he says hes experiencing little to no depression and anxiety, while symptoms including slurred speech, headaches, head pressure, memory issues, concentration, and insomniaare all completely gone.

I didnt see him smile for years, says his wife, Ela. With her husband still symptom-free after five months, she asks Scott, how can you not believe this stuff works?

While the results of Carcillos experience are truly astonishing, Scott says its the way these experiences pair up with existing clinical research that truly makes the story.

Bilal Powell of the New York Jets is tackled by Kerry Rhodes of the Arizona Cardinals on December 2, ... [+] 2012. Rhodes, now retired, experienced many concussions throughout his career and went to Costa Rica to drink ayahuasca to help overcome the symptoms of brain trauma.

Athletes started emerging as potential patients who could benefit from these therapies, he says by phone from the Bronx. Their experience lines up with emerging science. For treatment-resistance depression and PTSD, these drugs can provide relief for a lot of people. Maybe not for everyone, and maybe its not going to fix everything, but better is better, and these guys hadnt found better in anything else.

Whats more, Scott suggests that had the federal government not shut down psychedelic research, which was in full swing before the war on drugs began, generations of people suffering from depression, addiction, and trauma could have been helped.

The segment directed by Jordan Kronick also features psychedelic researcher Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris of the Imperial College London. He says a single dose of psilocybin has been shown to produce enduring results in patients suffering from a multitude of conditions that run the gamut, from depression and anxiety to obsessive compulsive disorder and more.

When former NFL player Rhodes is featured, he gets emotional when recalling his first ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica. Like Carcillo, Rhodes says the experience changed him, eliminating his headaches and pain, bringing back his memory, and even removing his fear around CTE, leading to huge improvements in quality of life.

I hear stories like that a lot, but Im not surprised because thats how these drugs have been used for thousands of years, says Rick Doblin, the founder of the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. Doblin describes what happened in America after the U.S. government shut down psychedelic research as an incredible exercise in cultural amnesia, and advocates for increased study of psychedelics through his organization.

McCall fought in the UFC and other professional MMA leagues for 15 years before finally tapping out. Injury after injury had left him snorting opiate painkillers including fentanyl on a regular basis, turning him into a self-described monster. Experimenting with psychedelics, he says, helped cure him of his addiction and suicidal thoughts.

Yushin Okami (white shorts) on the offensive against Dean Lister (grey/blue shorts) during UFC 92 at ... [+] MGM Grand Garden Arena on December 27, 2008. Lister, revered among grapplers as the godfather of modern leg locks, was defeated in what ended up being his last fight in the UFC.

Today, he is committed to helping improve the mental health of other former fighters by showing them how life-altering regular group experiences with psychedelic medicines can be.

Fighters are good people, McCall says, but theyre tormented. The Real Sports segment takes viewers inside a private ceremony in which a group of fighters including grappler and former UFC star Lister are guided through a psilocybin trip by a shaman.

Like any longtime mixed martial artist, Lister has experienced his fair share of head trauma, and describes the symptoms associated with repeated concussions like being stuck in a prison cell in your own mind. Before taking five grams of mushrooms (with McCall seated to his right), Lister was struggling with alcoholism, drinking up to 20 beers a day and taking Xanax every night.

During the deep journey (the only kind afforded to anyone who consumes five grams, or a heros dose, at one time) Lester experiences the kind of near-death hallucination only psychedelic travellers will be familiar with, and says to himself, If I wake up, Im going to do things different. Since the experience, hes steered clear of all drugs and alcohol.

Its so common with psychedelics, that sense of something really serious happening, maybe even death, says Carhart-Harris. The way it turns around, where people realize, oh, Im not actually dyingthats where the shift happens. Its like survivor euphoria: oh, I do have that second chance.

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These Four Former Pro Athletes Are Using Psychedelics To Heal Their Brain Injuries - Forbes

When Rick Doblin was in his early 20s, he had a dream in which he was escorted back in time to witness a Holocaust survivors narrow escape from the Nazis.

In his mind, Doblin traveled to Eastern Europe to witness thousands of Jews lined up alongside a mass grave as the gunners open fire, toppling the bodies into the earth. The man spends three days alive underground before emerging and fleeing to the woods, where he survives the war in hiding.

