We're standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, "It's been rescheduled." And I just said, "No, you can't be serious." And I said, "You've got to show me this." And I read the document. I kept thinking, "There must be an error in the document. It can't have been rescheduled." And no, it's been rescheduled. So, we start dancing around the kitchen. It's like, "This is unbelievable. This is really amazing." We were so thrilled. The headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia is the first country to do this. Look at Australia now. Australia's leading the world in this field. And it's like, this is surreal.
Where do you think it makes sense to begin? I mean, we could just begin with the trip treatment and how that domino knocked over so many dominoes.
With all of the momentum of said dominoes. Do you want to just begin there and we'll just chat through it?
In 2015, I came across your blog. Well, I'd been signing up to your blog for ages. I mean, you know, I've been reading your books and admiring your biohacking courage to try all different things and experiment for yourself because that's very much how I also like to operate. I just don't believe anything until I try it myself.
And so being that person that had never had any alcohol really, don't drink coffee, never got high, never had any drugs in my whole life until I read your Five Bullet blog back in December, I think it was 2015, when you said that you had donated $100,000 US to the Imperial College with psilocybin for depression. I think it was Tim.
Yeah. 2015 would have been Johns Hopkins with Roland Griffiths. So there was a depression study there.
That's right. So that was like a light bulb went off for me and I clicked on the link and I read the article and it was a fascinating article in the New Yorker magazine called The Trip Treatment.
That's right. By Michael Pollan, the one and only. And I said to my husband, "We have to do this." Like, "Please read this article." And he just, I think he thought I'd lost it. And he read the article and then he said, "Why don't you see if we can get into a trial?" And so we then approached Robin Carhart-Harris, who has subsequently become a great friend of ours. But at that time it was like, "Well, can we get into one of the trials in Europe?" And he said, "Well, no, you don't qualify. You don't have a mental illness diagnosis." And then he proceeded to see if he could introduce us to the psychedelic society. And finally, we were introduced to a guide in the Netherlands and we flew over to Europe and we had this extraordinary experience where we took a large dose of psilocybin. But for me, I had spent the previous 6 months, you know, when we'd planned this, just getting more and more nervous. I was just like petrified.
Yeah. And I was like, am I going to lose my mind? What's going to happen? Meanwhile, my husband's just not engaged in it at all. And so, it got to the day before where we're going to go and meet this guide. And I wrote an email to my accountant and I said, "If anything's to happen to me in the next 24 to 48 hours, these are my last wishes." I was that scared. Scared of losing control, scared of what this would all mean. I'd never had any drugs in my whole life before. And was I going to go crazy? So anyway, we went and my husband picked up the guy at the airport. We were meeting him. He surrounded him in his white robes, sort of Ram Dass style, hippie Indian white robes. Gave me a huge bear hug. Then my husband asked him all the way back, "Well, what is what's going to happen?"
Play run a show for me. Yeah.
Right. And after 45 minutes, he was no wiser. And then literally we the next day took the medicines with the guide and yeah and we were blasted into multiple realms of consciousness, all different dimensions of consciousness, and it was an extraordinary experience as you well know, a sense of being connected to self, to others, the planet. Feeling like you're part of everything, that everything's part of you. I think I said to you last time we spoke that I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that day. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience and I could see the energy in everything and my husband was also completely blown away. It brought us much closer together which was also something we didn't, well we didn't plan for but it was a fantastic bonus and we then just started going, what has just happened to us. So it was such an extraordinary experience. It took us about a year to really integrate what had happened and and we kept talking about it and you know it was a true mystical experience at the highest level.
When you say it took a year to integrate, was it really just letting the snow globe settle and seeing what was discernible after things had settled or were you using therapy to talk through the experience afterwards? What did integration look like for you guys?
No, it was sort of the snow globe.
Everything had sort of been blown, you know, like a huge fireworks display. And actually, it was like a fireworks display at times. And so for us it was letting that settle and then for me I'd thought, well there's no way I'd ever do that again. Like it was it was challenging. I mean it was beautiful but it was also challenging because a lot of material came up relating to my ancestors probably relating to other ancestral lineages that I'd had before. And I thought there's no way I'm going to do this again. But then as the year went on and we were going to go back to Europe again and stuff, I thought, okay, well, maybe we'll we'll have another go and see if it's the same or if that was just a fluke or what happened. And so we went back again and we work with the same guide, Dutch guide. And we had an even higher dose and it was even more profound. And so by that stage we said to one another, wow, well if this is having this impact on us and it was really healing us like personally there was something going on. There was some kind of magic. I mean, magic mushrooms, but you know, it was like there was some kind of golden thread that was trying to connect us back to ourselves, to integrate us into ourselves and then connect us to one another and to other people. And we said to ourselves, we'd already founded five charities between us by that stage. And we just thought, wow, well, if this is happening to us, imagine if this could be applied to all the people who are suffering with like homelessness or domestic violence or unemployment, disabilities, people suffering with depression that we come across through all of our charitable work. Because underpinning all kinds of disadvantage is usually some kind of mental illness, some kind of trauma, depression, something that has happened to that person in their lives. And it's usually that they've ended up being unemployed or committing domestic violence or whatever it happens to be, but it's through the intergenerational trauma that they've experienced. And so Peter and I just started looking and going, well, let's meet all of the people around the world. Let's go to all the conferences. Let's start meeting all the researchers. And we did that. And we started meeting researchers from all over the world, which was absolutely extraordinary. And we attended events and we learned everything we could. We watched every video. We listened to every recording that we could. And then by that stage, Peter and I were like, "This is extraordinary." Like, and we spoke with Rick Doblin at about that stage, which was in 2018. And in 2018, he said to me, Tania, I think you should set up a charity in Australia to do this. And we were mad enough to do that.
