Episode 52 – Brad Burge

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human experience is in session my guest for today is mr. Brad Burge from Maps Brad it is your second time on HX p welcome back sir I’m so excited to be back had a great chat last time okay Brad so let’s let’s dig right into what maps is doing I mean the year is only in its first few months but already some some great things seem to be happening for maps your medical marijuana research received a boost in January when the DEA completed their inspection of the John

Hopkins University trial site what what does this mean for the city’s progress oh yeah well you know just to say I was last back on I was lost on in 2014 and that’s 2016 now and we were just in the middle of our phase two MDMA trials and now we’re just 2016 is just a big year a big shift for us and just like really moving to the next phase with the research and that’s including the marijuana research so we’ve been working on getting this study started for about

14 years now going through various levels of government obstacles various review processes including one review process that was removed last year there was extra from marijuana research and now researchers don’t have to go through that with the Public Health Service and then there was the firing of dr. Seuss’s Lee who was the original principal investigator on the study um just for your listeners who may not remember this is a study in that 76 United States

military veterans where we’re exploring different strains of medical marijuana with different ratios of THC and CBD to treat symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder now a lot of veterans are using marijuana for treatment of their post-traumatic stress disorder a lot of people for whom VA treatments including medications to start working right so we want to actually do the clinical trial so the research necessary to actually

find out how it works whether it works who it works for and ultimately hopefully to make whole plant medical marijuana an fda-approved prescription drug so this study we were thrilled last year Maps got our very first government grant it was a 2.1 million dollar grant from the state of Colorado Wow now the state of Colorado has as you know has legalized marijuana for recreational use and the taxes the income to the state from all the sales of that marijuana had

to go somewhere and so they created a grant program for medical marijuana research so taking the taxes from legal recreational marijuana and putting a towards medical marijuana research maps was the largest recipient of a 9 million dollar pool of funding that the state of Colorado was giving out to different applicants to do the research 2.1 million dollars now funding this marijuana for PTSD study the very first government grant first government

funding that maps has ever received so already that’s a that’s just a huge advancement yeah that’s that’s actual government funds being used to support nonprofit medical marijuana research so very exciting the trial is now actually in two sites we’ve expanded it same number of subjects 76 subjects but is now in two sites one at Johns Hopkins and one in Phoenix Arizona and the DEA as you mentioned just recently approved the study site in at the University in

Baltimore Johns Hopkins and now we’re just waiting to finish the construction on the study site that is in Phoenix Arizona where dr. Cicely is going to be treating subjects there so we expect this will get started this year we are just about to finalize that construction and then we’ll be able to get that final de approval get federal DEA approval and then order the marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse which will be

supplying the marijuana this is amazing man I mean you guys are changing the world that’s what you’re doing on a daily basis I mean it might not feel that way right now I mean we’ve we last time we talked as you said it was 2014 did you expect so much of a transition I mean it seems like you guys have made a lot of progress yeah well you know 2016 happens to be our 30th anniversary actually 30 years of working to remove government obstacles and remove the

irrational stigma that’s been around for so long surrounding psychedelics and medical marijuana so it’s been planned for a long time my boss Rick Doblin has been at it since 1986 and were as I said we’re just moving into this whole new phase where we’re at least in the case of the MDMA research we’re doing for PTSD or not we’re almost done with the original set of trials the small set of trials that’ll be ultimately six Phase two trials that we will have completed

and then just getting ready this year to move on to the much larger saves three trials that will hopefully ultimately within the next six years or so make MDMA illegal prescription treatment for PTSD let’s yeah let’s touch on that so your your your studies into treating PTSD with mdma-assisted therapy your Israel trials saw the last subject receiving their first treatment in the phase 2 study and your Boulder Colorado subjects leaving phase 2 and entering

the 12-month long-term follow-up face what comes next for the two studies have any interesting insights been kind of gleaned from the data so far oh yeah you know the the boulder trial that’s our second largest trial our largest one is this that the participants are still in their long-term follow-up the largest one being in South Carolina primarily in veterans and 24 subjects so not that much bigger 24 and 23 subjects but still

generally small studies the results from the bowler study are still preliminary still being analyzed but they look extremely promising spoken with the investigators who presented it to our research team and they are very very comparable with the really amazing we that the amazing results we got in our first couple of phase 2 studies which sowed show that eighty-three percent so over three quarters of the people who received mdma-assisted psychotherapy no longer

qualified for PTSD anymore after treatment so that’s our published results I can’t talk specifically about the published results because there’s the upcoming result for the boulder study because the data is still being analyzed and we want to say exactly what the results were just when they came out but we are seeing extremely positive results we’ve had quite a few study participants being open to speaking about their experience lately we will or

