DR RAYYAN ZAFAR: CAN PSYCHEDELICS CHANGE YOUR LIFE?

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1:14Get an AI agent to manage your sales and marketing. Or work like a 10-person team, even if it's just you. So you don't need superpowers to get everything done. You just need Wix. Try it out for yourself at Wix.com. For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac extra value meal for$8. That means two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun, and medium fries, and a drink. We may need to change that jingle. Prices and participation may vary. Hello, everyone. My name is Jamie Lang, and this is Great Company.

1:53Well, hello there, dear friend. Hi there. How are you? I'm well. Yourself? Yeah, I feel good. Do you? I feel really... I feel good. Why do you feel so good? I don't know. I feel good. It's a good time of year. May. Summer is coming. May's the greatest time of year because my dad's birthday's in May. That's a weird reasoning why it's the best time of year. I don't know why I like it. I like my dad's birthday being in May. I just think May was that time at school when you could see the end. Yeah, but it's exams. Yeah, but it was fun. It was summer. Do you know what? It's bank holiday. There's been about 400 bank holidays.

2:30Still not enough. Do you really think so? It's been so many. You need another jubilee, a royal death, dare I say it. I didn't say that. Also, I feel like this is the time when we're recording this because people could be listening to it. And other times is that it's a time when we start thinking about festivals and going out and people are drinking maybe a bit more. They're having a bit more fun. They're having some nights out, all those kind of things. And that's why this episode today is a perfect little drop That is a lovely segue, but first of all, what's your name? Hello everyone, if you don't know me already, my name is Jamie Lange and I'm host of this podcast And you are The producer You're Jemima, you do all of the magic that no one really sees But they do hear it But they do hear it, well they do kind of see it and hear it You are, we are the, what are you?

3:21You're the With the dream team We're the dream team. You're the fruit bowl to the fruit. You're the fruit. I'd probably be the fruit. And the guest is the source? No, that doesn't really work. That's a horrible analogy. Yeah, that's not a good one. Should we just talk about our guest? Well, I'm trying to think of an analogy. You are the nail in the wood. What are you? The wood. What's the hammer? The guest? What's the guest? I don't know. I think we should stop that. Okay, let's just... Let's talk about our guest. Our guest is so exciting. Today's guest is Dr. Rayan Zafar. He's the first person to have a PhD in psychedelics in the UK.

4:06I'm so excited. I mean, look, whether or not you believe in psychedelics or believe in that drugs are powder good, then there's lots of arguments for both sides in lots of different ways. It's a very interesting topic, especially at this time. Look, taking drugs recreationally is not a good idea. Oh, it's illegal. It's firstly illegal, but secondly, for lots of reasons, it's a terrible idea. And I think before we start this episode, I want to really make that clear, that my personal belief is that drug taking on a recreational level is dangerous, lots of different things. However, Dr. Rayan has a PhD in this And I imagine we're going to talk a lot about How prescription drugs may help your physical health maybe Maybe your mental health, lots of different things And when we talk of psychedelics, we talk of mushrooms And we talk of acid, LSD, those type of things But also I'm going to ask questions about cocaine, about MDMA, about ketamine which ketamine is now used for prescription to help with depression.

5:15Yeah. So it's really important to note that this conversation is all about, well, what we're going to be asking Dr. Rayan is about medical use of psychedelics. So prescribed by a doctor. And I think by the sound from my production call, it's no longer a fringe science. It is something that we will probably see in our lifetimes where these psychedelic drugs will be prescribed by doctors. And it's called divergence when something is prescribed only by doctors. It's not legal. Like being legal in hospitals does not mean legal recreationally. Wow. It has massive cultural impact becoming something that is legally accepted by a doctor and medicine.

6:00There's a belief that MDMA used for prescription is going to be made legal. Yeah. So in Australia, it already is legal. and in the next year, probably legal in the States. And he, I mean, we'll find out. But on my call, he was saying it could be as soon as two years in the NHS, prescribed in the NHS. And I just want to find out how bad alcohol is for us. I am beyond excited to be chatting about this. Really eye-opening. Of all the production calls I've ever done, this was the one which like actually blew my mind. So I can't wait for your mind to be blown. Okay, well, listen, let's begin it then.

6:38And so before we begin, also, if you haven't followed or subscribed to the show, we would absolutely love it if you could do. It does so many things for us. So thank you so much. And thank you for coming back and sharing this episode as well. We really, really appreciate it because we just love doing it, don't we? We really do. OK, here we go. Please enjoy the episode of Great Company with Dr. Rayan Safar. Rayan, with all your data and the science that you know, do you believe that MDMA and psychedelics can help people with mental health disorders? I'm a scientist, so I can't say 100%. But what I can say is that these are the most promising innovation in mental health ever in the history of civilisation.

7:19Hi, I'm Dr. Rayan Zafar, and I'm great company. Rayan, firstly, I am beyond excited for this. Yeah. I am so excited. And all the team is in here because everyone is so excited because it's one of these conversations that, for some reason when we talk about drugs and we talk about psychedelics and different things that it's it's it's always done under hushed tone for some reason yeah and so to have this conversation with you i feel very excited can you explain to the listener who you are and exactly what you do yeah so uh i'm ran so far i guess i'm a doctor of a very niche area psychedelic scientist and a neuropsychopharmacologist.

8:08So I basically spent four years working with the ex-government's chief drug advisor, exploring the impact of drugs like psychedelics on the brain and how they can be used to help individuals with really severe mental health conditions like depression, addiction. And a lot of my research really focuses on kind of basically reframing the narrative around psychedelics and other drugs and how they actually can be used beneficially clinically in order to really help individuals to overcome their problems. And four years ago, five years ago, when I started, it was very much like a fringe science. It was an area that, you know, even in the scientific world, medical world, people just say, oh, what are these weird hippie scientists doing in the corner?

8:55But in the last two to three years, it's become part of the mainstream and i guess maybe that's why we're here today talking about it so it's been quite journey for me to kind of go through the science and you know do my research and continue to do that and then now like more often i'm speaking about it to the public and it's been yeah it's been quite the trip i like that i like that i mean okay i i have so many questions and you've got four days right we can just sit here for a little because that's literally i honestly have so many questions why did you decide to study this out of everything why this yeah so to be honest i've actually never spoken about this on a public platform very openly but the kind of initial motivation was really personal for me so when i was when i was 11 i was like moving to secondary school, like out of area from where I was kind of brought up.

9:55And in that move, I kind of really didn't feel like I was part of the school, felt quite lonely. And I developed quite a lot of mental health related problems in that time. Like I actually, like sadly ended up having an eating disorder as a result to kind of cope with that, that stress. And that was sort of when I was 12. So I was really young. I was like super confused about what was going on with me, why I was behaving and acting this way. And it got to a point where I had to be taken out of school and had like quite intensive treatment in like this inpatient psychiatric ward. And that was really my first understanding of mental health, psychiatry and like essentially like my brain like doing things that I necessarily didn't want.