And for people who don't have the context just to just to describe Rick briefly, Rick is really one of the primary drivers, probably the primary driver I would say, and there are a lot of people of course who have played large roles behind the psychedelic movement through this organization called MAPS and they have been predominantly focused on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD and that's been the main indication. So he has been a fixture. He's very unorthodox. He is very well educated in policy, incredibly colorful. He's just one hell of a character. And I wanted people to have just a little bit of, but he's been he's been forging ahead since the 70s or 80s, well before there was any kind of tip of the hat from anywhere in the mainstream. So that's Rick Doblin and he's very good at helping other people and encouraging other people.
Yeah. Absolute inspiration. He's dedicated his whole life to this work and it's just extraordinary and he was a total inspiration to us as was Roland Griffiths and Robin and David Nutt, Professor David Nutt, the head of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London. Just amazing people, these legends. And the thing was in Australia we really didn't have a lot going on. There was one trial in the making. It was a trial for end of life stress and anxiety through terminal diagnosis which had been replicated in other parts of the world like at New York University and Johns Hopkins University. And we just knew that if Australia could start to position itself in this space that there might be a chance to heal a lot of people. So we did start a charity, Mind Medicine Australia. We launched it in February 2019 and we started working in this field starting to work out well how could we get these medicines to Australians as quickly, safely, accessibly as possible and and cost effectively as well. We originally approached the Therapeutic Goods Administration, I think it was in in late 2020, and we asked them if it would be possible if the medicines could be rescheduled.
So, let me pause you. I apologize, Tania, just for the Yankees listening and others maybe. The TGA is roughly analogous to the FDA in the US. So if you want a new drug approved, if you have something that is in a highly restricted drug class and you want to make it more readily available through prescription with fewer controls, etc., then you have to contend with in our case the FDA, but in your case the TGA. Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, that's exactly right. And these bodies require a lot of data and evidence and generally speaking pharmaceutical companies make applications to them for the rescheduling of medicines. And in this case, we wanted to make an application to move these medicines from prohibited substances, which in Australia was called schedule 9, but in the US is called schedule one, to a schedule 8 medicine, which is a controlled medicine, so that it could be used in clinical environments. And so we started applying to the TGA and we put an application in at their encouragement and then at the interim stage it was knocked back and then at the final stage despite many public submissions it was also knocked back and so we thought let's put it in again and one of the things that the TGA has to do is it has to provide its reasons for knocking it back. So my husband who's an extraordinary intellect and strategic I guess mind started really working on these applications and really addressing their concerns. And so then we put in another application to reschedule psilocybin MDMA for the treatment of depression and trauma in Australia. And again at the interim stage the application was knocked back and they had to provide their reasons and then we put in a final submission. And in that period there was another public consultation period and over we did this huge campaign and we were educating people all the time through this period. We were presenting webinars and we were presenting talks to politicians and health professionals and anyone we could, business leaders. We were talking like we probably gave thousands of presentations about these medicines over that period. And then finally we put in a submission and over 13,000 Australians supported this submission through public submissions to our therapeutic goods administration supporting the medicine and over 98% of people supported the rescheduling of these medicines. And this was the largest amount of public submissions ever received by our regulators for rescheduling any medicines. So there was this huge pressure.
Yeah. I imagine not every one of those recipients was super happy about the volume. I have to imagine.
Right. Probably because they had to publish them all as well, you know. Oh wow. Like on their platform. Yeah.
So a couple of questions. At that point, was it still just you and your husband who were working on this or had you assembled the volunteers to assist you guys in various ways? What did it look like at that point?
No, it was like this massive movement by then. I mean like we had started chapters in communities all around Australia. So we had over 30 chapters in place like Byron Bay or Brisbane, Darwin, Perth, even chapters in New Zealand.
And that would be chapters of Mind Medicine Australia. So it'd be like MMA put in place name.
Yeah. People who were just like behind this mission.
Yeah. Just chapters and chapters of people.
When you have chapters, how did you, I'm just thinking of the challenges involved with like retail and franchising or whatever. Like quality control and giving people marching directions of some type. When people would reach out, how would you enable them or what materials would you send them? What would you encourage them to do? If you've got people in Byron Bay and 29 other locations, yeah, across Australia, what would you guys send to them?
We had templates for everything. So, we had precedents and templates and we had how to actually do this. So, we made it as easy as we could for the public to put submissions in.
And we had volunteers in all those places who were leading these campaigns and getting a whole lot of people together in those places. But in addition to that, we also had clinicians. So we had already started training clinicians through our world-leading certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapy. So we started that training in 2021 and we've already trained now over 750 clinicians. So psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, OT therapists, social workers, counselors, you name it. We've trained a lot of clinicians in Australia. So we already had an enormous amount of clinicians who were starting to put pressure on their peak bodies and professional bodies as well as the general public. So there was also an enormous amount of people not necessarily in our chapters but just people who just families, you know, had people who were suffering with mental illness in their families. There was workplaces. So there was a lot of people who had people in their workplaces suffering with depression or trauma or addictions. And people just started to really jump on the bandwagon to start to really learn about these medicines as sacred medicines.
And the medicines at that point, just to define the molecules we're talking about, that was MDMA and psilocybin.
Let me bring us back for a moment to David Nutt. And the reason I'm going to bring David Nutt back into the picture is because in the process of doing homework for this conversation I came across a number of allies that you had recruited over time, right? You really had a multi-pronged approach and I want to talk about some of those prongs.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. That's a big approach. Yeah, this is abc.net.au and it mentions you engaging new lobbyists. Hawker Britton known for their cozy relationships with the Labor government who and it goes on da da da understand the dynamics of CRA. The organization then flew out Imperial College of London neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt for a road show up and down the east coast. Mhm.
