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This transcript was created with speech popularity software. Although it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the audio of the episode before quoting this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes. com if you have any questions.
From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro.
More than 50 years ago, the United States banned psychedelic drugs. Now, in a primary shift, states and towns across the country will legalize them as medical treatment. According to my colleague, Andrew Jacobs, the sudden change has a lot to do with who is now asking for those drugs.
It’s Wednesday, February 22.
Andy, tell us about this woman, Juliana Mercer, and her affair with those medical remedies you talked about.
So Juliana is 40 years old and lives in San Diego, but she went to the best school in Arizona.
I was in my senior year of high school. I had an athletic scholarship and went on to college and run.
And one day, he visited his local mall in Arizona and saw all those army recruiting offices.
I’m bored and curious.
And she came in and talked to the other recruiters.
And the last workplace in that row, the Marine Corps workplace.
And she ended up as a Marine Corps recruiter.
And everything they told me about being a Marine, everything I wanted to be. And that day, I signed on the dotted line and pledged to go to education camp.
And by the end of that conversation, she had checked in. And shortly after completing the educational camp, it happened on September 11.
I saw the towers fall. I hadn’t even signed up for my first unit yet.
And in 2005, she was sent to Iraq and saw a lot of troubling things during her time there.
Day after day, I saw the truth of the war in our country.
And after about six months, she was transferred to an Army hospital in San Diego. There he worked with young foot soldiers who had been horribly wounded during the war.
I work with Marines who were usually very, very young and limbless, who came back with brain damage, post-traumatic stress. And then I work with them to help them reintegrate into a life after an injury.
She was dealing with those young men and women who were in the prime of life and who were not only physically mutilated, but also emotionally very damaged and scarred.
So we had a lot of injuries, a lot of brain damage, that were new to us. And a lot of post-traumatic stress, which we hadn’t faced en masse before.
So, after five years of working at that military hospital in San Diego, he sent her back to the battlefield. He went to Afghanistan.
In 2010, I deployed to Helmand, Afghanistan.
And that’s when he started to feel some of those kinds of mental repercussions from the last few years of his work.
And really, a while after I arrived, I hallucinated that some of my wounded Marines were there. And I may see them walking towards me.
She said she would see the foot soldiers she believed were the men she had worked with at the San Diego hospital.
And I was scared and I would run up to them and ask, like I thought I was one of my guys who had an amputation, and I was like, why are you here?And then I would come over and realize that it wasn’t them, that I was hallucinating. And so I knew very temporarily that something was wrong.
And at the same time, he continued to revel in many horrors. Soldiers killed.
We had those ceremonies where you would walk into the flight line and pay your last respects to the flagged coffins on them. And I ended up wasting count of how many coffins I had greeted.
And as she says, she kind of bottled everything. And then she goes back to the États-Unis.
Around 2018, 2019, I myself in a position where I had no purpose.
Depressed, anxious, but unable to serve as in civilian life.
Those all seem to be age-old symptoms of PTSD.
Exactly.
So I’m talking about therapy. And that helped a little bit.
It’s not that I’m ignoring those problems. She went to see a therapist she was going to for depression, but it didn’t relieve the pain she felt.
I just didn’t move the needle for myself and didn’t perceive what the real challenge was.
And that’s when he turned to psychedelics.
So it’s a very high dose of psilocybin, called the hero’s dose.
So he took a single dose of psilocybin mushrooms, known as magic mushrooms, at home.
You know, an eye mask. You pay attention to the music. And you allow him to do what psilocybin does.
And the way he describes it is that he lifted the veil over his depression and anxiety.
What I was able to do was nevertheless feel all those feelings that I had trapped inside.
It’s not like she relives it beyond the trauma. It’s more like I’ve just had a new perspective.
Every time I couldn’t cry when we greeted a Marine returning home in a casket. Every time I couldn’t show that I was disappointed and had empathy for my Marines who struggled to find their prosthetics and their circle of relatives. life, and all those things that had stuck inside me because I had never been given the opportunity to feel them. I could let them go crying for hours on end.
What she described is just a kind of huge, repressed emotional release from everything that had been bottled up in recent years.
That one session, overnight, 20 years of that trauma, grief and pain completely left my body. And I woke up, looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize who I was seeing. I loving, cheerful and original. And he, someone he hadn’t noticed in a long time. And I looked at myself, and I thought, what just happened to me?
So, Andy, help me understand what kind of mechanics was going on with Juliana when she took this single dose of psychedelic mushrooms, and why did it allow her to access all this pain that she had been locked up for so long?
