003 Mark Haden from MAPS Canada

In this episode we talk with Mark Haden, Executive Director of MAPS Canada about the clinical trails they are conducting using MDMA for people who suffer with PTSD. We also talk about the history of psychedelics in Canada and the United States. 

Transcript

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Dave 0:14

welcome to the psychedelic suitcase. I'm Dave McNee. In this episode we talk with Mark Hayden. Mark has worked in the field of addiction counseling for close to 30 years. He's also the executive director of maps Canada. Maps is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies. And what do they do? Well, they're currently on their third phase of a clinical study where they are treating people with post traumatic stress disorder with the drug MDMA and getting really good results. We talk about that, the history of psychedelics in Canada, in the U S drug reform and what he envisions coming down the road in terms of facilitated psychedelic drug therapy. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Here's Mark Hayden . Mark, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Mark 1:00

You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dave 1:02

I've heard you talk a few times about sort of the history of , psychedelics in particularly Canada. and I was wondering, before we get back to that, where do you think we went wrong, if that makes any sense? U m, compared to the indigenous cultures around the world, it seems that w e sort of lost track a little bit of what we really should be going after in life in some ways. And it seems that we maybe had that at some point, but maybe through bad laws or, just the sort of demonization of things like psychedelics. We didn't actually incorporate them into our culture the way that other people have. U m, and i wa just wondering, where was the point where it sort of went off the rails?

Mark 1:46

Well, if you think about indigenous communities and how they have integrated psychedelics into their societies, they always control and contain the psychedelic experience through the practice of ritual and structure and leadership by elders. And it doesn't matter which community you go to, it's always that it's, it's, it's never just a teenage thing. It's always woven into the fabric and it's about connection . It's about connection to the land. It's about connection to the spirit that our connection to that community, it's about connection to the medicine is there's a process of, of connecting. It is woven into how indigenous people have used psychedelics forever. And for the first time ever in the 1960s, Tim Leary links psychedelics with the disconnection message to an intern on a dropout . And it was a younger folks thing. I mean the backdrop of the Vietnam war and the fear of the baby boomers just put psychedelics in a completely different place than all other indigenous communities have had them. And there was a backlash and there was backlash not just against psychedelics but back against the whole baby booming generation and cannabis and drugs and psychedelics. And, and so we , um, we're slowly digging ourselves out of that particular mess that we created a few years back.

Dave 3:07

Well, also to introduce yourself as well. You're the chair of maps Canada , uh , which is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies. And they are currently I'm involved in a series of tests with the MDMA to treat PTSD. If you could talk about the results, that'd be great.

Mark 3:23

The current treatments for p osttraumatic stress disorder don't work very well. U m, t hose somewhere the literature says about 10% and people are selling posttraumatic stress disorders t o the military w ill claim up to 25% effective. So the range is somewhere between 10 and 25. The first study that was done with Michael demonstrate an 83% level of effectiveness. That was kind of the exploratory open label study and , um , and it got everybody's attention. So the question, if you're a completely skeptical exterior person looking at that data, if you're proposing an 83% level of action invest versus the 10 to 25%, you would say that they're lying. They're falsifying their data. So the way you prove that you're not, as you do it with more sites, with more therapists in multiple countries, and you have loss of oversight like the FDA in the United States like health Canada and Canada. And so far we are continuing to demonstrate a high level of effectiveness. It isn't quite 83%, but it's really good and it's way better than traditional treatments. So that with, with encouragement , um, we're plowing forward. In fact, the FDA in United States looked at our data and said, we want to give you a breakthrough status. That means it's so effective and it, they just want to speed speed the access. They want to allow people to access it as quickly as possible. So it's exciting. So is the plan yeah . To open up centers where and how, how would this be administered to the patients? Well, in Canada we'll finish our phase three and we will give that data to federal government and then fingers crossed, I'm optimistic that they will say yes, this is now illegal prescription drug. And the sponsor of the drug gets to say what the rollout looks like and sponsor of the drug is maps USA and they will essentially license facilities license , um , or certify trained practitioners and sell MBMA to them. And so we'll have a, a rush on our hands of people really wanting to provide this service. So how quickly can we roll it out in a way that still maintains the quality of the service? Is the things that we're thinking about now. Would it be something that would be an additional cost to people or would it be something that's sort of being considered under the coverage of Columbia normal healthcare ? Right now? I don't think I've, federal government has even started to think about that question. I would anticipate initially it would be a private pay, right? Maybe later if we can prove that it's saving the government money. Essentially the costs of having veterans on disability allowance , um, is challenging. I mean that's a huge issue in the States is not as much in Canada, but it's the , these are the kinds of things you use , the cost benefit analysis you have to do to show the government that it's actually worthwhile investment.