And it goes on to mention him as one of the celebrities of sorts in psychedelic circles, certainly within scientific circles. And I'm going back to the PC here. During a whirlwind tour sponsored by herbal tincture and organic chocolate brands, perfect. He addressed packed town halls in Byron Bay, Sydney, and CRA, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, and Melbourne.
Then there were black tie events with philanthropists and stakeholders at the Australian clubs in Sydney and Melbourne. It goes on and on.
Mhm. So, if there's any more color to that, I'd love to hear it. Like, the purpose of doing that.
Absolutely. I mean, that was a huge part of it.
And the reason I'm bringing this up and the part of the reason I wanted to have this conversation is because you did something very remarkable and you know, there were other parties involved in a lot going on. But I mean, MMA was a real driving force behind some incredible world first, like on the playing field of sort of global pharmacology and mental health treatments. You've accomplished something really impressive. And there are pieces of the playbook that I think people could apply in other locations. And this would be, I think, potentially one example of that. So could you speak to what you did with the road show with David and maybe how you used lobbyists and also like how did you pay for all that?
Well, I mean these are really important questions and we are being asked by a lot of other countries and organizations how how we did it and it was very tough but we we tried everything. So we never gave up. That was one aspect and my husband and I are very persistent people. So every roadblock that we'd get, we'd think, okay, what are we going to do now? And we would climb around or over or through that wall, whatever we could do to keep going. So what happened was in 2022, David, who'd become an incredibly good friend of ours and someone we deeply respected and we just adore his humor and and his intellect.
How did you first connect with David? Cold email or how did that happen?
Yeah. I mean, so as you would see, we've one of the other really strong prongs of our strategy was to put together this world-leading advisory panel. And so we've got about 75 or so leaders in this field or people who are really great advocates for these medicines, scientists, doctors, researchers, and others. And I just started reaching out to to people. But also in 2018, I went to a conference run by Eona in Madison in Wisconsin and I spoke at that conference.
Yeah, that's that's a trip. It's a bit of a trip for you.
Eona for people who don't know is an organization at least last I checked predominantly focused on psilocybin.
Mhm. Correct. And their medicine's likely to be registered as just about as soon as Compass Pathways, another huge pharma company who's an applicant for psilocybin. Over the next 6 months or so, we anticipate a number of these medicines becoming registered medicines. We can talk about that shortly, but back to the time that we brought David Nutt out. So, basically, I had approached a lot of people. I'd also met a lot of people at Eona. And so I then started inviting them to join our advisory panel. And so that was how I met Robin, Roland, David Nutt, all of these people. And as we'd meet one person, then they'd say, "Well, have you met this person and have you met that person?" And
Let me pause you, Tania, for a second because I know you're persistent, but these people get asked to do all sorts of stuff all the time.
How did you make it easy or compelling for them to say yes? Like what's the pitch? What was the pitch to someone like Robin? Right? Because at that point, I'm trying to put a date to it, but Robin at that point had probably appeared, I'm just guessing on the timeline here in How to Change Your Mind. He's somewhat of a main scientific protagonist or certainly figure within How to Change Your Mind, a book by Michael Pollan that really shifted the tectonic plates of what was possible for psychedelics in the US and elsewhere. In some ways, in a lot of ways, in many, if not most of the best known philanthropists and supporters of psychedelics, not all of them, but a very high percentage, would kind of reach back to that as the tipping point for their interest. So, how do you get then Robin's like the hottest girl at the dance, right? And he's very charismatic. He's good on camera. He's good in audio.
I met them. I met them, Tim. You know like I met most of them actually at the Eona conference and also I happened to sing at the Eona conference and speak. So I gave a speech. I spoke about what we were hoping to achieve in Australia. Also sang. Mhm. I serenaded Roland Griffiths. It was beautiful. I mean I miss that guy so much. And so I met these people and we just connected and they were inspired by the fact that we were trying to move the needle in Australia. I don't think that they thought that we could do it. And to be honest, I didn't know that we could do it either. Like it was just persisting and persisting and so I think people just started joining us because maybe they believe that we could do it. I mean we had set up five charities before that had already done some significant things.
How did you end up speaking at the conference? Right. Because that seems to me an important piece of the recipe for why suddenly you could talk to them afterwards. Right. And they were already a warm audience at that point. So, how did you end up speaking at that conference?
Well, that was through Bill Linton. And so, Bill Linton is the founder of Eona and I'm sure you know and you know him and he's just a lovely guy and again we connected. I wrote to him.
What did you say to Bill in the email?
You know, I'd really like to speak at your conference. And in fact, I think they even had heard what we were doing and that we were trying to do this in Australia. And then they actually I said, "Look, I can also sing." Yeah. And maybe that was part of it. And then he just said, "Well, look, I'd like you to come over. I'd like you to sing." We I think we probably had a Zoom call or something like that. And they then invited me to speak and to sing. And it was a long trip. It was a very long trip. And literally, I had to get off the plane. And it is a very long trip. I was in an altered state. I was in some time warp then the jet lag and everything.
I wanted to sidebar quickly that sometimes it is the weirdest, not that singing is weird there. I have much stranger obsessions and interests, but it's the most unexpected maybe talents or side interests or fill in the blank that you do on the weekends and evenings. That sometimes is the thing that opens the door.
Because it is the thing that other people aren't leading with. Right. So when you're like, "Oh, and I also sing." And they're like, "You know what? You know, she's scrappy. She's willing to fly all the way from Australia. Oh my god." Like to Wisconsin. Okay, sure. Yeah, why not? Let's give it a shot.