10:42but I couldn't really stop. I was lucky enough to be able to, you know, be treated and come out of it. And that kind of like pivotal moment made me realize that I want to kind of dedicate my life to the field of mental health in some way, kind of contributing and giving back for, you know, the other people that might not be so fortunate to recover. Yeah. So, So it pivoted towards really looking into the brain and the mind. And my actual boss today, Professor David Nutt, who's kind of a luminary in this field, he came to my school when we were 16 and he showed the first scans of LSD on the brain.

11:23And I was in the assembly like, whoa, have you seen this? And my friend's like, yeah, that's cool. I was like, no, this is next level. The, firstly, thank you for sharing that because I think eating disorders are very tricky to talk about, especially coming from men. I think there's not many. It's really hard. And I remember when I was, especially when I was 18 years old, I think I've said this before, but I was about 18 years old, 19. I was 18 years old and I damaged my knee playing rugby. Okay, yeah. And I damaged my ACL ligament. And my whole blueprint was I wanted to be a rugby player. And that was taken away from me in this freak rugby accident.

12:07So I couldn't play again. And I turned to drinking. And so I started to suppress whatever I was feeling with alcohol. And maybe perhaps I was sort of maybe binge eating without realizing. I just didn't understand much like you. When you were young, you didn't understand your brain. And I remember my mum said to me, you look quite stocky at the moment. And I went, I don't look stocky. Anyway, I was on holiday and we had those disposable cameras. A photo was taken to me. We got them developed. And I got the photos. I remember looking at the photos and suddenly seeing a picture of me topless on the beach and feeling immediate shame.

12:41And it was so strange. And something took over my brain and I had a sort of issue for a year, I would say, with food. And like you, I still to this day don't understand why that happened. And the sense of control came all over this sense of food. So I really understand. Yeah. It's like, it's really weird when you're in that position and you've got these like thoughts are just coming up to your, you know, your conscious self and you can't really control them. And they just make you feel awful and they make you act on things and you're there and you kind of know, I mean, even maybe if you were a bit stocky, you probably weren't that big.

13:20No. So, but like your brain just changes the way that you perceive yourself and plays tricks on itself. And it's, yeah, it's so destabilizing. It's completely. When you were sitting in that class at 16 years old and you saw the professor put on the screen what LSD does to the brain. Yeah. What did you see? What did it tell you? What did it make you realize in that class? So at that time in 2016, we didn't and nobody knew about the potential effects of psychedotes for mental health. That hadn't been proven yet. So this was the first study in this lab that David Nutt set up. And basically what they found, nobody had really understood what LSD did in the brain.

14:02And they essentially found that instead of kind of turning the brain on, that you'd imagine with all these hallucinations, it actually turned the control center of the brain off. So the part of your brain which kind of controls your identity, like you as Jamie, me as Rayanne, like us kind of sitting in this room, our daily thoughts, our feelings, it turned the volume down on that part of the brain. And that was really interesting. But that part of the brain that it turned down, we later found out, was hyperactive in mental health disorders, like depression and addiction. So it essentially turned off the kind of locus of the brain involved with mental health disorders.

14:46And that first study is the one that then catalyzed the research that we can talk about in a bit. So it was really a pivotal moment for science and for mental health, that LSD brain imaging study. So let me understand this. So LSD turns off that sort of loud part of your brain. Yeah. That is making you have those cravings towards whatever it is. Maybe it's an addiction towards gambling, alcohol, all those kind of things. How does it do that? How does it turn it off? Why does it turn it off? Yeah, so, well, the why we don't really know, because LSD was found sort of serendipitously by this chemist.

15:28But what we know is that it kind of works in the system, the default moods network in the brain. It's what you do, it's your brain at rest. It's your default way of thinking. And through the way that LSD and other psychedelic drugs like magic mushrooms, they all work on the same receptor in the brain, on a serotonin system, which is related to mood. and they kind of latch onto this receptor in the brain. And this causes the way that the brain networks kind of function to change. So essentially what it does, and we don't know why, but it does do this reliably across magic mushrooms, LSD, DMT, what we call classic psychedelics, is turning down the volume in that kind of default mode area.

16:10And through turning down that part of the brain, which is your kind of control center, It allows parts of the brain that don't usually speak to each other to begin to talk. And you see this increasing connection across the brain. So that might be able to explain why people have kind of a loss of ego. So you kind of lose yourself because your control centers are off. So you kind of drop out. And then the increasing connectivity between all these different parts of the brain, we think might facilitate new ways of thinking and new ways of rationalizing perhaps your mental health, why you might be feeling sad.

16:49It kind of disrupts those negative thought cycles that might be underlying depression or addiction or eating disorders. And it allows you to really kind of step out of your mental health issue for six hours and then really begin to think of new ways to frame your thinking and your behavior. Yeah. That's insanely exciting, because, you know, I have definitely had, and I've been open, I've had real bouts of anxiety in the past, right? Where, because of the heightened anxiety that I had due to lots of different things, I had low mood, and just wasn't feeling great. And all you want are those moments of relief.

17:29Yeah, you just want them, right? Because you want to separate, because all you're doing in those moments, and people listening to this right now, who are struggling and going through whatever they're going through, every part of their living day is focused on the negative feeling the whole time. And you can't escape it. Yeah, it's like ruminative, like cycles around and around. And so you're saying that these psychedelics give you that moment of escape? Yeah, they disrupt those pathways and allow your mind to kind of bubble up. Your unconscious, your trauma, it allows everything to be released.

18:02and then in that time you can then work with it internally and with support the difference between psychedelics is they act on those systems within about 20 minutes within the brain drugs like antidepressants take about two to six weeks to kind of disrupt those thought patterns so not only is this but we think these are the most rapid acting antidepressants we've ever known what yeah it is are you serious yeah i'm yeah this is like really scientifically backed there's no other there's no other drug in psychiatry with therapy that's able to that rapidly disrupt these negative thought cycles and reduce depression scores so we did we did the first study of magic mushroom therapy and depression 20 patients with treatment resistant depression which means they didn't respond to two or more antidepressants so really really ill they were given two medium to high doses of psychedelic assisted therapy and which is what just so I can understand that as well yeah yeah so the way that it works with this psychedelic therapy is there's three stages you have stage one which is preparation and that involves a therapist or a guide a trained clinician sits down with the patient before they take the kind of the medicine day and you talk through what they're going to experience you set intentions you work through kind of maybe some causes they may think have been involved in their depression addiction whatever mental health condition you then have phase two which is the medicine day and in that day they come to the hospital at ham smith hospital where we do our dosing and they're given a large dose of psilocybin in capsules and they lie in a bed in this nice room with plants and they're given headphones with music an eye mask and two therapists by their side and then they have this five to six hour journey where they're tripping and they're supported if they get a challenging experience the therapists are there on hand and then the following day is phase three and following on from that, it's integration.

20:16It's about making stories and narratives from the trip that might make you understand better yourself and might help you to better understand why you were ill and might also give you new coping mechanisms for the future to stay well. So it's about using those hallucinations and visualizations and building it into a framework to take you forward in your life so that you can stay well so you had these 20 patients yeah with resisted depression depression which means as you said that nothing was helping nothing works nothing works they were they had tried antidepressants they tried antidepressants talking therapy so they failed on two to three conventional therapies and at this point they had no no hope i mean most that these individuals can't leave the bed or the home, they are really severely affected.