Dave 6:19

I heard your counterpart in the States talking about how these centers that you're hoping to open up at some point. U m, and maybe this is just in the States, I'm not quite sure. I t would be more than just for healing and more for, But also he was talking, you know, everything from couples therapy to spiritual experiences th at s omeone could have.

Mark 6:39

There are multiple initiatives that are shifting how people think about drugs and specifically psychedelics i s the research initiatives. So there's the, once you have passed a phase one, two and three clinical trial, you can legally prescribe that medicine in the context t hat specified. So, u m, that's, that's one track, but there's a whole other track. The track is the legalization of psilocybin mushrooms initiatives in the States and there's multiple of them. And t here's an initiative here as well to allow therapists use it for end of life anxiety. So does that sort of drug policy reform piece to psychedelics. And then there's the research piece and they're both pushing public opinion, but, u h, I don't know which will happen quicker. I mean, if they said we're going to decriminalize all psychedelics or even all drugs, u m, in the Portuguese kind of model, what would we do? I mean, that would, hopefully they, the elders of the psychedelic community would, would start to do training. U m, and t here w ill be, u m, the service would slowly unfold in a way that maximize benefits and minimize the harms.

Dave 7:49

Right. And regulation and how it would be regulated as opposed is my next question is how do you, in sort of perfect world, how do you see it being regulated and administered?

Mark 8:00

Well, if you want to , if you look at second psychedelic drives, there's essentially one potential harm. Um , if you, I Google, I have Google words on my computer for all the different psychedelics and so everyday I get the media news dump in my box and a lot of it about things that went wrong was psychedelics. And so, but it all comes down to one thing, which is lack of supervision, right? Lack of skillful control of dosage of set , which is the expectation of setting, which is the environment of setting people up for the experience, debriefing appropriately allowing for integration work if that's done skillfully. The problems with psychedelics go down to incredibly a , it's not zero, but it's incredibly low. Right? Oh, in a post prohibition world, psychedelics would be, the psychedelic experience would be available to people, but it'd be available by trained practitioners, knew how to set people up for the experience and hopefully we're wise elders, which is essentially what the indigenous communities have been saying for years is that this thing has to be structured in a way that isn't just about people running into the grocery store and grabbing something and running out going, gee, let's go driving. I mean that would produce a real problem for us as a society, but if it's available through [inaudible] skilled practitioner is , and the context of the skilled practitioners could vary widely. I mean it could be indigenous Iowasca circles. It can be indigenous payoti circles, which are very different. It could be psychedelic psychotherapy using LSD or psilocybin for anxiety or depression. It could be MGMA therapy for PTSD. It could be, it could be multi-day. Dance has goals , you know, it doesn't really matter what the context is. As long as somebody is in charge and they're trained and they screen appropriately and they debrief appropriately and they structure the situation to maximize the benefit. At the end of the day, I don't think there's just one model. You know, indigenous groups could continue to do it and judicial groups have always done so the peyote people would still do it in the same way they've always done at the ayahuasca folks will do it the same way they've done it. If somebody wants to go and get psychedelic psychotherapy with MGMA for PTSD , they probably experienced a maps type protocol, right? Yep . Really matter the circumstances. You just need somebody in charge, managing set setting and safety and dosage issues, and there's a lot of room in that for a wide range of different experiences. Many people have experienced iOS at the ceremonies. In fact, it's really, if I think about the shift in how people work with these kinds of medicines as a result of doing a ton of ayahuasca ceremonies, it changes things because people are now bringing the ceremonial aspect to other substances because they see the beauty of a structure of a structured ceremony. Right? Throughout Vancouver, there's green ceremonies and people in a yoga with cannabis ceremonies. There's a whole variety of different people who are taking sort of, I would describe them as indigenous like structures and applying it to cannabis, which I actually think is a great idea and more ritualistic control that we weave around a substance in a society. The less problematic our collective relationship with that substances. Right.

Dave 11:11

Yeah, no that , that makes a lot of sense. Um, and also just once again provides a connection with a group of people and it's , it's nice to , to know that there are efforts being made to sort of have that connection restored your conference on November 2nd , uh , in Vancouver. What are you planning on talking about there?

Mark 11:28

Oh, the spirit plant medicine conference.

Dave 11:30

Yes.