Well, also I think by then I'd also had that connection with Ram Dass. Yes. So that was also a help. I haven't mentioned that and that was very significant. So actually and I want to come back to David Nutt with you which I really because that's really important but back in 2016 after you'd woken me up into this whole space and then we did the medicine with this Dutch guide. He played us some Ram Dass at the end of the medicine session and I went, "Who's this guy? This is amazing." And my husband's one of these guys who when he hears someone really inspiring, he goes, "Well, is there a way we could meet them?" And so, okay, well, why not try and meet Ram Dass? So what we did was we wrote to him via again his people and we found out that you could indeed spend a week living at Ram Dass's house in Hawaii and get to spend time with him, you know, living there. So we were lucky enough that we got to fly to Maui.
Well, hold on. How does that how does that work? Because I'm sure a lot of people would love to hang out with Ram Dass.
What are the hurdles you have to clear to live at his house for a week? Or how does it work? Or is it just pay for play or how is it?
We made a donation and we got to live in the in the house that was on his land there and live right next to him and then every day or two we'd get to hang out a little bit with Ram Dass.
And so we'd come into the main house. We'd spend some time meditating with him. He'd invite us to some of the ceremonies that he'd be having at the house. We even went to the beach with him because he had this incredible wheelchair that had these amazing inflatable tires and he'd be wheeled out in his wheelchair out into the ocean and one particular day there'd be two rainbows that appear when Ram Dass gets out into the ocean. It was like pinching yourself like is this really happening? And a lot of it was sitting in silence with him because he had had that stroke. And by this stage it was it was about a year or so before he actually would pass. And so he was still vibrant though. And when you looked in Ram Dass's eyes, you could just see yourself reflected back in him. And I remember singing to him as well. And there were tears rolling down his face when I sang to him. And it was a song called Coming Home. It was all about coming home to yourself. And but the minute that we would mention psychedelics to Ram Dass, his eyes would light up and he'd start talking about you know his time that he gave his guru in India this huge dose of craziest story have you heard this story right and nothing happened it's in Be Here Now and his guru in India.
So Ram Dass again just to provide a little context for people who are like what are they talking about Ram Dass which is I believe servant of God of Ram. Yeah. Servant of God is the non-birth name of the man formerly known as Richard Alpert who was at Harvard with Timothy Leary who some people may recognize and they were both kicked out of Harvard. A little known fact in part due to Andrew Weil then an undergrad writing I think it was in the Harvard Crimson about their dosing of psilocybin and there was some discussion I don't know if it was verified of them giving it to undergrads and it became this huge scandal and they were booted out and at one point Timothy Leary was designated by Nixon, President Nixon, as the most dangerous man in America which is like ridiculous in retrospect but there you have it and there's a lot more we could say about that but suffice to Richard Alpert decides to go to India and at one point he somehow finds his way right this pre-internet pre-smartphone somehow finds his way to this guru again we just described him Be Here Now Maharaji yeah Maharaji and he's I think trying to explain to him something about psychedelics and he's like well do you have any and he's like yeah I do and he had promised LSD and he gave him it was either 400 or 600 micrograms. This guy had never taken any psychedelics, took that and just sat there and clearly would have set in and like an hour later as if nothing was happening just kind of looked at him with a smile and was like, "Interesting." Yeah. And I think he said something like, "Sure, you can like peek in and say hello to Christ consciousness or whatever you want to call it, but you're not actually going to get to know the depth." But the fact that somebody could take 400 or 600 micrograms, to put that in perspective, 100 micrograms is considered a let's just call it standard hit. If I were to take 200 micrograms, I would be completely incapacitated for 8 to 12 hours. So the fact that somebody could take 4 to 600, I think that would even happen to me on 50 to be honest, Tim. Yeah. And could just carry on having a conversation as if they only had a glass of water is is somewhat mind-boggling. It's bizarre. Ram Dass went on to do a lot of writing and a lot of recording and it's just incredibly compelling, prolific to listen to. So, you spent time with Ram Dass.
We spent time with Ram Dass.
So, the Ram Dass card ends up being helpful to get to Madison.
And then Bill Linton and Co invite you with open arms. You sing, you talk, you meet this whole cast of characters, including I'm guessing D. Was David Nutt there in Madison?
I'm not sure that David was there, but Robin and Roland and and everyone else was there.
Yeah, they're all stones throw from David.
So then, this was like the year before we started Mind Medicine Australia. So then I wrote to David and I said, "We're launching a charity. It's on February the 13th." That was the date of our launch. Would you come to Australia and speak at the launch? And so we flew David to Australia. He spoke at our launch which was at the University of Melbourne and we then became very friendly with David and his wife who's delightful. And we've brought him over a few times since then. And that launch was packed out. And then what happened was in I mean cut a long story short I'm cutting through a whole lot of things here but in 2022 we invited him to Australia to present at some town hall events in public but then we also brought him to the therapeutic goods administration and we asked the therapeutic goods administration if you know we could present to them and we asked the head of the therapeutic goods administration how many people approximately would come to the meeting that we would have David Nutt there. We would also have a woman there whose husband had tragically lost his life because he'd got depression and had not been able to cope. I'll talk about that very briefly in a second. So what happened was the the head of the TGA said, "Oh, there'll be probably 10 or 15 people that turn up to the meeting." 140 people turned up to the meeting. Some of them were in the room, some of them were on Zoom.
And these are all people internal to the TGA. These are all employees or employed by the TGA.