21:08In fact, actually, in the world, there's about 100 million people who don't respond to antidepressants and have this category. In fact, only about 30 % of people really do respond to antidepressants. So there's a large faction of patients with depression that aren't getting any beneficial effect from treatments currently. um so of those 20 within one week 19 out of 20 of them went into what we call remission so that's classified as no longer having depression within one week so 95 of them were classified within one week as having no depression after two magic mushroom doses

21:54what yeah this was and this was magic mushrooms the magic mushrooms yeah psilocybin is it like rewiring your brain is that what happens well yeah so what is this this concept we're really excited about now and we're trying to understand like whether it can cause these like long-term rewiring changes and we're beginning to see the kind of fruits of that so when i said before it kind of helps you to unlearn bad habits or bad thoughts after the session your brain kind of opens up into a very hyperplastic state and it can be molded into new pathways that are kind of more adaptive and help you to be more resilient and help you to get better behaviors and that process is called neuroplasticity it's called uh it's called flexibility it allows you to reframe so the drug will just open up the brain a little bit and then allow you to kind of remold it into more better ways of thinking and being what are your thoughts on antidepressants do you agree with them i think they're super important for people i don't i don't i'm definitely not someone in medical research that defies it in face of psychedelics i know many patients who have and needed antidepressants and it's helped them and because the alternative i think is suicide and that that can't be the option you have to be able to stop an individual and even though it might not be able to 100 % get at the cause even if it's just a band-aid maybe or a stop gap that's better I think than somebody doing something awful to themselves so I'm I'm massively for it unfortunately I think the issue is some of the side effects a lot of patients that we work with and generally report, you know, this numbing of emotion.

23:46And the other thing is that also that, you know, they only work in about 35 % of patients, depression. So there's a lot of... Placebo as well. Placebo, yeah, placebo is also work. It does work better than placebo, only fractionally. But placebo is also, yeah, it's effective. Okay, like there is so much to break down and I want to tread delicately, right? Because, you know, there is still the stigma against drugs, right? And we've got to get into that. Yeah, yeah. For sure. So this is what I really need to understand. So why do we, and this is, you don't even, you said when you were 12 years old, you didn't understand.

24:27Why do we get depression? Why do we get anxiety? Why do we get mental health? Why is that happening to us? Why is of this plague like a lava through villages and towns and cities across the world why is it happening yeah and on that actually on the way here i wanted to just kind of read a stat about mental health diagnosis all of this i love yeah by the age of 75 one in two people will have a diagnosis of a mental health condition in their lifetime 50 of the global population will at one point to have a diagnosis. Why? So there are many factors, but if we think about it from the way that we develop.

25:08So when we're babies, our brains are sort of the most pure in a way. You know, we're untamed by our environment, our society, things around us. As we go through development, our brains become more responsive to our environments. Often and unfortunately, some individuals experience trauma when they're younger. So that's one way that when you're quite young and your brain is kind of figuring out the world, if a traumatic experience happens, usually that child remembers it and their brain pathways remember that as a very scary and frightful experience. And the brain kind of holds onto it as a way to cope on for future survival so that they don't end up developing further issues.

25:59Now that can be beneficial in the short run, but after a while, if those thoughts become ingrained in the neural networks, as we get older, our brains kind of become a little bit more clever. They kind of only really hold on to the pathways that are important for, you know, your survival. But if that formative of early life childhood trauma sets into the brain it's almost cemented there um and many patients with addiction with trauma with eating disorders often report that they've had you know early life crisis and their brains have essentially held on to that trauma somewhat and into adulthood because it's so kind of deeply ingrained into their psyche their thinking patterns as you've mentioned that have been very negative about themselves have become so ingrained it's like kind of you know if you you know when you do something daily you get really good at it you know it's the same with also bad thought patterns negative thinking the more if you're thinking 100 times a day that i'm a really bad person or you know that i'm worthless you know that thought pattern becomes almost automatic so the more that it's ingrained in your system the harder it is to escape and that's why mental health disorders are so pervasive and why they're so hard to treat because a lot of individuals suffer for a very long time before getting treatment.

27:16They're very ineffective treatments. So that's kind of the brain model. So you get kind of stuck neurologically. When you look at child and adolescence and their brains, actually you see that they have a shrinking of their brain, a shrinking of the frontal part of the brain. It's involved in logic reasoning. It's involved in like cognition. so you see these kind of changes in brain structure directly related to trauma so the brains just aren't as functional because of what's happened to them but beyond that the world we live in today is pretty shit like we have growing economic crises we have geopolitical conflicts happening everywhere there's a cost of living crisis going on the impact of covid we actually saw a doubling of the rate of depression within the space of years so 25 percent of british adults clinically depressed at the moment like diagnostically whereas 25 yeah whereas it was 11 before covid what yes one in four people yeah one in four people with a diagnosis of depression and i think one in six people are having some kind of therapy talking on medication so we have this mental health crisis as a result i think of the societies we live in of childhood traumas and the impact that that has and the way that we kind of hold on to it is really within this brain system.

28:40So it's within the way that the longer that we leave mental health and treated because we are not very good at treating mental health for the reasons I suggest that there's just not very effective treatments. The NHS can't provide for it at the moment because of spiraling costs means that people are not only unwell, but they're getting sicker. So every single mental health ward across the country, all the doctors and psychiatrists I work with and patients I see is that the severity of patients coming in is increasing year on year. So it's like fighting an uphill battle with treating people in the UK and it's all over the world.

29:20When you say diagnosis, what do you mean by that? yeah so i diagnosis is a tricky one because what psychiatrists and clinicians talk about is like a category like this person fits this checklist and they're depressed or this person fits this checklist they've got anxiety the reality is is that those diagnostic criteria were kind of made a very long time ago and not with really much i don't think they really fit the average person i mean anyone that i speak to and anyone that has had mental health problems knows that you know they don't just have like depression they might have anxiety they might have some other issues and so diagnoses are helpful because they help individuals to come into the mental health care system and get treated so that's the value of it but what it does is it starts categorizing people and by categorizing them you kind of take away the ability to treat them well because there's so many subtypes that we know now of depression of addiction like not one person's experience of mental health is the same and that's because we all have unique brains and actually going back to how mental health arises if you have these traumatic experiences your brain puts more energy into remembering how to stay safe and therefore holds on to the depression as like maybe perhaps a coping mechanism and then you pay attention to less in your environment.