Mark 11:31

I'm running a panel that asks an interesting question. Is underground therapy helpful or harmful t o the process of legalization? A nd that's a really interesting question because it's not clear. I think one way of thinking about it is what city really tight city a rchitecture rules d o t o buildings because it, when I have a brother who's an architect and he o bserves that when the city comes in and regulates a lot, what happens is you lose all the best and y ou lose all the worst. So the top wildly beautiful, extravagant, artistically decadent buildings aren't appropriate and the horrible buildings aren't appropriate. So what you've got is this little mediocre thing in the middle, right? So it's interesting to look at psychedelics through that lens is I think the more we regulate , um, the more we'll lose. Oh , thanks . I mean, there were some underground therapists that are absolutely fabulous and others that are very unskilled, they don't have the knowledge or the training or the personality to do the work. Right? So there's a real mixture out there. And so the people who do it excellently help the messaging and the people that do it terribly are harmful to the messaging.

Dave 12:49

I've heard you talk also about the language of psychedelics and, and I think that's really important as well. Even just the term psychedelics.

Mark 12:58

When psychedelics first came into the Western culture, they, the belief after Albert Hoffman invented LSD that they were essentially made available to psychiatrists and the belief at the time was that it would help psychiatrists to understand this schizophrenia. So the language that they used was appropriate for that belief, which was psychotomimetic, which means mimicking a mental illness. And then they continued using for awhile and then decided that actually it wasn't particularly helpful for helping them to understand schizophrenia and they, but they noticed people had some pretty visual, dramatic, dramatic visuals around the whole experience. So they called them hallucinogens, which basically means seeing stuff and as they continue to develop some maturity and understanding it , they understood that there's a lot more going on. This really isn't about seeing stuff. This is really about manifesting the mind. It's about access to unconscious material. People become a lot more introspective and able to share levels of the personality that they can't normally. So the word psychedelic essentially means mind manifesting and that's the word that essentially the researchers have decided to use because it's the most accurate. Now, the downside is the word psychedelic does, it also has a lot of cultural baggage as in psychedelic art and psychedelic culture. So researchers aren't applauding that use of the word psychedelics . They're just applauding the, what the word actually means, which is mind manifesting. Now subsequent to that, other people who came along and said, well, these , these medicines had been used by indigenous cultures for years to explore spirituality. And that's the word and theologian , which is, you know, a manifesting of the spirit. And then other people came along and said, well, you know, if you include MGMA and MDA and that , that whole empathogen group that really needs a new and some new languaging around that. So in pathogen, which means connecting to others and somebody tossed out entactogen, which is acting to sell on your own larger sense of your personality and the depth of your personality. So it does mean a lot of words bounced around. Um , the fur for the most researchers believe the most neutral word is psychedelic it . Yeah. Other ones are flavored more. And so the most, the most accurate word to use is not biased, is psychedelic.

Dave 15:28

In Canada. Here are we a ffected much by the American policies?

Mark 15:32

That's not a simple question. Some complexity to that cause essentially Canadian popular opinion changed dramatically with cannabis as a result of the legalization of initiatives in States. So we looked at what was happening in the States, the majority of Canadians and said, we need to do this. And Justin Trudeau about in front of the podium or in front of the parade on the podium and said, okay, we're going to fully legalize cannabis. He did that because he read the polls , the polls supported it. And the reason why was because the Americans started the discussion now that we fully legalized it and it seems to be just fine by fully legalized. You know, the American, it's a state by state state initiative in Canada. It's a federal initiative, right ? So what the United States sees is the whole country has done it and it seems to be just fine and fact people are making money. And so it's all medically viable for lots of folks. So, yes, we , we do push each other back and forth. Within the world of psychedelics, it's a little more different. It's a little different because the MDM will be legalized in both Canada, the States around the same time because it's a multi-country study. The silicide initiatives in the States are unique to the States. We don't have, you know, the end of life anxiety with psilocybin and with depression for psilocybin isn't a Canadian initiative. It's an American initiative. Right . Oh , um , that will push us hopefully, but we won't immediately roll it out in the same way. We'll immediately rollout MDMA for PTSD because that is Canadian study. It's a multi-country study and then Canada as part of it . How do you see psychedelics benefiting , um, just medicine in general? How do you, what do they offer that other things don't offer? Well, I think on the scale of evangelical, I'm somewhere in the middle. I mean, there's some people out there that really talk about, you know, healing the relationship with the universe. And I think that we need to start with more realistic, more realistic , uh , expectations. I mean, yes, it will help specific treatment indications, you know, it will help people with depression, anxiety and life anxiety, PTSD. So sort of cluster headaches, you know, so there'll be specific indications. Um, we're, we're talking about doing an eating disorder study. We believe that we could really help eating disorders. So there'll be some indications that come down the pipe that psychedelics won't fully cure, but they'll certainly probably be a more effective treatment than traditional treatments. And so that will shift public opinion and hopefully then the public will push the federal government to legalize it a nd then hopefully be a vailable a nd t o c ontained i n t hat way.