we just had a really great fundraising appeal in the last part of last year so just in in December a few months ago and were able to raise all of the funding that we needed left for that Boulder study and in that process several subjects came out and spoke on video about their experience and we think that was really motivating for bringing a lot of new supporters on board to help get that study completely funded in and completed we’ll also have one of the

study participants who found herself deeply recovered from PTSD after the MDMA sessions that she received in the study she’ll be speaking at our upcoming 30th anniversary celebration just going to be in oakland california on April seventeenth so just the sheer number of people who are willing to come out and and share their stories I think I spoked with five different participants just in the last few months from that study who

are not only feeling recovered from their PTSD but are also feeling comfortable not to speak publicly about their exteme is I don’t think I got a chance to email you were mentioned this to you but after our the first episode we did I got an email from someone who had been deployed in Iraq and he he emailed me and he said he said thank you for doing that episode because is he he was receiving a lot of kind of social stigma from the idea of using

MDMA to treat his PTSD and he was suffering from some really heavy PTSD and he just said he just said that he heard the episode and through hearing it it helped him decide that you know he should give this a chance so so moving moving on here that’s just great yeah truly truly changing people’s lives it’s okay so there’s an aspect of the mdma-assisted therapy that maps is doing in regards to couples and I find this pretty interesting there’s a it’s a

conjoined kind of thing where one person has the the trauma and the other person doesn’t do it can you explain to us please yeah yeah absolutely so just the the the background is that before MDMA was criminalized in 1985 the year before Maps was founded it was fairly widely used in the therapeutic community it still wasn’t super well known it wasn’t taught in medical schools but there was a fairly large community and maybe hundreds maybe thousands of therapists

who are using MDMA to treat people in their practices there hadn’t been any clinical trials who it was all anecdotal and experimental at the time but one of the main reasons are the main ways that MDMA was used was in couples counseling so helping couples talk about their the more difficult aspects of their experience and sometimes the MDMA helped people in these case reports come closer together to open up communication in some cases that help people realize that

they weren’t meant to be together and they separated either way it helps solve the problem but in in either case the the effects of MDMA seem to help people process openly especially with others so Maps is focused primarily on post-traumatic stress disorder right now in treatments for PTSD partly because MDMA just seems to have such amazing effectiveness when combined with psychotherapy for PTSD this new study that we’re starting which is going to be

with lead investigator Michael mid Hoffer he’s a psychiatrist who’s been leading many of our other phase 2 studies and then an additional sub investigator named Candace Monson who comes from Ryerson University in in Canada she’s one of the original developers of cognitive behavioural conjoin therapy which is a form of psychotherapy that’s used for couples and not just romantic couples either and that’s important to highlight that with

the study we’re not just focus on romantic couples but on one person with PTSD and another what we call a concern significant other so this could be a brother or a sister or a friend or a family member just somebody who’s very close to this person and whose relationship with this person is impacted by the person with PTSD PTSD does tend to affect more than just the individual it also tends to affects the families and the people around them just

by its very nature right yeah so we’re exploring PTSD this new study which is mdma-assisted psychotherapy for one person with PTSD and one person who does not have PTSD is not on our main drug development track which is to say the data is not going to be submitted to the FDA for the purpose of making mdma-assisted psychotherapy illegal treatment for PTSD it’s a it’s a it’s a new exploration of a possible use of MDMA in a way that it could be used once

MDMA is approved so it’s gathering more data about the safety and also this this new approach to using MDMA yeah and that’s I mean it’s so important to kind of realize that you guys are studying all of the aspects of this I mean especially in regards to I mean not just couples but also family members I mean it’s not your your mom and your dad and your brother or your sister are also experiencing and PTSD affects everyone that’s involved so that’s such a huge

thing I know that time is kind of short here I mean there’s there’s a there’s a global psychedelic dinner initiative that’s coming up how does what’s going on there Thanks you know we’re really excited about these it’s a Maps has done a number of crowdfunding initiatives I think we spoke about it last time in fact where we ask the public through social media through email to make small or large donations whatever they can afford to contribute

in a community way to the development of MDMA and other psychedelics we’ve also done crowdfunding campaigns for psychedelic harm reduction initiative that we take the festivals and other events around the world so the crowdfunding has been very successful we found a great deal of success from crowdfunding and we wanted to find a new way for people to both support the research financially since we’re nonprofit that’s where it all comes from

except for that one grant for the marijuana research but for the MDMA research we still need this this private funding so you know map submission is kind of twofold what is to complete this research to make these substances legally and safely available the other one is to reduce the stigma and to help people in a sense feel more comfortable talking about psychedelics and psychedelic experiences and psychedelic therapy just like you said just having