The man then tells Doblin that he survived this horror only to deliver a message that Doblin should devote his life to promoting psychedelics as a cure for human ills and an insurance policy against another Holocaust. Then he expires.

Doblin took the advice to heart. For much of the next four decades, he waged an often frustrating battle to get public health authorities to recognize the value of psychedelics, the perception-shifting compounds popularized in the 1960s that have been a source of both fear and fascination ever since.

Ive always felt that the response to the Holocaust is helping people realize our common humanity, Doblin said. And that there are many ways to do that, and psychedelic mystical experiences are one of the ways. And so I felt like what Im doing is to try to prevent another Holocaust and that thats the deepest motivation.

In the United States, research on these chemicals has been banned since the 1960s because, in the governments judgment, they have no recognized medical value and a high potential for abuse. But a growing body of research has shown their efficacy for a range of mental illnesses that have proven resistant to other treatments, including post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, depression and anxiety. Research underway at Johns Hopkins and New York University is also investigating whether psychedelics can be of use in a wider array of applications, including one study on whether the drugs can induce spiritual experiences among religious clergy.

Doblin has funded some of this research as the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit he runs from his home here in suburban Boston. And after years of effort and $100 million raised, he now stands on the cusp of a major victory.

In late October, Doblin received preliminary results from a MAPS-funded phase 3 study of the effects of MDMA better known as the club drug Ecstasy on PTSD. Phase 3 trials are typically the final hurdle before the Food and Drug Administration authorizes a drug for public use. Those preliminary results showed MDMA surpassed the FDAs threshold for statistical significance in treating PTSD.

A formal scientific paper is due early next year and Doblin expects government authorization for prescription use will eventually follow. If it does, it would be the first time the federal government has ever approved a psychedelic to assist in psychotherapy.

Its enormously satisfying because it was something that Ive basically been devoted to for the last 48 years, Doblin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It was just ecstatic, you could say.

Legalization of medical MDMA would represent the culmination of a journey that Doblin often traces back to his bar mitzvah.

Born in Chicago in 1953, Doblin was raised in suburban Skokie, a heavily Jewish area home to a large number of Holocaust survivors. The family later moved to Winnetka, an affluent suburb where they lived in a house designed by an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright that had a tree growing in the middle of it. His father, Morton, was a pediatrician and his mother, Arline, a schoolteacher.

I grew up thinking the whole world was Jewish, Doblin said. That was my education. All my parents friends were Jewish. The neighbors were all Jewish. We went to temple. Youre a little kid, you think your whole world is the universe.

Though his family had arrived in America before the war, the Holocaust loomed large in Doblins childhood imagination. The irrational hatred, the othering of minorities and the potentially lethal consequences terrified him. Psychedelics offered him a way to turn that fear into something useful.

It also showed him a way to invigorate his inner life in a way that Judaism had failed to, a fact that came home to him in dramatic fashion as he lay in bed the morning after his bar mitzvah and was disappointed to discover nothing had changed. This rite of passage that Jewish boys had undergone for centuries had failed to turn him into a man.

I just felt like my bar mitzvah was a massively disappointing rite of passage that didnt engage me at the levels that I needed to be engaged in, that I was hungry for, he said. So four years later, when I first started taking LSD, I was like, this is what my bar mitzvah should have done. This is engaging me at the existential, spiritual, emotional levels that really can produce a rite of passage, that this is what I was missing.

Doblin enrolled at New College in Sarasota, Florida, then an experimental school that he recalls as a four-year bacchanal where students lounged poolside in the nude by day and danced all night under the influence of psychedelics. It took him 16 years to earn his degree.

He first tried LSD in his freshman year. And though the effects were not the full-blown mystical experience many report under the drugs influence, it was enough to convince him that this chemical synthesized in a Swiss laboratory in 1938 held enormous potential for human transformation.

In the first, Id say, 10 LSD trips, what they were doing for me was putting me in touch with my emotions and also helping me think more about kind of this inner energy, and also these intimations of connectivity with the history of evolution, with other people, with nature, he said.