Dave 18:10

For the MDMA trials, For example, what is MDMA doing that , uh , other things can't do to the brain?

18:19

we can guess at the answer to that question because we don't actually know. But we can guess . So the model that most researchers discuss is essentially psychedelics give you access to your unconscious mind. They reduce the permeability. And if you think about what your unconscious mind is, it's what drove the car today. If you happen to drive a car, you know you're , you weren't thinking about your feet at all. What you're thinking about is lunch in the meeting. You going to have your conscious mind is doing, you know, random comments to yourself about how the world is working and what your immediate planning, what you think about what's going on in the radio. Your unconscious mind is riding the car. You don't go left foot, right foot push now with your conscious mind, right? But we have lots of stuff that happens in our unconscious mind all the times. It essentially runs our life and do no regards to feelings. And as we meet people and we respond emotionally, that's all coming from on and off unconscious mind. And so PTSD is a buried tape loop in the unconscious mind and does it reduce permeability so you can kind of get into it, into your unconscious mind and find the tape loop. And the second aspect is traditional therapies when they become close to that take Luke as a huge fear response. And so with MGMA it reduces the fear response. You can actually go into the tape loop and kind of rework it in a way that seems to release some of the emotional energy around it that's so disruptive in people's lives.

Mark 19:46

I ran into an individual, for example, who has schizophrenia and he's essentially over a multi decade process. He figured out that high dosages of anything cannabis or psychedelics are really horrible for him . They de stabilize him and his life goes completely off the rails. But what he discovered is very, very small dose of either LSD or mushrooms. Um , seems to change the voices. And the voices that he has in his head are normally negative, judgmental , um, destructive , um, nasty voices that are , uh , very condemning of him. And when he takes a psychedelic micro-dose tiny, tiny mouth, the voices are still there, but they change and they become very loving and positive to him, which is quite something. And so , um, I've just never heard that story. I , I dug around in the literature and I found one paper that observed that schizophrenia in groups when given a low dose of LSD function better. It was just one paper. And that was in 1956 I think it was published. So I've really dug in, I really can't find any literature that that explores the relationship of low dose of psychedelics with schizophrenia. All of the literature with high dose has this problem. It's very destabilizing. Right. I think it's an interesting enough story that I've decided to write up the story of his life. So I'm kind of writing his biography. It's an interesting story. And treatments for schizophrenia right now really don't work very well. They're very sedating and have lots of side effects. And if there was something out there that would help treat schizophrenia. Now admittedly in the research world, that's the high hanging fruit, you know? No, we search those are talking about that. So it's a, that's going to be long, slow one.

Dave 21:22

Yeah, no, it's interesting that there seems to be, for this gentleman anyway, or the patient, it seems to be there is a threshold in which it turns from positive to negative.

Mark 21:32

Um, yeah. Which is fascinating. Yeah.

Dave 21:35

And so maybe one day I'm, this will, I know I have no idea, but it may want to help them improving treatments for schizophrenia. Yeah , yeah. That's great. I'm writing the book of his life and his relationship with psychedelics, but I'm also finding a survey cause I'd like to , uh , ask, you know, with microdosing , does anybody have , um , schizophrenia and what, what are the , why are they taking life for those ? What impact is it having? Because some of the surveys have noticed that there was a small number of people with major mental health disorders that microdose but we don't know why. So I'd really like to add to a survey to find out that it seems microdosing is in the last few years just sort of been this, this buzzword , but it's, it seems to be attributed to, you know, people in Silicon Valley trying to, you know, get more out of their Workday sort of a thing. Um, I wonder at what level of dose , um , it would change for that, that, that person , uh, yeah, that's, that's , it's fascinating. I know it'd be interesting to see the results of the survey as well. Um, cause he , you might , you might've hit on something that , uh , yeah, like you said, not many people there or looking into. So that's great.