30:44That's why a lot of people with depression and all these other illnesses say that they feel very closed off from society. They just, you know, nothing sparks them. They're just in their heads the whole time. But you talk about this one and two by the time we're 75, right? You know, and that's, my thing is this, is that not every, you're talking about trauma and this is just, again, I'm being your people here. We're talking about trauma, but not everyone is going through the same trauma or or heightened trauma maybe people aren't going through trauma but one in two 50 yeah that feels like a huge amount it's a lot so there's got to be something else going on yeah so not everyone experiences trauma either but what everyone does experience is stress is grief is loss of a partner financial difficulties um you know problems with friendships there's loads of lifestyle things that happen to individuals that can trigger mental health conditions as well so the people that have trauma they you know that that's a certain kind of category of patients that have have these mental health disorders the others is the kind of wider population and we're a product of our own society and the interaction that humans have with the the humans is not always controlled and therefore the impact that other humans have in your lives can either be beneficial or negative and actually the diagnostic category for any mental health disorders is persistent low mood for depression from two or more weeks so you can imagine you know there's lots of i've been upset for more than two weeks at times in my life and not felt well so yeah there's a lot of variability um and there's a lot of stress that we're living in in these times So I think that's probably also contributing to that one and two figure.

32:34But if you're in that situation and, you know, having done or doing your PhD and you understanding this area and being very involved in mental health, have you yourself sort of practice what you preach? Have you tried psychedelics? Have you gone down that road yourself to see the effects that it has on you? Yeah. So in certain areas of the world, psychedelic use is legal. So about two years ago, I was in Central America. I actually went there to do field research. So a lot of the work that we do in our lab is very clinical and hospital based. But Mazatec tribes have been using psychedelic medicines for thousands of years.

33:16They've shepherded these medicines, spiritual practices and medicinal practices. And I wanted to go into the jungle and really understand the ceremony, the reasons why it worked and how it works. So I sat with some shamans and curanderers in the jungle, and then I did a magic mushroom ceremony with them. And it was a kind of a time in my life, in my PhD, where I was super stressed out. I had so much work to do. I can't say I've ever been that calm after that experience for at least like a year, even to this day. It was two years ago. I just completely like got rid of that stress. And also the stress from after my granddad passed away was still a bit lingering.

33:56and I don't I don't like I had this anxiety I just don't have anxiety anymore which is I find so interesting there was just this like feeling of peace like complete peace I felt in my body cerebrally and then I was like like I finally like I'm here I found peace and that kind of powerfully I can still feel it and remember it and so whenever I'm you know really stressed or like you know there's a lot going on I kind of just think back to like how I felt in that moment how my body felt and do a bit of meditation and it really takes me back to that grounding that that psychedelic experience offered me and so yeah I mean it's been it's been impactful for me for sure on a personal level the thing with that though is very spiritual and you're a scientist yeah so how do you explain that interesting so I don't think science and spirituality are actually that far apart um if you'd asked like philosophers like hippocrates he's like the father of medicine he was very much aligned with the philosophers and the spiritualists at the time and i think when you are a scientist of the brain and the mind you kind of have a responsibility to be open so science is not necessarily about you know finding an answer it's just asking more questions.

35:19In the same way, spirituality is about seeking for the eternal truth, but individuals that are spiritual, it's not about arriving at destination, it's a practice. So in the same way that I'm kind of like on this practice of learning knowledge and trying to expand my ability to be open and aware, I think people that are spiritual also do that. So when I first started science, I wasn't. I was completely, you know, I was an atheist. I didn't believe in spirituality at all. I was like very closed off. And the more I learn about science, the less I'm sure of in a way. That seems like a complete contradiction because everyone leans when they go towards spirituality, they always go, well, science doesn't back it up.

36:05So therefore I don't believe that. But you're saying there's opposite in a sense. Yeah. So for me, science is really just more about when I find, so for example, let's take some patients of mine that I'm going to be doing a study with psilocybin for gambling addiction in the next year. And that's never been done before. And I spent four years trying to find some kind of parts of the brain that might be involved with gambling addiction. And I was very much aware. And we found, you know, parts that were dysfunctional. so as soon as i found that i was like okay next question okay can this specific drug work in this part of the brain to help make people feel better so that's what my next bit of research will be and once i find the results of that there's going to be 10 more questions that open up and like as results come in you kind of change your theories about the world and the mind and the brain so it's yeah i think the public perception of science is that you know we know it all, but actually we're all on this journey to find out.

37:06If I was going to talk to my mum, right, who is much older, I would, she would hate me to say her age, but she is older. She would say to me, her version would be like, well, the reason why addiction is happening, all these things, because the accessibility to drugs. And so many people are just doing drugs and that's the problem and drugs are the issue. It's the drugs, drugs are the issue. What would you say to that? Well, I think, I mean, I don't think that's true respectfully. No, yeah, nor do I. I'm just using her as an example. So if we look back to, so drugs became illegal in the 1970s. 1971 is when drugs became illegal.

37:48So they weren't always illegal. Drugs like heroin, LSD, you know, psilocybin, MDMA, all of these things, they were legal before that time. And then Richard Nixon decided in the 1970s to make drugs illegal for one very clear reason. Essentially, at that time, the US were involved with a war in Vietnam. And there were many protests going on in the 60s, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, there were civil liberty movements related to women's rights, LGBTQ rights, anti-war protests. the government could not incarcerate people protesting against the war in a so-called democracy a lot of these protesters were using drugs like lsd and psilocybin the shroom boom of the 60s and that was making them pacifists because these drugs by nature make you more open and make you more able to understand the other person's ideology people did not want to be conscripted to go to war.

38:48So what the Nixon government decided to do was by banning these drugs, they could then incarcerate the hippies and the people that were dissenting them for their foreign policy agenda, and then therefore they could continue with their policy. So the banning of drugs was based on no medicinal or scientific ground. And it has been proven since then that there has been leaked reports from the CIA, and there's been no evidence to suggest that these drugs should be banned. Now, in the 1970s in the UK, when drugs were illegal, like heroin, we had 1 ,000 heroin users in the whole of the UK. Today in the UK, there are 250 ,000 heroin addicts and about 5 ,000 dying per year.

39:34That is despite drugs being illegal. So the illegality of drugs over the last 50 years has not changed anything in terms of problems associated with drugs. Making drugs illegal has only exacerbated the harms. People have gone to the underground. Drugs like fentanyl have appeared, which are smaller, easier to transport and smuggle around the world and 100 times more powerful. Drugs like cannabis has become stronger because individuals and dealers want to make it more addictive so they can get more money. The drugs have gone into the black market, which is unregulated, which causes an unforeseen amount of crime.

40:14So the illegality of drugs as a general concept has actually led to the current drug crisis that we're now seeing around the world and crime and the destruction of lives. It's not drugs. It's how drugs are managed. How do you counter that? What would you then, if you had the ability to make a change, what would you say that we have to do to make a change? I'm a massive proponent for decriminalization and having regulated supplies. So there's a lot of data and evidence that suggests that this is actually really effective to also Portugal decriminalized drugs about 20 years ago. And what they've seen since then is a reduction in individuals using heroin and having heroin-assisted deaths.

41:03Addiction rates have come down. There's been a reduction in crime. Those are the countries in the world that are following suit now. So Germany have just legalized cannabis and they're like two weeks ago and they're likely to get an economy around that. In Canada and large parts of the US now, cannabis is widely available. Magic mushrooms are available in states. So this decriminalization as to legalization movement, and we've seen data of use, it doesn't massively increase the use. People use drugs anyway, whether or not they're legal, people are using them. So by bringing it into a regulated market, you ensure that they're safer and that you can kind of make sure that they're not contaminated with all these dangerous other drugs that are available.