Yeah. They were like Department of Health people, executives, you know, all from all different parts of the Department of Health and and the TGA. And so what happened was we we had invited this woman called Vanessa to speak just before David Nutt. And Vanessa's husband had got depression a few years prior. Just out of the blue all of a sudden got depression really badly and he woke up one day and he said to her I need to go to a hospital and so she took him to a doctor and they started him on some SSRIs anti-depressants and then they didn't work and then he got taken to an institution because he was really unwell he was put in that institution and they've got a young daughter very successful man by the way no previous history of depression just came on. And so he was put in this institution that didn't help. They saw every professor and expert that they could. She's kept a 20-page dossier of every treatment she tried. During the middle of him trying many, many treatments, she rang me up and she said, "Tania, you know, I've heard about psychedelic-assisted therapies. Could Franco, his name was Franco, could he get psychedelic-assisted therapies?" And I said, "Look, no, not in Australia at the moment. We're trying really hard to get these medicines rescheduled, but he would have to go overseas to do this legally, like in the Netherlands where psilocybin truffles are legal for example or somewhere else. He was not well enough to be taken overseas and they didn't want to break the law by going underground in Australia and this applies to a lot of people. And so what happened was they kept trying all the different other treatments, the professors, he was in the institutions. She said to me, she rang me about another year later, said, "He's begging me to go every day. He wants to go. He wants to leave. Hang in there. We We're really working hard on this." Anyway, he couldn't wait. She had kept this 20-page dossier. And she got up in front of the TGA and she said, "I believe that if my husband had have had access to these treatments that he might still be alive today and you know that our young daughter would still have a father." And you know this is all the treatments we tried. It's not like we didn't try to get Franco well. We did. And there wasn't a dry eye in the room at this stage. And then Professor Nutt comes on and starts presenting about the science and all the research, the data, the evidence that by that stage there'd been a lot of trials as you know that had taken place. So he presented and then we presented and still everyone was going there's no way this is going to happen. And there's no way the rescheduling is going to happen. There was scientists and and clinicians and others that just said it's not going to happen. But this was in about November of 2022. And we just kept, you know, pushing. And then in February, February the 3rd, it was 2023, we're standing in the kitchen and my husband goes, "It's been rescheduled." And I just said, "No, can't be serious." And I said, "You've got to show me this." And I read the document. I kept thinking, "There must be an error in the document. It can't have been rescheduled." And no, it's been rescheduled. So we start dancing around the kitchen. It's like, "This is unbelievable." We were so like this is really amazing. We were so thrilled. Then like the headlines start coming out from around the world. Australia has rescheduled. Australia is the first country to do this. Look at Australia now. Australia's leading the world in this field. And it's like this is surreal. This is so incredible that this actually happened in Australia because you know Australia tends to be more of a follower than a leader often. But to do this was incredible. So then a few months later the rules changed so that the psychiatrist could actually start to treat patients in clinics. And that was the whole purpose of this was that there should be clinics around Australia with clinicians that we'd been training since 2021 and that patients should start to be treated with these incredible sacred medicines with therapy obviously. And so there was these multidisciplinary teams and psychiatrists could start applying to the therapeutic goods administration for what's called an authorized prescriber status. So you psychiatrist put an application into the TGA and we help a lot of psychiatrists do these applications because they're quite onerous and they have to put in their protocols, how much medicine they're going to use, where they're going to practice from, all these different protocols. And then those are reviewed by the TGA and an independent ethics committee. And if they get the TGA stamp and the ethics committee stamp, they can start using psychedelic-assisted therapy, psilocybin-assisted therapy, and MDMA-assisted therapy in their clinics. And so there's now over 20 clinics around Australia, mostly led by clinicians that we have trained through our certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapies and over 400 patients or so roughly have been treated. Now, that doesn't sound like a lot because there's millions of Australians who are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. And there's millions of people globally suffering from these conditions who are not getting well like Franco. And one of the arguments that was really important for the Therapeutic Goods Administration was there's a risk to not doing anything. So if you don't do anything, if you don't reschedule these medicines, that's actually a risk because patients who've tried everything like Franco might end up taking their own lives and that would be tragic. And we through the period that we were making these applications heard of other stories than Franco. We had a lot of people who write to us. They texted us, they emailed us, and they begged us. We even had politicians writing to us saying they've got a son or a constituent saying could we please provide the medicines to them and we said well no we can't until these medicines are rescheduled. So we kept having people begging us for the medicines. We obviously couldn't provide them. We're not a medicine provider. And important to say to everyone that these medicines you don't take them lightly. You take them in a very controlled setting. Personally, I love nature, but we have to do it in clinics in Australia under these circumstances and it's really important for the patient to have the right preparation and mindset so that they can be open to whatever is coming through the altered state and then bring all of those insights for their life, their work, their health, whatever it happens to be back into their life. And usually that's done through therapy. So a patient goes through a 3 or 4 month process protocol and we are seeing 60 to 80% remission rates in Australia which is replicating what we've seen in trials around the world. So of those 400 patients that have been treated so far around Australia 60 to 80% of those are going to remissions and there's been no serious adverse events.
What does the pie chart split look like for out of those 400? How many are psilocybin for depression
versus MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD?
So more of them are MDMA. So more psychiatrists started out doing MDMA for trauma.
It's probably a good idea. I think it's good to get comfortable skiing the blue squares before the black diamonds.
Yeah, right. Tends to be more manageable. Many of the psychiatrists felt more comfortable administering MDMA first. There are some patients in Australia, I think, who've been administered both medicines, not at the same time, but subsequently.
But it's probably about a 70-30 split. But psilocybin is starting to creep up. And we're also seeing psilocybin now being researched for a whole range of other conditions, as you know. So for addictions and obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, you know.
I think MDMA is still very underestimated as a tool. It's sort of been in the zeitgeist long enough that a lot of the writing or videos or podcasts that get attention are focused on the latest and greatest or what they might consider the new kid on the block, like a 5-MeO-DMT. Okay, everything's about 5-MeO-DMT because it can be crammed into 15 minutes and it's the businessman's path to God and all this stuff, which from a commercialization perspective I understand. But at the same time, you have something that is already very well researched and that has actually been around a very, very long time. I want to say it's the 1920s when MDMA was first patented and then it was shelved and then the patent expired and then Sasha Shulgin in his little lab and his tasting parties conjured up hundreds of psychedelics. If anyone's ever heard of 2C-B, 2C-E, you can thank Sasha Shulgin. But also resurrected MDMA, which basically replaced MDA as the underground therapist's tool. And I think MDMA is very underestimated.