Mark 22:38

In terms of other interesting projects, I d id a publication o n paper where I, I found three people who had taken massive accidental overdoses of LSD. Right. And we would never in any kind of research study be able to give people l ike those k inds of dosages. So w e'll never know unless we find people w ho have taken a lot and then find out what their experience was and what, it was quite interesting because one of the individuals had had a long history of bipolar, like manic depression, right. And u m, and had essentially b een healed by the experience and it had been documented because she was under the care of a mental health team. So it was documented, g et a long history. So she was under, she had, she had had both psychiatric and case note and counselor case note notes. And then she had this, u m, unfortunate i t at the time event. And afterwards she went back to her psychologist and a psychiatrist and they were really puzzled and they documented again and again that she seems to be just fine. And , uh, so it was an interesting case because I had so much medical documentation indicating that she really quite unwell [inaudible] experience essentially heal after the experience.

Dave 23:51

W as i t was the experience, u h, itself o f t he, it's obviously if y ou took i t that much, it was probably not a very pleasant experience w ith the actual LSD experience.

Mark 24:01

Yeah. It was always all of the overdoses that I talked to had a horrible experience that was really unpleasant. Lots of vomiting, just rolling around completely out of control. I t took a lot and it was extremely unpleasant for them and extremely unpleasant a nd people around them. It is incredible that something positive w ould come out of that. U h, yeah, I s tudied three cases and one s eemed to have c ure h er bipolar the second, u m, was i t a woman who was pregnant at the time a nd she gave birth to a very happy, healthy boy who's now grown up. The incident was 18 years ago w hen, so, right. U m, it's, he's fine. So that was interesting b ecause she was two weeks pregnant. And the third case was, u m, an individual who had done absolutely massive dose. I mean she thought she found a line of cocaine in her boyfriends, A nd snorted it. It wasn't cocaine. It was LSD. So she was really, really sick. She had vomited and vomited for hours. But what came out of it after she eventually came down was, y eah, she had, she had a morphine addiction going into it and she came off h er morphine with no w ithdrawals, which is unheard of. And s he h ad, she was on a morphine because of a lot of physical pain. And t hen the physical pain seemed to resolve itself for a w hile. And then she was playing afterwards trying to see if she could manage physical pain. She subsequently played with morphine a little bit and she would use LSD to start to work with that and then to try to improve her relationship with both pain and morphine. And to some extent at work , you know, it wasn't outrageous success, but it certainly was an interesting case study.

Dave 25:38

I want to talk to you a little bit about, and this is kind of going back a little bit , uh , I'm just sort of fascinated about the history of it. I guess and more about that as oppose.

Mark 25:46

I mean t here were historical Aboriginal for divisions, u m, that we don't know a whole lot about. But then, u m, t he Albert Hoffman invented LSD and it went into the community of psychiatrists and Weyburn Saskatchewan was the hospital where there was doing most of the research. T here was a hospital in n ew West minister are called Hollywood hospital. T hat was also having, giving psychedelic experiences to people and documenting what they did and doing a little bit of research. So between those two centers, it was about a 15 year period, u m, where it was promising. And if I was g onna say w hat was one piece of research that t hey most excited by, it was LSD for the treatment of alcoholism and then, a nd they were continuing to publish and they were completely optimistic that this would transform a lot of different t imes, psychiatric treatments. And then the whole sixties thing, t he, the rebellion against, u m, the parents that rebellion against the Vietnam war and t hey huge number of young people who are loudly yelling. U m, and then the young p eople smoking cannabis and then taking psychedelics and, and advocating disconnection a nd, and, and complaining loudly about their parents, you know, industrial jobs. And they were part of the system that was corrupt. And so there was a kind of a battle. And in that case, the government did, what they often do is they take the people i n t heir targeting and they criminalize their drugs. They criminalized cannabis and they criminalized psychedelics. And it could have been very different time, you know, worth that number of young people all at one time. And it was introduced slowly through indigenous communities. And it was , um, it would join the churches and then talk about how it helped them to function well in their lives. And it could have been different, but just cultural context at the time resulted in a huge backlash against psychedelics and cannabis and drugs were criminalized. Yeah . So it's just only, it seems only recently in the last few years that , uh, it's opened up again. And what , so what made it opened up again? What, what was the cause of, how is the research now started up? Well , I think there's not a simple answer to that question. I think there's multiple, I think the baby boomers grew up so there's no threat of them anymore. And the baby boomers are now in positions of power and they're going, that wasn't such a bad experience back in my teenage days . And um , okay . And there's a desperate need for new mental health diagnoses, you know , or , or new mental health treatments and, and the, the, the brilliance of Rick Doblin saying we want to treat soldiers and police really shifts messaging , you know, completely. Cause it's, you know, when you're, you're treating soldiers and police with PTSD. Yeah . And messaging is that we're treating people who are revered by our society and we're giving them psychedelics . So, so the messaging is completely different now. And that's really what's bringing it back slowly. But there was somebody, and I don't know who it was, but somebody made a decision to allow psychedelic medicine, is to be, to allow it to go through the stage one, two and three clinical process, which all other molecules go through. You know , if you want to scrape the guts of a sea cucumber and see if you've got a bowel and about inflammation, problem solution in that, got what you have to go through with stage one, two and three clinical trial. And it's, yes, that thing that you've scraped out of the bio concentrator of the ocean does reduce the inflammation [inaudible] and it's not toxic to animals or people. And it will be marketed as a little pink pill and it's stringent. It's hard to go through this millions and millions of dollars to go through that process. So why don't we just allow that process to function with psychedelics? And essentially that was it . Just a note was made and that's what's happening.