41:46And you have some kind of level of public health safety that comes with it. And responsibility from the government. We can't just continue to have a stiff upper lip on this and act like people aren't doing drugs because that attitude is leading to all these deaths that we're seeing. I'm going to challenge you there because you were talking about alcoholism and how that's killing so many people, right? You know, that's legal for people in music for over 18 year olds, we can drink it. And that's only rising. So then one would argue to you, you'd say, well, we legalize drugs. It's only going to go up and become like alcohol where we can just buy it over a counter.

42:23And then that becomes a problem. Yeah. So what I'd say to that is that alcohol is a drug for a start. It works exactly on the brain systems that other drugs work on. I think we've had this false dichotomy that we've almost been lied to. Like tobacco is a drug, alcohol is a drug. So I classify that in the problems related to drugs. Alcohol has just been regulated freely because of historic precedent. It's just been allowed because it's one of the oldest drugs we've ever had. And with alcohol use, actually, interestingly, there's been some moves that the government have done to try to tackle it.

42:59The deaths that came out were because of lockdown. But we're seeing in like 16 to 30 year olds, particularly, they are drinking far less alcohol than they used to. And that's because there's been a lot of public health messaging around the dangers of alcohol. Alcohol actually is one of the most dangerous drugs to the brain and the body that we know of. It's the most neurotoxic drug. Give me some stats. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we do brain scans and we did this study 12 years ago where we got 40 experts around the world to rank 16 different drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, from most harmful to least harmful.

43:39And we categorized it on harm to self. So that includes, you know, the brain effects, the body effects, disability, death, all of these kinds of factors, harm to society. and we pulled all of the results and we gave them a score out of 100. Alcohol came on top 72 out of 100. Magic Mushrooms and MDMA came out at 10 out of 100. This wasn't just British data, this was repeated by the European Brain Council. Experts in Australia have also replicated this now and it's consistently shown that alcohol is the most destructive drug in our society today so why because what it makes you aggressive it may what for what reasons so the issues with alcohol are are quite manifold across so many it's a leading cause of of disability and and and illness so alcohol contributes a lot about five percent of all diseases in the world so cancer cardio respiratory diseases lung liver it contributes five percent of all diseases it's really high in the list of um of what we call the global burden of disease the rates of liver cirrhosis are amongst the highest in europe that they've ever been so these are kind of the physical effects of alcohol um then beyond alcohol you have all of the all the effects that it has on are socioeconomics, so policing, domestic violence, fights, abuse, all of these kinds of factors play into the reasoning why NHS, the NHS on a Friday and Saturday is full of drunk people.

45:24And the amount of resources put in to dealing with that, whereas it could be being dealt with, you know, people at end stage, you know, life or people with, you know, very severe conditions. Alcohol in and of itself is the most widely used drug as well in the whole world. And so because it's the most widely used drug as well, it's pervasive. I think most people in Britain probably know one person that leaves with an alcohol problem. I think it's, and that stat in and of itself demonstrates the severity of the issue we have. What does alcohol do to the brain? so to begin the reason why we love it or some people love it is it releases this neurotransmitter called GABA so GABA is like the calming agent of the brain so you have like your first drink and I drink alcohol I'm not like anti-alcohol by the way but um you have your first drink and this GABA gets released and you're like relaxed and it kind of shuts off the front part of the brain which is like nagging you all day after a while you release a bit more dopamine and that becomes a bit more moreish and like you're kind of motivated so you know i said that drugs act in the dopamine system so does alcohol um but after a while once you start increasing it as you increase that gaba your body will go into sedation because it starts to shut down the brain inhibits it too much it's over relaxed so it kind of reduces the way that the brain excitation works then that leads to coma if you get to high blood concentrations and even finally death so that's when people die from alcohol poisoning because they've shut off the brain systems involved with heartbeat and breathing oh my god the sorry it's a bit heavy isn't it it's not at all it's just it's just it's it's insane are there any benefits to alcohol whatsoever if you to say as a scientist sitting there are there any benefits at all to alcohol so there was a lot of kind of debate about the value of alcohol from the french the french really wanted to kind of push for it um and so there were these massive studies done in kind of like the late 90s and there was some inkling that maybe red wine one glass a day would be beneficial for heart effects and so we interrogated that data a little bit more to understand whether that was true and it turns out that that it wasn't true and that there is a very specific portion of the population and it's a very specific amount it's kind of kind of interesting so 70 mils of red wine a day if you're a woman between 60 and 69 may be able to reduce the impact of heart effects that's the only small part of society that might have a benefit for the rest of society there is no benefit even any any amount of alcohol will have a detrimental effect so why are we drinking it because it's part of our culture we're british oh my god right this is this is what's game i was looking at some of the stats that you'd sent so we we drink too much in the uk we know that you know when we see especially euros are coming up we the england fans are always the ones who are abroad and getting drunk and falling into fountains and not, you know, showing, you know, making us look bad a little bit.

48:46I heard that we are the biggest consumer of ketamine. Yes. We are, London is the largest consumer of cocaine in any city in Europe at 29%. Yeah. Can you give me these stats? I think it's in the world, actually. So we did this wastewater analysis, uh and you basically measure what is a wastewater analysis so like the thames which is just over there so you basically put these sticks that measure the amount of substances or whatever in in these rivers and you can actually measure levels of like the breakdown product of cocaine because you essentially wee and piss and then that goes into the river and that's actually a completely different conversation because of the wastewater but um yeah they found that basically in in london we have very stable but the highest level and concentration of the breakdown product of cocaine in our rivers versus any other city in the world twofold more than new york um yeah so yeah londoners really love that cocaine but cocaine cocaine is cocaine is not good it's there's doesn't yeah that's that's one drug that there is no clinical evidence apart from in dentistry it's been used in dentistry to reduce pain um but aside from that there is yeah cocaine like alcohol um i categorize them as drugs that have like you know quite negative consequences so when we're drinking water in the uk from in london from our tap yeah we're consuming cocaine i know i don't think i didn't think that that was one of the stupid questions.

50:23No, no. There it is. There's one of them. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.

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52:07When you find someone with addiction, especially gambling, I always think is a really scary addiction because with drugs, alcohol, you can kind of tell family members, friends who are having an issue with it, right? You can see their demeanor change. Maybe they, they look unwell. They are, you know, lots of things change with a gambling addiction. It's very secret. Yeah. And, and really upsettingly, you don't really realize until the last minute with gambling addictions because, you know, the money is gone or whatever happens, they're too much in debt and it's just awful. And, you know people have families have been destroyed yeah because of gambling addiction and it's one of the things that we don't really talk about as much for some reason yeah and it's a very it's i think it's a very british problem as well why so i guess in the uk things like horse racing and betting has been really a part of our fabric of our culture for a long time um and i actually think gambling was kind of developed by the british so it was you know part of our kind of cultural past and you know we see it now in like the rise of sports bettings football teams being sponsored by these gambling companies it's kind of been a market which has left been left unregulated in fact the highest paid woman in the uk the highest paid ceo anyone in the uk is ceo bet for it she earned 365 million a year so it is it's wild that that you know these organizations can really profit off completely incinerating the helms of many people in fact i read a statistic that actually the majority i think over 70 percent of the revenue that gambling companies make is from five to ten percent of gamblers and it's those five to ten percent of gamblers i'm pretty sure are the ones that have problem gambling.