Given how broadly speaking, how manageable it is relative to many of the other psychedelics that we could discuss.
And I think partially because it doesn't necessarily—I would say pretty typically does not provide the 17th dimension shattered into stardust technicolor grand finale fireworks show, which make for good stories, right? That it gets underestimated as a tool because it's maybe not making the rounds at as many cocktail parties because you can't—it's unlikely you're going to be like, 'Yeah, and then these dancing crocodiles with sapphire eyes came out and danced around me,' and so on, which you know you'll certainly get if you're hanging out with your ayahuasca friends.
So MDMA is really, I think, a tremendous, tremendous tool given the risk profile, given the manageability of it relative to other things. A question I suppose related to the integration that you already mentioned is the therapy that acts as the kind of latticework of support for these experiences in Australia. Is it standardized, or is it really up to the clinician and the patients to select the therapeutic modality? Is it standardized perhaps in the way that MAPS was trying to standardize with like IFS-informed dyads and things of this type?
So it's not standardized, and many of our clinicians, the ones who've done our certificate in psychedelic-assisted therapies, you know, use a whole lot of different modalities. So yes, some of them may use parts and IFS therapy, internal family systems therapy, or they may use other types of therapy. So there's all sorts of different therapies that we encourage our clinicians to look at. And that might be—and I feel like one of the things that's becoming most important is even just nutrition. So just coming out of this experience and having the right nutrition, because if you go back into your life and just start eating all—say if you were eating a lot of sugar before or drinking a lot of alcohol and you go back to that, well then you're probably going to relapse. So there's all sorts of things around nutrition and exercise that we're hoping will be more and more included as integration therapy post-treatment for anyone doing psychedelic-assisted therapies. But we don't believe that there should be a cookie-cutter approach. Every therapist has different skills that they bring to the table. And many of them, most of the therapists that we're training are trauma-informed, but not all of them. And they're just learning, you know, and they're learning to bring their own skills and work out what works for each patient. And I think that matters a lot because everyone that we're treating through these clinics, they're all individuals and not everything's going to work identically for every patient, just the same way that the dose of the medicine is not going to be identical for each patient.
How many patients would you hope? Not in a pie-in-the-sky, best-case, green lights all the way scenario, but in a kind of base case, right? Not worst case, not best case, kind of right down the middle case. How many patients do you think could be served with these medicines over the next three years in Australia? What do you think?
Well, it's an exponential thing. So we're seeing a huge exponential growth. So just even now as we speak, we just found out that now there's 120 authorized prescribing psychiatrists in Australia for either MDMA or psilocybin or both medicines. So that is a huge jump. You know, we started with one or two psychiatrists back at the start of 2024. We're now at the middle-latter part of 2026. And that is an exponential increase in authorized prescribing psychiatrists. In the first year, we trained about 80 therapists. We've now trained 750. In the first year, only a handful of patients—maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 patients were treated. Now there's been nearly 400. So maybe it will get to 5,000 by then. This is me being conservative. Yeah, 5,000. Yeah. Well, it could be a lot more, but maybe 5,000 is a realistic number.
But that's a fraction of who needs it, right?
Which I understand, but I don't want to let the dream of boiling the ocean kind of minimize the impact of even 400 people. Because what people listening may not realize is that if you look back at the early studies, if you look at a lot of current studies, they are expensive, right? At least in the United States. I'll speak for the United—well, speak for the United States. What a sentence. I will speak to some of the clinical trials in the US, many of which I've been involved with. And because these compounds are still Schedule One, it is incredibly difficult, time-consuming and expensive to recruit subjects, to get approvals through ethics boards, IRBs, etc. And as a result, what you could get on the street very easily—mushroom chocolates or otherwise—for $50, for a patient in a proper clinical trial run at a university could cost $15,000 per person, right? I mean, something like that. It is incredibly expensive. And what that means is you end up with these studies that are well-designed and hopefully properly powered. And people can dig into that if they want online, and if they want to read up on what that means from a statistical perspective. But you end up with 10 people, you end up with eight people, maybe you end up with 15 people. Certainly, if you're a for-profit company, Compass and others have been able to and have had to have larger sample sizes and larger cohorts and so on and so forth as you move through the different phases. 400's a lot, but there's a big but, and I'm hoping you can tell me the answer. I'm sure you can. Is there some type of requirement for data reporting from people who are authorized? Because it's most valuable as a way of building momentum and creating a virtuous cycle if there is mandatory data reporting that then provides a signal.
Well, no, and that's a really important part of our strategy. So our strategy at Mind Medicine Australia was to build the ecosystem so that we could make sure everyone was trained, that the public and clinicians were fully educated, and we keep doing that, that there is ongoing research for new conditions, that clinical rollouts and the medicine supply can happen very smoothly, and then there's the whole pay part, which I'll come to. So there's the whole cost of it all, but the data collection is really, really important. And one of the things David Nutt did with us was he was really like, we have to make sure there's real-world evidence being collected. So he worked with Professor Paul Fitzgerald at Australian National University, and Mind Medicine Australia has funded a registry which we have no influence on—we simply funded at the Australian National University, which collects real-world evidence, the data from the baseline of a patient when they go in for the treatment, then what they're like when they come out of the treatment, and that's being collected all the time. It hasn't published yet, but we hope that it will publish over the next few months and then continue to publish periodically as they collect more and more data. And this data is critical because this is what can show the government—well, firstly, they know there's been no adverse events, serious ones, because there's been nothing reported to the TGA, but it's also really important to show the government, wow, well, these remission rates around 60 to 80%—that's compared against 10 to 15% for existing treatments for PTSD and psilocybin—with MDMA and psilocybin treatment for depression and trauma in Australia at the moment. So 10 to 15% versus 60 to 80% remission rates. That starts to become very important for a government because they go, well, wow, there could be some serious cost savings here.
