So, this is going to be a little bit different. What I want to do is give you a sketch of one of the most unlikely against the odds success and advocacy for the public interest in a generation at least. And I wrote a book called Acid Test. And what it is, this is about the emergence of the seemingly surprising emergence of drugs like LSD, ecstasy, which is also called MDMA, and other psychedelic drugs for treatment of psychiatric maladies ranging from addiction, smoking addiction, PTSD, social awkwardness and autism, and even things such as self-actualization in fact. And that is now suddenly after 30 years of being a demonized and feared class of drugs is suddenly showing up in institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins and NYU and in clinical trials that are showing great success and great promise for millions of people who cannot get relief from traditional treatments. And how did this come about? Well, it’s actually what I discovered when I was researching this book is that actually it comes down to one man, one man who has had a vision and came from a very surprising place. And that man is a guy named Rick Doblin. And this is a picture of him in 1975 in Sarasota, Florida. He was a perpetual student at New College and he was what might call an acid head. And he didn’t even make it through his freshman year. In fact, he left college, he said, he told his parents he wanted to leave college to go study LSD. Not a promising beginning, you would think. But Rick had something going for him. He had a vision. He was the first American generation of a Jewish family who had suffered serious losses in the Holocaust. And even as a small boy, he had a serious view of the world and his grandfather and his father had done very well in business and he realized that he was going to have an inheritance that meant that he could pursue what he wanted to pursue. And what he wanted to pursue, even at the age of like 12 or 14, was the healing of the world from the insanity that caused the Holocaust. And so I mean, you know, imagine a pre-adolescent who has that, that is his goal. So he ends up going to New College, which at the time was an independent liberal arts institution in Sarasota. And the first thing he discovers is that there’s a pool on campus right not far from Sarasota Bay where there are a bunch of people swimming naked and they also have parties at night where they’re all doing LSD. Well this was the sort of thing that scared so many people in this country and basically provoked this great reaction that made it the most restricted class of drug along with heroin, etc. But it was more than that. It was almost like that whatever this weird mindset that this drug induced was a threat to our very culture and that’s the way that the people and authority reacted. So what it turns out is that for the 15 years before that happened, LSD had been the most studied psychoactive drug in history and it had been racking up a tremendous record of success in dealing with very difficult psychiatric illnesses when it was used in under medical supervision in a very carefully controlled atmosphere with a lot of safeguards. And it was incredibly effective and psychiatrists felt this was going to totally revolutionize psychiatry, but when these restrictions came down doing any kind of research was basically radioactive. Anybody who even expressed an interest endangered his career. So all the physicians and psychiatrists that knew how valuable this could be, they retreated into the woodwork after the prohibitions came along. And that left Rick Doblin who was just a student. He really had nothing to do with this except he kind of appointed himself and he went out to Eslon in California where a lot of these people were sort of meeting trying to decide how to respond to this and he kind of shamed them into, they knew that MDMA was going to be illegalized much later than LSD and they decided, one of the qualifications for that was that it had no accepted medical use which was flat out untrue because it was being actively used by psychiatrists, by many psychiatrists with thousands of patients and with great success as I’ve said. So he kind of shamed them, just this kid who had done a lot of acid and he kind of shamed them into suing the DEA when the DEA was going to do a schedule one. And he appointed himself as the person who was engaging the lawyers, who was gathering the research and gathering the testimonials that there was in fact medical use for this drug and the hearings went on for a year in front of a judge and the judge ruled for them straight down the line said there was accepted medical use of this, it was safe under medical conditions, under medical supervision and that the DEA did not fit in schedule one, that it needed to be controlled in a way that allowed for research and prescription and the DEA said no. And since this was an administrative hearing, the DEA had the ability to just say no and so that’s what they did. So Rick decided okay, that didn’t work, so what happened? It was a political thing, it wasn’t a legal thing or it wasn’t a scientific thing, so he went to, he got admitted to the Harvard Kennedy School and got a PhD in public policy and he figured I need to know how the levers of, and he was going to get, he was actually going to, and this was at a time where the FDA was undergoing a culture change and they were going to hire him to go in there and see how they work and see how they can advance this medical thing and then the DEA squashed that idea so he said okay I’m going to form a non-profit and he formed a non-profit called the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and they said we’re going to prove this through pure science, we’re going to make the science so good that nobody can deny it and that’s what they did and they began doing, they started with animal studies that prove that under clinical conditions this would not be a dangerous drug to administer, then they went on to human safety studies and then finally they began getting FDA approval to do the first clinical studies of psychedelics and most notably they began a series of studies that used it to treat veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe chronic PTSD with tremendous success and so this is, that was him during his Tim Leary of the 80s phase when he was saying that unrestricted use of MDMA would be the future of psychiatry but then he decided no I don’t want to be an underground therapist, I want to be mainstream and that’s Rick today as the founder and director of this non-profit which is managed, they’re now raising like an excess of two million dollars a year, they have the support of all sorts of wealthy people who like some of us here might have had some experiences in their youth that can persuaded them that these drugs had some lasting power to help people change in positive ways and you know there’s still hurdles to undergo with nearly as many as half a million vets are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with terrible life threatening and life destroying PTSD and the estimates are that between disability and their medical costs that we owe them for going to fight our wars for us over the next 34 years is going to cost all of us here a trillion dollars in current taxpayer dollars and yet the Pentagon finds the subject still radioactive when I was on a radio show to talk about this and I was trying to get somebody high ranking the Pentagon to come they said oh no it’s much too dangerous for folks in uniform meaning to their career and I’m thinking what could be more dangerous than half a million soldiers to whom we owe health care and benefits to go untreated all you know for their entire lives so that’s Rick Doblin’s story and I was very interested to meet him and very fortunate to be able to write about him in this book so thank you for listening.