53:58It's probably about 1.4 million people, a YouGov poll recently predicted in the UK, that have problem gambling. It's a significant portion of our society that are struggling. So these big betting companies are profiting off people who are in... Unwell. Unwell. Yeah. What happens to your brain when you have an addiction, typically a gambling deal? What So when you do a gambling behavior, say you win£1 ,000 and you put£5 in, what happens immediately is you have a surge of this neurotransmitter. It's called dopamine. You may have heard of it, and it's basically our motivation molecule. It's reward and then it's motivation.

54:46So when you have a first win, you release this dopamine and that's very rewarding. and your brain remembers that very well because it's like wow this felt good and the reason why we release dopamine is for our survival we release it when we eat food we do release when we have sex it's very much there to kind of gravitate us towards things that will help us survive and reproduce but behaviors like gambling or drugs they hijack this system and they cause the release of dopamine above and beyond what food and sex could give you but your brain doesn't know the difference so your brain thinks that that is then important for your survival so the more you engage in those behaviors your brain pathway your dopamine pathways in the brain they start kind of latching onto that as a kind of reward over time it shifts from reward to even looking at it you start getting that dopamine hit so people with addiction often say like if they've got an alcohol addiction just seeing a pint will start trigger their brain systems and they'll want to you know grab a pint almost automatically and we call that something called q reactivity so i did one of the earliest studies with gamblers trying to look at this thing called q reactivity um and we actually did it on paul merson i don't know if you know him the arsenal for ex arsenal footballer yeah yeah lost eight million in gambling yeah so he did a documentary where he for the bbc with us where he came in and we put him in this mri scanner which is a fancy brain imaging scanner and we showed him different video clips of gambling sort of videos of food social people socializing some nature and the only thing that his brain responded to was gambling videos it lit up like fire what yeah he couldn't respond his brain didn't respond to natural rewards like food, like social nature stuff.

56:47His brain wasn't interested in that. And he said that he hadn't gambled for a year. So that brain imaging study, and now we've done it in 20 other participants of gambling disorder. I'm going to publish your results very soon. We found that the brains of individuals with gambling disorder have this hyperactivity to just even looking at gambling related videos so that proves to me that even marketing gambling adverts is dangerous enough for individuals to get hooked because it engages all their brain systems and so it was it was one of the most kind of fundamental pieces of science i think i've ever done is how the power of behavior alone can fundamentally change your brain and what you're attracted to and you're kind of reward system.

57:36And it's kind of scary as well, at the same time that it can do that. When you see this in someone's brain, where the natural dopamines that we should be having, whether it's socialising or nature or going for a swim or work food, all those kind of things, when you're not, what has happened to someone's brain there? And who is more susceptible to that? Because you're not getting dopamines with those things. Is it because you've had so many dopamines hits in your life, that those surface level ones don't do the best job for you. Because I definitely, just speaking from a personal point of view, right?

58:11I did a reality show for many years. Yeah. Right. I watch you on it. Okay. He's fine. God thought he wouldn't have. But anyway, I did this. So I did this reality show made in Chelsea for many years. Yeah. And so my twenties was constantly full of dopamine. Yeah. doing a show, likes on social media, going to awards shows, getting awards, sex, alcohol, all the time. And then what I found is, is that it's, I was having these constant dopamine hits all the time. That when I turned 27 and I was burnt out, I went through depersonalization, which was horrendous, which for anyone who doesn't know what depersonalization is, It's basically in short term, it's where you, your body, your brain goes into autopilot and it protects you.

59:03And you basically see yourself from an outside point of view. I thought that I was outside of my own body for six months and it was a horrendous experience. And I realized I had to start taking care of my body. However, when I stopped all of that, the cravings and all the alcohol and the sleeping around and all those sorts of things, I felt very bored. yeah and i suppose that's is it because it's too much dopamine then you can't you feel do you know where i'm going yeah yeah so the working theory is that over time when you kind of interact with these high dopaminergic activities what happens is you down regulate that system you burn that system out quite frankly so we see a reduction in dopamine stores in the brain you'll see reduction in endorphin stores there are different kind of like kind of pleasure molecule So you see this dampening down and individuals as a theory that you kind of become a bit hypodopaminergic and therefore only these high thrills get you excited.

1:00:03And then the more you push on the high thrills, the lower over time it goes. So that's where the cycle of decline starts. And for you, I guess you were lucky enough to kind of stop with that. I mean, it sounds horrendous and really awful, but in addiction, what happens is people continue to go on that decline and then they take more drugs to feel normal and better so after a while it's not even about pleasure it's about trying to maintain like a stay or stop withdrawal or stop the body from physically feeling sick and it's it's in that cycle that patients are really kind of the end stage of addiction and that is that's a horrible place to to be in because there's nothing you can do to feel good at that point.

1:00:52Is addiction, whether it's alcohol or gambling, it's a disease then? Yeah, it's a medical condition, it's a disease. And I think for a while there's been a lot of stigma around what addiction is. I think the word has been used and appropriated a lot of the time by many individuals, by popular culture, by society, by the media, but what addiction really means is compulsive use of a drug, substance, or behavior, despite negative consequences, to familial, social, or relational functioning with an inability to stop. So in the UK alone, we know that there's probably about three to five million individuals suffering with addiction, actually within the space of these two hours that we're talking now, about eight people will die from alcohol addiction, one every 15 to 20 minutes.

1:01:57So it's one of these, in fact, the government released a report last week. Last year, 10 ,000 individuals died from alcohol and that's the highest it's ever been since records began. the problems of addiction are beyond just alcohol opiate addiction is on the rise in the u.s 100 000 people are dying a year from fentanyl gambling addiction suicide rates are some of the highest of almost all psychiatric conditions there's yeah addiction is a real medical illness with real consequences not just for the individual for family for society costs costs the government around 19 billion pounds a year, right?

1:02:41The kind of effects of addiction. And I think the worst thing about this condition is actually, I guess, depression, about 50 % of patients actually receive treatment. In addiction, it's less than 10%. So there is literally barely anything that majority of patients can do because we don't have effective treatments in addiction. Many of them don't work. most patients relapse over 60 % of them. And the government have cut rehab centers by 50 % in the last 10 years. So we're really, it's getting worse over time. I mean, those stats are horrendous. I mean, it's just, I just, it bothers me a lot. You know, we're talking about taking drugs recreationally, right?

