Psychedelics Then and Now with Zach Leary

Mac McClelland joins the MAPS Podcast for the first original episode of content for the show. Mac is an award winning journalist who wrote the article “The Psychedelic Miracle” for Rolling Stone magazine. The sub headline reads: "How some doctors are risking everything to unleash the healing power of MDMA, ayahuasca and other hallucinogens.”  Mac’s fantastically in depth journalistic prose combined with her own personal experience with psychedelically assisted psycho-therapy creates an epic discovery into the world of psychedelic research and the doctors that engage in it.   Mac was interviewed by Zach Leary and the podcast is reflective of not only the Rolling Stone piece but also of her own personal journey, the current landscape of psychedelic research and an examination into corners of the country engaged in this work that you might know even exist.    Mac McClelland is an award-winning journalist and author of Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story and For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story From Burma’s Never-Ending War. She's written for Wired, Reuters, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, New York, the New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Matter, and Sunset, among other publications, and corresponded for PBS and Vice News Tonight on HBO. She's additionally appeared on major national and international media outlets C-Span, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, the BBC, CBC, and Deutsche Welle.

Since 2008, the NYU Psychedelic Research Group (established in 2006) has administered a moderate dose of psilocybin to 16 participants in a double-blind placebo-controlled trial of the efficacy of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in individuals with advanced cancer and psychosocial distress. Dr. Ross will present preliminary clinical observations and data from our study, in which a majority of patients have experienced acute and sustained reductions in death anxiety, existential distress, and depression; as well as increases in spiritual states and practices, and improved family system functioning. Stephen Ross, M.D., is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and Associate Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Radiology, and Medicine at the NYU College of Dentistry. He directs the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse and the Opioid Overdose Prevention Program at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City. He is Director of Addiction Psychiatry at NYU Tisch Hospital and Director of the NYU Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship. He is certified in General and Addiction Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) and in Addiction Medicine by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). Dr. Ross has received a dozen local and national teaching awards related to education of medical students, psychiatry residents, and post-graduate fellows. Dr. Ross is an expert on the therapeutic application of serotonergic hallucinogens to treat psychiatric and addictive spectrum illnesses. He directs the NYU Psychedelic Research Group and is Principal Investigator of the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Project. Dr. Ross receives his research funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Heffter Research Institute.

Scientific Problem Solving with Psychedelics James will describe how to best use psychoactive materials for enhanced problem solving, a poorly understood and under-researched area. However, there are established methods that open minds to useful solutions for real problems. He will share his personal experience as part of a group that established the basic guidelines: set and setting, substance and dosage, as well as whatever else was necessary to effectively dissolve barriers to solving hard science problems. James Fadiman, PhD completed his dissertation at Stanford on the effectiveness of LSD-assisted therapy just as all research was shut down. During the subsequent 40-year lull, he has held a variety of teaching, consulting, training, counseling, and editorial positions. He has taught in psychology departments and design engineering, and for the past three decades at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sofia University) that he co-founded. He has published textbooks, professional books, a self-help book, a novel, and a series of videos ("Drugs: The Children are Choosing") for National Public Television. His books have been published in eight languages. He was featured in a National Geographic documentary and had three solo shows of his nature photography. He sits on two non-profit boards and has been the president of several small natural resource companies. He was involved in researching psychedelics for spiritual, therapeutic, and creative uses when it was legal, and recently published The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys and released a series of videos (with Kokyo Henkel) on Buddhism and Psychedelics. He is now conducting surveys of psychedelic use and has pioneered research on micro-dosing of a number of substances for a host of conditions (jamesfadiman.com).