these open conversations can draw people out of the woodwork and help people feel more comfortable talking about their issues and maybe seeking help in a different way so that’s part of what we want to do with these global psychedelic dinners the idea is for people to host a dinner either in their home or at a restaurant have people over it can be a potluck or a picnic or at the beach or anything like that and just talk openly

about psychedelics we’re not encouraging people to use psychedelics at these events but certainly to eat delicious food and to talk very specifically and openly about psychedelics and we think that’s gonna you know help people feel more comfortable and not just feel more comfortable donating but also feel more comfortable just talking about their experiences and I’m finding new ways to heal that aren’t reliant on the traditional psychiatric approaches you

know we’re encouraging people to do it anytime this April our 30th anniversary again is this year and we have a major event a banquet and celebration happening in the San Francisco Bay Area as I mentioned on April seventeenth as kind of the the centerpiece of the global psychedelic dinners but these are happening all over the world we have over two hundred and 30 people in more than 26 countries now registered to host these dinners and the

goal what we’re really aiming for is we’re hoping to fund through these dinners and through this banquet through donations and sponsorships and people sharing their own crowdfunding pages and so on to completely fund our purchase of a kilogram of MDMA for our phase three research hmm okay that’s a lot yeah it’s a it’s it’s about 8,000 doses at at or around there and it’ll it’ll be all the MDMA we need for our us phase three trials four hundred thousand dollars may

seem like a lot of money for a kilo of MDMA which it’s street value is probably a lot less than that unfortunately the FDA only only looks at data using what’s called Good Manufacturing Practices certified MDMA or any other drug so that is pharmaceutical grade MDMA so all of the rules and regulations and bureaucratic requirements surrounding the manufacture of this legal pharmaceutical grade MDMA costs a total of four hundred thousand dollars so

that’s the cost of doing fda-approved Research and we’re hoping the global psychedelic dinners can help us reach that goal oh yeah very very interesting man I I really really appreciate your time Brad thank you so much okay so last thing here so maps is doing you guys the 30th anniversary is in April and you’re doing your own banquet and dinner celebration where and when is that happening and I mean what what do you guys going to be up to while what can

attendees expect to enjoy well well there well san francisco bay area is a great place lots of fun things to do in the area if you’re not already from here so April seventeenth starting at five o’clock we have a banquet where we’ll have a series of speakers this is a beautiful banquet it’s all taking place at the scottish rite center which is an old masonic temple on the shores of lake merritt in oakland in the East San Francisco Bay

so beautiful old venue with a lot of sort of mysticism and import to it you feel like that’s appropriate for the 30th anniversary of a psychedelic research organization and so we have a series of speakers rick doblin our founder and executive director my boss will be will be there speaking we’ll have researchers michael mid Hoffer one of the researchers i mentioned will also have to study subjects participants speaking about their experience one

woman from the boulder study who experienced sexual assault recovered from PTSD after being in our study and another guy I was a u.s. Marine veteran served in Iraq and also recovered from PTSD after serving in our trial so so we’ll be having that banquet series of talks and then everybody will go upstairs to this amazing it’s amazing halls amazing celebration hall where we’ll have another address it opens up for general admission at that point the

banquet and celebration are two different sets of tickets if you go to the banquet you can definitely come to the celebration then up there we’ll have a series of musical and multimedia presentations DJ Spooky also known as Paul Miller will be doing a fantastic musical act with a multimedia component to it usually does planetarium projections will also have android jones and faye droid android has done some amazing projections on the Empire State

Building on the Vatican on the Sydney Opera House he’ll be doing some of his live projections there and then we’ll conclude with a live performance special performance from Ken Jordan one of the two founding members of the crystal method will be playing for 45 minutes a downtempo electronic music set to round out the evening wow that sounds like quite the lineup man I’d and wish I could attend really really amazing Brad thank you so much again for your time

we’re gonna bring you back in another I don’t know a year and a half or so and see where you guys are at just because it seems like we’re it’s moving light speed I mean I mean it was almost I mean it felt like it would take a lot longer to move through face phase two trials yeah in last time yeah yeah it’s all it’s all concluding really quickly and by then we’ll be part way into our phase 3 trials in 2017 and moving full speed ahead towards prescription

access all right man we’re can not people get to the maps web site Maps dot org also if you want to learn more about the psychedelic dinners that’s psychedelic dinners org Brad thank you so much for your time I really appreciate your presence man I thank you so much Savior it’s been great as always this is the human experience we will see you guys next week