Dave 29:23

Oh, that's great. Okay, I will let you go soon, but I just wanted to ask you one last thing. how do you see, obviously these centers are will be opened and I think inevitably they will be, how do you see that changing the community? How do see that? Are we going to get back at some point t o the way that the indigenous people are sort of connected to things or, I mean, i t could only help I suppose, but I just wanted to see y ou. So your, what your sort of vision of the future would be like, u m, once, once these things are sort of up and running in a sense.

Mark 29:57

Well, I start out simple, which is yes, we will be more effective at treating specific illnesses. That stage one, I'm giving people a sense of spirituality and often psychedelics are perceived as the most meaningful or the most , um , spiritual experience of people's lives. So allowing people to have access to that I think would help people lead more balanced and healthy lives and hopefully start to reconnect with the planet in some way. Our , our disconnection with the planet is causing us amount of harm , um, today, you know, as the hurricanes descend. Uh, so we, we really need to rethink , um , how we're, how we treat our planet and start to connect with a larger sense. And you know, I th I think these are things that psychedelics could offer.

Dave 30:44

Are there any Western countries that have sort of adopted this in any way, or is it just are we blazing new ground here?

Mark 30:52

Well, if I think about what's happened in the Netherlands, the Netherlands that access a historically to full grown like, you know , like cubensis mushrooms and then that was shut down and then it became truffles, which is an underground site on the national right. For many decades the Netherlands had had access to psychedelic to the very, very few problems and they really haven't put in a, you can only access through licensed trained practitioners level of safety and still the relatively safe. So there are people within the culture who have just stepped up to the plate and are offering a service in a structured kind of way that their , it's kind of ad hoc. You can also just go and buy them and do them yourself. So the Netherlands is an interesting model. It hasn't produced harm and they , for the lack of criminalization probably does good. Um, the discussions in the States are interesting because there are decriminalization and legalization initiatives with , um , tremendous mushrooms and the decriminalized, basically it's say the police will place those as low as possible priority, but it doesn't offer any way of regulating it. The Oregon initiative, Oregon 2020 is the one that I'm most interested in. It's Tom and Sherry Eckard who are leading the charge on that one is what they're proposing is that psychedelics be illegalized mushrooms be legalized in a very specific context, which is basically training practitioners. So I'm really rooting for that particular one cause I think just decriminalization initiatives aren't particularly interesting. I'm much more interested in how we as a society, you know, weave these into our society in a way that maximizes the benefit , minimizes the harms. Right . And so that's really the question that I ask is how do we, how do we guide people in these experiences in a whole variety of different ways that it helps people who live happier lives. Yeah. Counseling, I mean, the pathogens are really helpful for couples . You know, we know that we know that time bonding and increasing empathy is a good thing. And when couples kind of work with medicines to help their relationship , um , it can be really helpful in terms of strengthening their relationships.

Dave 32:55

Yeah, like you said, I think supervision is, that is the biggest thing , um, guide people through these experiences. It's been great talking to you and um, yeah, good luck at the conference and uh , really use a pleasure to talk to you, Mark. Thank you.

Mark 33:07

Thank you David.

Dave 33:08

And that was my conversation with Mark Haden. To find out more about Mark, head over to a markhaden .com or visit maps.org or mapscanada.org to find out more about the clinical studies they are currently involved with. The psychedelic suitcase is produced by Carolyn Myers and myself , your host, Dave McNee. So join us again when we unpack more of the psychedelic suitcase. Until then, safe travels