1:03:25And the harmful size and the negatives. Let's talk about the positives because, you know, you mentioned MDMA and Professor David Nutt went into parliament, wasn't it? And he sort of famously said that taking ecstasy is safer than riding a horse. And he was exiled. Yeah, he was. He was sacked. And I think that statement is bold, but so true. there's been like a lot of i mean what you want to do is bring a debate i like the debate we're having that we just had about alcohol versus other drugs for a very long time because of the banning of drugs in the 1970s people have just automatically assumed drugs like mdma and psychedelics are bad they're put into this category called schedule one schedule one is the highest ranking of illegality of drugs if you're in schedule one it means that there's high addictive potential and no medical benefit just by contrast in schedule two you have cocaine and heroin which is categorized as less harmful in the united nations and world health organization laws and the british law so psychedelics and mdma more harmful cocaine and heroin less harmful so he as the chief drugs chief advisor for drugs for the government was like if i'm chairing this committee that you've elected me to, to give scientific policy evidence, I need to make you realise that the laws that you have are incorrect.

1:04:59And more importantly, they stifle research. David basically said, let's have an honest and rational debate about drugs. Horse riding kills about 10 ,000 people a year versus around maximum 20 people a year in the UK die from ecstasy, if that 20 maximum 20 but the way that these deaths that there was really interesting study done by the mrc global health unit they basically looked at coroner's reports of all deaths related to drugs and if you die from paracetamol one in two hundreds reported in the newspapers one in a hundred for alcohol one in about five for methamphetamine but every ecstasy death is reported in the media.

1:05:45And so the media's narrative has distorted public perception about the harms of ecstasy and then political perceptions. And he said, and we know that not many people are dying from ecstasy because we see the coroner's reports. So he said, let's have a rational debate about this potential molecule that could be therapeutic and beneficial. Let's try to get it out of schedule. Moving it to schedule two doesn't make it freely available. It just helps researchers and scientists like myself to be able to do this research. And on August the 12th this year in the US, after maybe 30 years of research, MDMA may get licensed as a treatment for PTSD.

1:06:27So this is off the back of crowdfunding an organization called MAPS. And they've done these phase three clinical trials, which are these big trials comparing MDMA to placebo for people with very severe and complex PTSD, veterans and individuals who've had trauma like rape and sexual abuse. 70 % of them went into remission after three MDMA assisted psychotherapy sessions. So 70 % of them qualified as no longer having PTSD. PTSD is a chronic disease. when you get PTSD, it's so difficult to escape it, constant state of fear, 70 % of them no longer. Just quickly, when you say something is chronic, what do you mean by that?

1:07:08So that sort of means like it's kind of there to stay for like a lifetime. So things like diabetes, for example, or what we call like chronic disorders, like when you get them, they generally don't tend to leave. And when we think about mental health as well, because there's really non-effective treatments, a lot of them are considered chronic. But actually, for the first time ever in psychiatry, we're able to now maybe start reframing it and not calling them chronic disorders because we're seeing patients recover and for a long time. How long do you think until the government in the UK start taking something like psychedelics or MDMA seriously and start legalizing it or properly using it for everyone?

1:07:57Yeah. Well, I'm pretty convinced some of the government ministers have taken them. They like to take drugs and then they like to ban them. But in terms of the regulation, they often, so we're making some advance. So in PMQs this year, an MP, Charlotte Nichols, Warrington, who we work with, she heads up this thing called the Center for Evidence-Based Drug Policy. And she basically asked questions to Rishi Sunak. And she said, when will you start rescheduling psilocybin from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 to allow research to be more widely available? And he said that this ACMD council are going to write a report later this year, which gives policy recommendations on how we can start changing policy to enable this research to speed up and the implementation.

1:08:49The issue that's always been in our country is that drugs have always sat in the home office and the home office is very much involved in saying no. That's what they do. They just say no. And it's all about policing. but drugs is a health issue and i think drug policy and this sort of should be moved to the department of health and in the department of health we'd have more proactive changes to allow this to be integrated into the nhs to deal with the public health issues that we spoke about today and these kind of questions are slowly warming up because essentially whether or not the government like it there's clinical trials happening right now and as i mentioned the one with MDMA of PTSD, the sign-off will be in August.

1:09:34And if that passes approval, it's likely that next year in the UK, there could be potential for that being a treatment here. So it's not really a political decision whether or not these drugs become available medicinally. They will. It's really a matter of time. The question about the political involvement is about decriminalization and recreational access to the drugs. And I think that question will come several years after the medicinal influx of these drugs comes into mental health care. Within this decade, I think we're going to see a lot of change. You know, out of all of this, what I take, right, is actually there's sort of something fundamentally wrong with the world at the moment.

1:10:19And we can, what is amazing is that you're saying that people who have chronic mental health, there is perhaps an answer coming and it's going to help. And there's studies that are showing that, but actually the world is in a really tricky place. Yeah. Trauma is everywhere. And we are being fed, um, what it seems to be sort of lies as in we're being fed things that are actually harming us. And as a generation, we're becoming sick and we're becoming disconnected and we can use psychedelics or MDMA to help us or we can use antidepressants. But at the end, the core of what the issue is, is not really being fixed.

1:10:59And that makes me feel a bit sad. It is. So we were built for community. Like mammals as creatures are meant to live in packs of like 30 to 50, really. That's sort of what our brains can deal with. Like the advancements of like modern civilization have seceded our brain's ability to adapt. living in these big metropolises like London. I think the rise in mental health, a lot of scholars also repeat this, is that the mental health is as a result of technology advancing too quick that our brains haven't caught up because we're still kind of in the hunter-gatherer brain where we're living in communities.

1:11:43And, you know, loneliness is on the rise. I think, you know, with psychedelics, that's like one way of looking at it, an antidepressant. But I think you're actually so right, Jamie, I think connection is the cure. Always is. That is at the root. And if you have strong friends, family, and that takes work as well. And I don't want to make it sound like it's an easy thing to even have those communities because some people aren't able to for whatever reason. But connection, if you just try to seek out and form strong bonds and connections that you're comfortable with, I think that will be the biggest predictor of your mental health.

1:12:22I completely agree the reason why I wanted to do this podcast is because it was about connection I think I said I said it in our very introduction of this whole show I think as a nation we have become so connected we become disconnected yeah and that's what's causing this loneliness in this mental health um tsunami as you put and it's upsetting yeah yeah it's completely and we need to become more connected this has honestly been and I cannot tell you how fascinating this has been this has been amazing um we like to end the show with eight questions we've had a little twist on your one what's a saying or phrase you would like people to take away from this interview there's a phrase by einstein insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results i think we've been doing the same thing with drug policy we're treating mental health 50 years and we still expect things to change.

1:13:15I think that's insanity. What's the best compliment you've ever received for the work you're doing? Oh, wow. For me, I think if we go back to Paul Merson, it was in my first year of my PhD where we had these documentary cameras running in and we showed him the picture of his brain and he looked at it and then he looked at me and one of my bosses, Dr. David Ritzo, and he said, does this prove to me that I'm not a bad person, that I'm sick and unwell? And that to me kind of validated that at least some work that I've done, it wasn't a direct compliment, but it was like, I've done something to make him reframe how he feels about himself and his gambling addiction.