We could save millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of a patient's lifetime. And one of the other things we've done at MMA is we've helped to really bring on the payers for these treatments. So we now have the Department of Veterans Affairs who are supporting treatments for veterans. We have the National Disability Insurance Scheme also funding treatments, and we have Medibank, which is our largest health insurer, who have basically said that any eligible gold members of Medibank can get pretty much the whole treatment cost paid apart from a couple of thousand dollars. So everyone's shifting to Medibank.
What does it look like to recruit any of these payers? So how do you even bring the first of these payers online? What does the outreach look like?
We went to them all from early on. So we were talking to the Department of Veterans Affairs from early on. Yeah. Because we had seen what had happened in the US with veterans, and we knew that that was a core strategy that Rick Doblin and MAPS had also used. And it's an important strategy because veterans and first responders have served their nation, and more veterans die through their own hands, through suicide, than die on the battlefield. And they experienced so much trauma in the work that they've done. And we knew that the Department of Veterans Affairs was really struggling with the amount of veteran suicides that were occurring. So they were someone we started talking to and presenting to from very early on in our time as Mind Medicine Australia. The National Disability Insurance Scheme came on board because they obviously want to try and reduce the costs of treatments, and this is a really good way to reduce costs over time. Though the cost of the treatment is relatively expensive upfront, over the course of a patient's lifetime the potential cost savings are enormous. Rick Doblin and MAPS did some economic modeling and showed that the cost per patient—this was a few years ago already—could be well over $100,000 US of cost savings. So we knew that cost would be a barrier. And so we also started a patient support fund at Mind Medicine Australia. And how we managed to do a lot of this was through our own philanthropy in the end. Yeah. We've also donated a lot of money to this. Peter and I have done this pro bono for the last eight years, completely pro bono, because we just want to help alleviate suffering and want to see people get their lives back.
Couple of questions all over the map. Is it true that you, with your facilitator from the Netherlands, were given psilocybin with Syrian rue, or was there no Syrian rue?
Why did he decide to include that? My understanding, and I haven't looked this up in a very long time, is that Syrian rue contains—could be multiple beta-carbolines like harm—harm—
Right? So Peganum harmala is the Syrian rue, but it imparts, when combined with psilocybin, a kind of an ayahuasca twist of lemon on top.
Because it's adding the monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
Why did your facilitator choose to approach it that way?
I think that was the protocol that he used.
Anyway, it was his standard protocol. Now I think it's a great protocol for the right clients. I think for us it was the right protocol. Firstly, it's an MAOI inhibitor, as you've just mentioned. So he has this protocol which he calls psilohuasca. So it's a combination of psilocybin and ayahuasca. That's how he sort of describes it. Now, when I went in, if I'd known that it was ayahuasca, I probably would have freaked out and gone, 'Oh, there's no way I'm doing ayahuasca.' But the way that it was done was actually—it was like that. And I think that because Peter and I had never had any drugs in our life at all, you know, we were completely new to this. But we were also Type A people.
Right. And I was a bit of a control freak then. I'm still one, but I'm not as much one now as I was then, I will say that. And that was one of the reasons I wanted to do this, was I wanted to let go of some of the control, right? So I really wanted to see what that would be like. What would Tania be like without all of that holding on?
Good for you. A lot of Type A people will not, you know, choose to release the white-knuckling, right?
So it was like this Syrian rue—it relaxed us firstly, but then the goal, which I found out later—was that, I didn't know this at the time, but that it expanded the visuals and the whole experience between two to ten times. So it amplified our experience and what we would have seen, heard, everything experienced by two to ten times. And subsequently, I think that is accurate. I think it extended the experience. It created more visuals than what I had seen, say, without using Peganum harmala subsequently. But the first two experiences Peter and I both had were with Syrian rue. And I thought it was an extraordinary way of relaxing us and then helping us to just let go of our bodies and just to be able to travel. And at one stage the guide said, 'Oh, you guys are really having a lot of trouble stepping out of your bodies.' I could hear him say that in the room.
You're like, 'Thanks, bud.' It was like your body's fighting you.
I'm curious what dose. Do you recall how many grams of—I'm assuming it was dried psilocybin mushroom of some type—with a kick of lemon juice?
The lemon. Did he let it marinate in the lemon for a while? Like did he grind it up and then marinate it?
Well, I don't know how long he'd marinate it for. I was too petrified to really watch that part.
How quickly did you feel the onset? That'll probably tell me how long it marinated.
I started feeling tingling through some of my, you know, feet and hands. Probably within about 30 minutes. My husband kept saying, 'There's nothing happening.' And then all of a sudden it was like, 'Oh my god.'
Yeah. Like, I mean, he was on the floor on a mattress. I was on the bed. We were not talking to one another. That was part of the sort of protocol. And it probably took about half an hour. And I could feel like there was so much tingling. I called the guide over and I said, 'Hey, I'm really afraid. Can you hold my hand?' Because I thought, 'What's happening?' I hadn't felt my body do these sorts of strange things before. And it was like I could feel myself sort of—it was like I was filling up and I didn't quite know what that meant. And then all of a sudden, I started to see the colors and the shapes and—Mhm. It was like this kaleidoscope that I was looking through and it was incredible.