At the time, a community of psychedelic enthusiasts, driven underground by the governments ban on LSD research, was quietly developing methods to harness the drugs power for psychic healing and spiritual growth. Doblin fell in with this crowd, which included Dr. Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychiatrist who had done some of the earliest research with LSD.

As Doblin pursued his ambition of becoming a psychedelic therapist, he undertook various passion projects in Florida, including building a handball court for the college and starting a construction business. In Sarasota, he lived in a fanciful cedar house he built himself as a venue for tripping, including a massage room, a soaring 20-foot ceiling, stained glass panels, floors made of river gravel but no television.

TV, Doblin told the Miami Herald in 1985, causes brain damage.

By the mid-1980s, Doblin had become a nationally recognized evangelist for MDMA, then just emerging into the public consciousness as a trendy new club drug. Around that time, at the urging of a top U.N. official with whom he shared the belief that a global spiritual awakening was the key to world peace, Doblin sent an MDMA sample to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the New Age rabbi and father of the Jewish Renewal movement.

Schachter-Shalomi was famously interested in psychedelics, having done LSD with Timothy Leary in the 1960s and reporting on the experience to his colleagues. Helater told The Washington Post, anonymously, that MDMA was a delight akin to the Jewish Sabbath. Doblin wound up visiting Schachter-Shalomis Philadelphia synagogue several years later, where he attended Yom Kippur services under the influence of MDMA.

It was amazing, Doblin said. It really opened my heart. MDMA and Yom Kippur go together great.

Doblin established MAPS in 1986, the year after the Drug Enforcement Administration declared MDMA a Schedule I narcotic, the governments most restrictive designation. For most of the next three decades, Doblin waged what seemed at times like a hopeless battle to pry open the door to psychedelic research, even earning a doctorate from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to get the skills to confront the government bureaucracy.

He found particularly fertile ground for these efforts in Israel, where he has extensive family ties and where decades of war and terrorism had made PTSD an urgent public health concern. (His great-grandparents house is aTel Aviv landmarkthat is now home to the Heseg Foundation.) MAPS held a conference by the Dead Sea in 1999 in an attempt to push Israeli regulators to approve a study of MDMA for the treatment of PTSD. Among the attendees was Raphael Mechoulam, the legendary Israeli researcher best known for identifying THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Israel later became the first country in the world to approve a compassionate use program for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD (the United States followed several months later) and provide public support for MDMA research, to the tune of $500,000 approved in February 2019. Israel is now one of just three countries where phase 3 trials are underway. (The United States and Canada are the others.)

Doblin declined to provide specifics about the preliminary results of the phase 3 trials, pending the publication of a formal paper. But preliminary results from phase 2 trials conducted partly in Israel found that out of 107 patients who had suffered from PTSD for an average of nearly 18 years, 68 percent reported no symptoms one year after MDMA-assisted therapy an extraordinary rate of success. Those results led the FDA in 2017 to declare MDMA a breakthrough therapy and to green-light phase 3 trials, which began the following year.

I think that what happens with MDMA, because of its pharmacological profile increased dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin it creates a sense of well-being, said Keren Tzarfaty, a therapist who directs Israeli projects for MAPS. The person is getting regulated and has a very beautiful experience of safety. And from this place, they can look and be with the trauma they have experienced. Then we can help them to process it.

The phase 3 results are landing in an environment newly receptive to these chemicals long demonized as tools of the counterculture.

At Johns Hopkins, a psychedelic research unit has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers investigating not only the potential to treat disease with psychedelics, but also their effects on healthy subjects. Investors are flocking to a nascent psychedelics industry, anticipating a boom similar to the one that accompanied the rise of medical marijuana a decade ago. The Harvard Divinity School is currently hosting a lecture series about psychedelics and the future of religion. And earlier this month, Oregon became the first state to legalize psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, in therapeutic settings. Michael Pollans 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, which surveyed this landscape, topped The New York Times best-seller list.

Doblin is naturally thrilled about this shift in the zeitgeist, one he had no small part in creating. But unlike many proponents of research into formerly forbidden drugs, Doblin is candid that his endgame is broad legalization. In his view, the ideal scenario is a regime called licensed legalization in which the right to use psychedelics is akin to driving a car: After taking the drug in a supervised setting, users are granted a license to use that can be taken away in response to misbehavior.

