Back To LibraryVideo Transcript:
Humans have been socially programmed to assume technological superiority follows chronologically in time. What do I mean by that? Take Moore's Law: the number of transistors on computer microchips has doubled every 2 years since 1970. Take the phone out of your pocket - this is a more technologically advanced phone than the phone you bought 10 years ago. Look, I'm a big fan of this sort of progress, okay? This progress is why we all came in a car instead of a cart and buggy today, right? We know that. However, there are certain parts of life, and particularly of medicine, where this doesn't hold true, where the man-made new thing is not as technologically superior as nature, right?
So take scurvy, a horrible affliction that affected sailors from the 1500s to 1850. Does anybody know what scurvy's from? Vitamin C deficiency, right? We all know that right, but they didn't know that back then. We only learned that in the 1930s, which resulted in a Nobel Prize. And so the sailors of the time were going transatlantic, right? We were just going to the new world, North America, South America, and if you think about that, it's a months-long journey and you need to have food that doesn't spoil. So what do you bring? Dried meats. What do you less likely bring? Fruit, right? Citrus fruit. And so many, many of the captains of these ships wouldn't bring along citrus fruit because it was such a long journey.
But humans had known since the 1400s sailing down to Africa that there was this thing called scurvy and that if you didn't take citrus fruits with you, you’re going to be in bad shape. And like I said, this killed two million people before we started implementing, you know, fruit rations on ships. What happened is that the Royal Society at the time and the thinkers of the time decided that this idea of citrus fruits, this plant medicine, wasn't going to likely be the solution to the problem. But they had the solution to the problem - the solution to the problem was acid combined with alcohol, vinegar, or arsenic. I'm not kidding, right? And that was the solution, that was what they thought would correct the problem. And they actually told the sailors, "Don't take the citrus fruit, it may make you worse." And that was the viewpoint at the time.
And this courageous doctor, these doctors that would go along with the ships transatlantic - Dr. James Lind - performed the world's first randomized control trial, multiple arm trial, where some people got citrus fruit, some people got some of these other interesting man-made solutions. And I don't think I have to tell anybody in this room what happened - the sailors that received citrus fruit were taking care of everybody else at the end of the week. The atrocity of this is that it wasn't for another 120 years before citrus was implemented as a part of sailing transatlantic. You can't imagine how many people died because of this.
And so I want to use this as a metaphor, and the metaphor is the following: humans, you know, since the dawn of time, taking in various fruits and vegetables and foods - they didn't know what any of that was doing, but they knew it tasted good and that was part of their diet. And over time a certain stressor hits, let's say transatlantic voyage, right? And when that stressor hits, that change in the environment, what happens is this person then narrows, let's say their diet down to just dried meats, and then disease occurs. And initially the solution and the problem are matched, and people kind of understand what the natural solution is. But as time goes on these associations dissolve, and then man tries to develop a new solution. And in this case, the new solution was arsenic, battery acid, or whatever it was, and not the natural solution. That may seem crazy right now, but back then this was the view, right?
And so, you know, that happens, and then if the man-made solution doesn't solve the problem, then people revert back to the natural solution. They do the science, science prevails, and again like I said, in 1930, a couple of chemists received the Nobel Prize for vitamin C synthesis. Man is inextricably linked with nature - we are inextricably linked with nature. Like plant-derived citrus fruit medicines, humans have been taking plant-derived psychoactive medicines for thousands of years. The Spanish, at least 3,000 years ago. The Native Americans were taking mescaline-containing peyote cactus for almost 6,000 years.
Western medicine tried to integrate these plant-based psychedelic medicines into our armamentarium of treatments for neuropsychiatric illness for 20 years, and guess what happened? History repeats itself, right? The first thing that happens - the authorities are concerned these things are making people sick, we need to make it illegal. And then in 1970, the Controlled Substance Act, and there are some people that shouldn't be taking psychedelics now, that's for sure. There's a subpopulation of people where there is a risk, but complete, just complete ban - nobody could study them. And it wasn't until the 2000s when we even started to study them, and as a physician, I cannot prescribe a psychedelic medicine in the United States today.
Let's take an example: the Tabernanthe iboga rainforest shrub of Central West Africa has been used by the Gabonese people for centuries. The tribe that uses these are called the Bwiti - they grind up the root bark and then they ingest it. The French in 1899 took this iboga root bark, brought it back to France, isolated one of the primary alkaloids, this ibogaine alkaloid, took the ibogaine alkaloid, started treating people in France for depression and anxiety - makes sense, right? And then the French had their own version of the Controlled Substance Act - banned just like the US, no medicinal value, not prescribable in France anymore.
So ibogaine went underground, started treating people with opiate use disorder. But most recently, the modern-day sailors - the Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs and Army Rangers and Special Forces operators have been stricken by a new plague: traumatic brain injury, the signature injury of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts, and with it, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thinking. More people die from suicide than they die on the battlefield these days.
And so we decided to do a study, and the study was a very complicated one, and thankfully the Stanford institutional review board let us do it. It took me a year actually to talk through this with them. So I had to talk them into letting us assess these guys knowing that they're going down to Mexico to take an illegal substance that's illegal in the US, down in Mexico do it, and then come back to Stanford and we reassess them a couple of times. Thankfully our institutional review board are pretty open-minded people.
And so everybody had traumatic brain injury, and most of them had post-traumatic stress disorder, [they] met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder before they went down there. None of them met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder when they got back - most of them held it, 88% reduction in symptoms by the one-month mark. But that's not all - similar reductions in anxiety, in depression, and here's the real dramatic finding: disability from traumatic brain injury, thought to be a structural problem in the brain - almost everybody at the one-month mark lost their disability from traumatic brain injury. This is a profound kind of neurotrophic factor, neurotrophic factor upregulator in the brain.
But what's even more remarkable about this is the psychological effect, the subjective effect - people are capable of going through past autobiographically relevant emotionally salient memories and reprocessing them, looking at them again in an objective framework, similar to Tom Cruise in Minority Report. So I'll leave you with this question: have we outlawed the modern-day orange? I don't mean that I think that ibogaine or iboga has vitamins necessarily in it, but it's this idea of making something illegal that has the potential for therapeutic effects. Being able for scientists to study these things - I think it's important that we can study them legally in the US. Thank you.