#377 — The Future of Psychedelic Medicine
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Dr. Jennifer Mitchell and Dr. Sarah Abedi about recent developments in research on psychedelics. They discuss the history of this research and the war on drugs, recent setbacks in the FDA approval process, MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the challenges of conducting this research, allegations of therapist misconduct, new therapeutic models for mental health treatment, psychoneuroimmunology, "non-psychedelic" psychedelics, good and bad trips, the FDA's coming decision on MDMA-assisted therapy, "right-to-try" policies for pharmaceuticals, the role of psychedelic therapists, the problem of having all this therapeutic work being done underground, and other topics.
Petition to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: https://www.approvemdmatherapy.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And the Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with |
| 0:26.8 | Dr. Jennifer Mitchell and Sarah Betty. Jennifer Mitchell is a professor in |
| 0:32.0 | the UCSF Department of Neurology and Associate Chief of Staff for Research and Development at the San Francisco VA. |
| 0:40.0 | Her research is focused on identifying and developing novel therapeutics for drug and alcohol abuse, |
| 0:45.0 | PTSD, stress, anxiety, and depression, |
| 0:50.0 | and on understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for these disorders. |
| 0:54.3 | Dr Mitchell has extensive and diverse experience with human and animal pharmacology, |
| 0:58.7 | hypothesis-driven neuroscience, human proof of concept studies, and clinical trials. |
| 1:05.0 | For the past few years, her work is centered around the development of psychedelic medicines |
| 1:08.3 | for a broad range of mental health conditions, including PTSD, which we will discuss. |
| 1:14.0 | Dr. Sarah Betty is a board certified emergency medicine physician and |
| 1:18.0 | psychedelic facilitator for clinical trials. |
| 1:21.0 | She has worked as a psychedelic facilitator at Pacific |
| 1:23.8 | Neuroscience Institute and is set to join the Silasibbon and Mindfulness |
| 1:27.8 | study at the USC Center for Mindfulness Science, which I think my |
| 1:31.5 | friend Jonas Kaplan has also associated with. |
| 1:35.8 | She works on policy change to expand funding for mental health research. |
| 1:39.9 | She has served as chief medical officer and Deputy Campaign Manager for the Treat California Initiative, |
| 1:46.3 | which I discussed on a previous podcast. |
| 1:48.8 | This was a citizen-driven initiative aimed at establishing a $ billion dollar funding agency to explore |
| 1:54.5 | novel therapeutics including psychodelics and that will be coming back around |
| 1:58.6 | I trust. Currently Sarah is the chief medical officer at Treat Humanity, an organization dedicated to advancing the research of medical health therapeutics, including psychedelics. |
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