1:14:06Like that work that I did, it felt like it had impacted his life And if I can do that, then that's for me the biggest compliment because that's really what I want to do. My producer Jemima just wrote, that made me cry. Sorry, that really went. That's so beautiful. It was. I cried when he, when he, why did that make you cry? Just that someone can think that they're a bad person. Yeah. For something that's like, I don't know why that made me so much. I'm quite hormonal today. Honestly, we were on camera as well when he said that and then I started welling up. and then I was like yeah you're not yeah it's just horrible to think that people with mental health problems think that they're bad people and if if we can go some way to try and like reduce that stigma and take the blame away from them and that's for me that's the biggest thing that I can do at least with some of the work I do you're making him cry sorry what scares you most about what you do oh uh i mean it's a massive responsibility to be giving these drugs people with severe mental health problems and i think the messaging around it is also massive responsibility i'm scared i'm scared of letting people down i'm scared of expectation like what if what if it doesn't work for some of my patients what then yeah it's twofold it's like i don't want to let people down and raise their hopes and I also I'm worried about like you know it's just just a responsibility and I have to make sure I'm careful what I do when was the last time you cried and why I was in South Africa actually um in in February I went away with some friends just to kind of do some working from there and we were in Cape Town and we'd just come back from like a nice weekend festival and uh I was just outside like our apartment and there was like some homeless individuals who were using heroin outside um and I usually I mean because I work with these patients like if they say something to me I usually just kind of let them speak to me I'm not really like I don't think they're bad people like they're just struggling so I went up to well they came up to me and I was just like oh let's just chat like how things going and and then I kind of left and walked away and I went back into this like kind of nice apartment and I just kind of contrasted like my life and I was like I'm so lucky to be here with like connection and my friends and security and on the other side outside this apartment there's this group of people struggling like it's just not fair and i just i felt like lucky and privileged but i also felt disgusted that that's the way the world is and that there's people there are always going to be people less fortunate and more fortunate than you but it was just really it just made me really sad wow that's amazing yeah what's something you can't let go of i actually like reality tv do you yeah I can't let go of reality TV.

1:17:14I think it's a nice switch off. My wife loves it. Honestly, she's obsessed. She can't let go of that either. What's something that people are most embarrassed to admit about psychedelics? I think using them. I think people are pretty hush hush. What's your biggest turn off? My biggest turn off, if we're going to link it to my work, is when people have lots of opinions and they don't really have like any facts to back it up. Like, although it might come across like I've kind of given a lot of opinion maybe today, it's actually, I've kind of just kind of relate facts and kind of just want people to kind of, you know, take from that what they will.

1:17:58So I feel like sometimes I've been in conversations, especially around drugs, where like opinion just breeds ignorance and people are just not willing to hear anything else. So that really, really annoys me. What's your biggest turn on? I really like music. I know this is like a massive side set, but I think there's nothing better than just like being with your friends, listening to great music, feeling connected. Nothing feels more pure and sacred and holy than like being in a rave, enjoying the music, hugging your friends, telling them that you love them. What are you most proud of in your career so far?

1:18:36i feel like i want to like kind of start this by saying like i'm standing on the shoulders of giants like my boss really opened the platform and so a lot of my kind of credit goes to him and he knocked down doors together stuff going like a big inspiration but my um there's like two things that i've done which i think i'm pretty proud about i mean not really spoken about in this talk but one of my earliest pieces of work was a charity called Drug Science, who are amazing. And I worked with kids with severe epilepsy who were using medical cannabis to treat their epilepsy. And actually, it was illegal at the time.

1:19:17And in 2018, the government changed the law. And I tracked 20 of the first patients in the UK after children who were using it and looked at how their seizures change. And then I went to the House of Lords and to the Scientific Select Committee and presented this data and basically said, look, this is more effective than these anti-epileptic drugs. And this cannabis oil is literally making these kids go back to school. It's reducing the seizures by over 85%. Like this is a true medicine. That was like, it was one of my earliest. I was like 24, 25 at the time. I was like, what am I doing? Like, this is beyond my time to be doing this.

1:19:56So I was proud to be involved in that because that's like an area, like it's children. and children's health. I cared about that a lot and that does still need a bit more work, that area. But then the other bit was this year we got funding. It's actually the first funding the government had given for a psychedelic trial and it was for a gambling addiction. So we were just so excited. I'm going to do one in heroin addiction as well. And we were just so excited that after four or five years of knocking on the government's door and saying, please give us money like we don't just want like philanthropists to give us when you want to be able to be funded and recognized as being scientifically credible and yes so we won the grants and so that was a team effort and over the next two years we're going to be doing that work so very excited there's a well done that's amazing um okay for a bonus one because you haven't done all episode in the final one you ready for this oh gosh what's your favorite swear word fuck I just think it's just like it gets you in like you know you just you say what's yours probably fuck as well I like that yeah it's just gets to the point I quite like shit shit I quite like shit yeah shit can be used kind of like a little bit more but fuck is just like you feel it and it's like embodies it man thank you so much for coming out of great company it's been amazing it's been wonderful thank you so much cheers thanks for having me

1:21:27Mind blown. Mind. Didn't I tell you? Wow. That is, to be honest, one of the most interesting episodes. We have our famous guests, the Elizabeth Days, the Paloma Faiths, right? And then we have our experts, Dr. Federica Ramati and now Dr. Rayanne Safar. These ones blow my mind because we are going through this age now, which is where we just want to know things about our health and about our minds and about so many different things. And that was unbelievably cool. Yeah. It's so hopeful. I mean, I got really emotional at the end. Yeah, you did. It's so hopeful. I just like, yeah. And it's something I just knew nothing about.

1:22:05I just didn't know so many things about the fact of the depression and how having chronic depression and then being prescribed psychedelics to help it. And there was a 95 % increase in their mental health for happiness. Crazy numbers that we're seeing. and look, I do want to point out once again that we are never encouraging anyone to take drugs recreationally. If you are wanting to learn more about it, then you can go and read up. We'll leave loads of links in the show description and you can talk to doctors about these different things. And, you know, we'd heard about the scary things about cocaine and things like that.

1:22:44So whatever you're doing out there, be a bit careful. Yeah, that's what I want to say. Be careful 100%. That was a fantastic episode. I loved it it was brilliant really mind-blowing okay guys remember if you haven't followed our podcast yet please do and if you love this episode please share it with your friends your neighbours your brothers your sisters your family groups whatever it is on WhatsApp just share it across and also you can follow us on social media at Great Company Podcast we're on TikTok YouTube and Instagram and everything is in the show description and as always we're going to see you next Wednesday for another episode and we can't wait we cannot wait goodbye bye

1:23:37If you're a smoker or vapor ready to make a change, you really only need one good reason. But with Zinn Nicotine Pouches, you'll discover many good reasons. Zinn is America's number one nicotine pouch brand. Plus, Zinn offers a robust rewards program. There are lots of options when it comes to nicotine satisfaction, but there's only one Zinn. Check out Zinn.com slash find to find Zinn at a store near you. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Hello, everyone. We're Jamie and Sophie. You may remember us from Nearlyweds and then Newlyweds. But now, guys, things are about to get even wilder as we take on our biggest adventure yet, becoming parents.

1:24:19Yeah, that's right. Newlyweds is now Nearly Parents and we're bringing you the same honest, heartwarming takes on our journey to parenthood, I guess. Join us as we find out what it really means to become a family while trying not to kill each other. Get ready for Nearly Parents, your favourite new podcast.