I mean, I'll be curious if this matches your experience because I do have some experience with psilocybin plus Syrian rue. Also, just a footnote for folks on the lemon. The lemon. Yeah. My understanding—I'm not a biochemist—but if you marinate the psilocybin mushroom, especially if it's ground up in, say, a coffee grinder, in lemon, that it basically pre-metabolizes it, breaks it down or converts it into psilocin. And your body is converting psilocybin into psilocin as the active metabolite to begin with. And in doing so, like for me, it would typically take—in some cases, it really depends on a lot of factors: when did I last eat, etc., etc.—but 45 minutes to an hour maybe for effects to really set in with eating mushrooms. If they're ground and put in lemon, and it depends on the strain of mushrooms—some can be more obviously potent than others—but 10 to 15 minutes, I mean, I am off to the races. Like what normally would have taken like 60 to 90 minutes, which is actually quite nice because the waiting game can be the most torturous part for a lot of people. Similarly with the Syrian rue, my experience is—let's just say if my workspace functional dose is 4.5 g, let's just say, or like 3.5 to 4 these days, let's just say, although I've taken the foot off the gas a lot with this stuff—but if Syrian rue is involved, then all of a sudden like 1.5 is plenty and you can use much less, which I think one advantage of that is that you're less likely to have a headache the next day. Some people at higher-dose psilocybin can really get a crusher of a headache depending on their sort of individual pharmacology. So have you continued to work with the Syrian rue or have you moved to sort of a different toolkit sometimes?
Yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, I'm sort of curious again to actually—I have this hankering at the moment to perhaps go and have a session with Syrian rue again. I think that it's more powerful for me still. But subsequent to the second dose, so when we had the second dose with the guide, yeah, it was probably about 2.5 to 3 g of dried mushroom that we were having, to your earlier question. And I guess the next one we had after that was probably with a guide somewhere in the US who didn't use the Syrian rue. And for me that was not as powerful. Like it was still good. I was still traveling quite a lot. And I think Aldous Huxley famously said, you know, once the doors of perception open, you can never shut them again. And I really have found that to be the case. You know, what I saw, I can never unsee. What I experienced, I experienced, and it's always going to be there with me, and I consider that the greatest gift that I had. And it enables me to get into other transcendental states with meditation and singing and other things much more quickly and easily as well. I can access those states more easily. Would I prefer to do Syrian rue from time to time? Yes, I think so. It is a good thing. Some people find it a bit nauseating. So there are some people who might find that it can make them a bit nauseous.
I don't get a headache from psilocybin, generally speaking. In fact, a lot of people I know use psilocybin to microdose to remove their cluster headaches and their migraines. So it's interesting that you said about the headache. So everyone's different, of course. Yeah, I think this is a Paracelsus 'the dose makes the poison' situation in the sense that microdosing—certainly there's research being done with LSD or analogs of LSD looking at cluster headaches very specifically, and a lot of the data I think are compelling. When I'm talking about headaches generally, what I'm talking about is someone who is relatively naive to psilocybin, and this is most people in the beginning innings, who are subconsciously or consciously trying to remain in control. And so they have three grams. They also don't know what to expect. So when the facilitator shuffles over and puts a hand on the shoulder and says, 'Hey, how are you feeling? Are you feeling anything?' You're like, 'I have no fucking idea.' That's what 99% are going to be like. I don't know if I'm feeling anything. I have no idea if this is the right thing or if I'm just making things up.
Okay. And then depending also on how seasoned the facilitator is, but they'll say, 'Well, if you're going to boost, this is the time to boost.'
And again, 99% of newbies are going to be like, 'I have no idea if I should boost.' But if they're not clearly feeling something and they imagine it's supposed to be this explosive 17th-dimension experience, they're like, 'Sure, I'll have more.' So they have three, then they have six, and then I've seen people have nine, and then some people go like 12. In a case like that, the likelihood of having a headache is non-zero.
When you start getting up into like the brute force—
—flood doses, which it happens a lot. I mean, moms also frequently need higher doses than some folks because they're so used to taking care of everybody else.
And also sometimes a good reason for people to do sessions separately as opposed to as a couple.
If someone is like a primary caretaker, sometimes they can be so preoccupied that they don't respond to what is already a saturating dose.
That's true. But there is also something very much to be said for doing this in groups.
We've seen that especially with just the experience, but also then the integration—like just sitting in circle together in sacred circles and sharing these experiences with others. It's just—you can't bottle it. I mean, everyone's experience is so different, and it really helps you to understand just how different we really are. But then we're getting the same sort of messages coming back. So even though the material is so different that we're seeing and hearing and feeling, our insights coming back can be very similar. And it's amazing how many people, for example, that I've met who've literally stone cold stopped alcohol after having psilocybin experiences and never had it again.
Yeah. Remarkable.
The group experience—I mean, the group dynamic, I think, is where a lot of gold is. And I think it was either 2014 or '15 where I funded a study at UCSF in Northern California looking at long-term demoralization, effectively a variant of depression, in AIDS survivors. And the reason that I funded that study—I mean, there are a number of reasons that I helped fund it, and I'm not sure if I funded the entire thing or part of it. That's beside the point. The point is that the reason it most grabbed my interest is it was the first time I had seen group integration in the study design. And I could foresee—or I would bet, at least at that point, and I still bet—that not only will it be much more cost-effective to deliver some of these medications in group environments because you're splitting the cost of one or two therapists/babysitters/slash nurses across multiple people, right? Four, six, whatever the number might be. I actually think, and this is certainly borne out in the data from a number of the better Iboga clinics, the outcomes are better. It's not just that the cost is lower, the outcomes are better, and certainly I think the experience is much more nuanced and deeper for the participants. So I do think there's a lot there. Let me come back to MMA. And every time I say it, I think of mixed martial arts, but I know it's not mixed martial arts.