Doblin predicts a system of this nature could be a reality by 2035, after a decade or so in which controlled therapeutic use accustoms the public to the value of these chemicals. In Doblins ideal world, the system also would allow parents to make private decisions about giving psychedelics to their children.

I think that psychedelics are great for rites of passage, Doblin said. I think that when you are 12, or 13, you are ready for trying to figure out your place in the world. So I think that we would have psychedelic bar and bat mitzvahs.

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz of Berkeley, the founder and CEO of Shefa, a new group that advocates for psychedelic therapies in the Jewish community, says that Doblins twin objectives of healing the wounds of past atrocities and infusing contemporary life with deeper meaning is an echo of the question Rabbi David Hartman posed in his seminal 1982 essayAuschwitz or Sinai.

Rick might not think of himself as a Jewish theologian, and maybe hes not, Kamenetz said. But he happens to be in a position of recasting the question: Is the Jewish agenda for the next 1,000 years going to be in the pain and trauma of Auschwitz, or are we doing to drop anchor and reach back to the moment thats always been the moment, the moment of revelation at Sinai? Do we want to reach into something that is transcendent, that exists within the human mind and heart? And that for Rick and for me is made completely available through the use of psychedelic therapy.

Such ideas, and Doblins fearlessness in promoting them, havent always endeared him to psychedelic researchers, who have sought to bring along risk-averse institutions by presenting their work as a scientifically sound approach to treating previously intractable illnesses not as a Trojan horse in the culture wars. To some ears, Doblins rhetoric about ending genocide and enlightening humanity through widespread use harkens back to Leary, the Harvard professor whose promiscuous dispensation of LSD led to his firing in 1963.

But Doblins success in bringing the fight for MDMA therapy to the cusp of fruition may go a long way toward silencing the naysayers, who have warned that potential blowback to a broad legalization effort would result in another crackdown like the one that squashed Learys early research. At least for now, those fears appear unfounded.

Im completely vindicated, Doblin said, breaking into a broad smile.

Medicalization leads to legalization because youve got fear and misinformation and people thinking that one dose, brain damage, functional consequences, addiction, stay away, he added. Theres just such decades and decades and decades of propaganda and fear. And how do you overcome that? Thats where medicalization comes in. If you can show that the benefits outweigh the risks, it causes people to start thinking.

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How his lifelong psychedelic journey may lead to the legalization of MDMA - The Jewish News of Northern California

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This year, Canadas health minister Patty Hajdu granted 12 terminally ill Canadians Section 56 exemption to the Controlled Drug and Substances Act so they may legally access psilocybin therapy.

Earlier this month, the first non-palliative Canadian,Mona Strelaeff,was also granted an exemption.Strelaeff, 67, said she has struggled with anxiety, depression and addiction for years, but following her psilocybin treatment, her depression and anxiety seem to be gone.

For the first time, I feel like I have won the battle in my mind, she said.

Levy, who alsoco-founded CanadianCannabisClinics, a national medical cannabis access and education service, credits cannabis legalization for helping challenge perceptions and opinions about the plant, including in the medical field.

Years ago, he says, if he attended a medical conference to speak about cannabis, physicians would pass his booth with a wide berth. They would walk around and not even engage with us to avoid a conversation, he says. And within a couple of years, it changed rapidly.

Field Trips medical director, Dr. Michael Verbora, has noticed the same thing. While, five years ago, some of his colleagues worried that he might be harming his patients by giving them microdoses of THC and weaning them off anti-psychotics, he says colleagues now approach him about prescribing cannabis for a variety of conditions, even where theres a lack of supporting evidence.

So the tide has completely changed there, Dr. Verbora says. And I think its going to happen with psychedelics, as well.

He says that one of the great benefits of psychedelics is that they can introduce neuroplasticity in the brain. That really just means flexibility in the brain, he says an ability to relearn and reframe old ways of thinking.

You get this period of time, he explains, where we can rewrite some of the narratives that we tell ourselves and, perhaps, shift that into a more positive setting.

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People are increasingly open to psychedelic therapies. Whats driving that change? - The GrowthOp