Well, one thing I will say is that the science of psychedelics is still evolving, and there are many scientists who don’t perceive the mechanics of psychedelics. But top experts would say that it promotes what’s called neuroplasticity, which is necessarily a rewiring of the brain.
Because what happens in many problems of intellectual fitness, depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, is that your thinking gets stuck in a kind of loop. And top experts would say that what psychedelics do is break that loop and allow you to see your life, experiences, and traumas from a whole new perspective.
So if a user is stuck on a symbol or self-doubt that is just bending and cycling, the concept of this elasticity here is that it suddenly gives them the area to get out of it and enjoy something different.
What psychedelics do is they allow you to sit on the sidelines, look almost and dispassionately at those experiences, those traumas, and allow you to revisit them, process them, communicate them, and think about them in a way that doesn’t cause debilitating pain. and anxiety
This is precisely what Juliana said happened to her.
Yes, that’s right. For her, it was such an eye-opening experience. It was so profound that I was going to spread the gospel, so to speak, and take those compounds to other people. But there’s an annoying problem, and it’s under federal law, those drugs are all illegal.
And when I was doing my studies, I discovered that wasn’t the case. And there was a time when there was a genuine burgeoning box in psychedelic studies in the United States. And the effects were really promising. And that’s until the federal government shuts everything down.
‘Ll.
So, Andy, help us understand when and why those types of psychedelic remedies are illegal in the United States.
Well, I think it’s worth investigating how those drugs were administered to the United States first. In the 1940s, a Swiss chemist experimented with another psychedelic compound, LSD, and ingested it. And when I got home by bike, I started to feel all the effects of this compound.
The strangest and most glorious motorcycle ride in history?
Yes. I like it
And he was so inspired by this experience and the promise LSD could hold for intellectual fitness issues, that he sent it to universities around the world to inspire other researchers to experiment. And that sparked the golden age of psychedelic research.
And what does that time look like?
Here’s an interview with the topic just before LSD management.
There ends a flowering of studies and research.
Everything is in color, and I can air. I can see it. I can see all the molecules.
Underway all over the world, but especially in the United States and Canada. And the researchers were experimenting with patients who had intellectual fitness issues, from depression to anxiety to alcoholism.
After all those years of searching for this secret drug, it’s the only thing starting to look like this for the first time.
And it looked like those drugs were going to have such a profound effect on the psychiatry’s box.
And then he jumped from the lab to society.
This is the Now generation.
And the young Americans protesting at the time of the Vietnam War.
They are disenchanted with the global around them.
I really embraced those drugs.
Tune things in to herbs. Take off your shoes. Return to concord with God’s concord.
And they are components of the counterculture movement.
And they can tell us we’re crazy. And we can say, well, you haven’t noticed anything yet.
And a catalyst for deeper social change.
America’s public enemy in the United States is drug addiction.
And this alarmed the powers that be.
To combat and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to carry out a new all-out offensive.
Specifically, Nixon was so alarmed to see thousands of young people protesting the war in Vietnam that he became convinced that those drugs were the fuel that fueled this antiwar movement.
I’ve asked Congress to provide the legislative authority and budget to push this kind of offensive.
Nixon declares war on drugs. And in 1970, at his request, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, which banned those compounds and listed them as the most serious illicit drugs. And while the goal was to criminalize recreational use, it also halted the investigation.
Therefore, the government’s reaction to what it considers, in fact, uncontrollable recreational use of those drugs is to take such strict measures against all their uses that it even stops medical remedies that employ psychedelics. Therefore, the concept that they are a drug that can help other people with intellectual illnesses becomes collateral damage.
Ouais. Et investment is drying up. Universities that can no longer do this type of studies. It’s too risky. And so, it actually marked the beginning of an era in which maximum studies end up taking a position in hiding.
And what’s that look like given the dangers of an illegal drug?
Well, that was most commonly left to a small organization of renegade scholars who continued to do this work, who were able to unload those drugs illicitly. And they kept doing studies because they believed in the promise of psychedelics and it was too vital to just put on ice.
That’s the scenario for about 50 years until 2017, when the Food and Drug Administration bestows what’s known as breakthrough treatment prestige on the compound MDMA, better known as ecstasy. This necessarily allowed for the first type of trials of government-approved studies on a psychedelic drug and reopened the door to widespread medical studies on psychedelic compounds for intellectual fitness issues. And one of the teams that benefits from those studies are the veterans.
This makes sense given the magnitude of PTSD veterans. What are some of the effects of these studies?
A recent MDMA study, for example, that recruited PTSD patients found that two months after treatment, 2/3 of those patients no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis.
So, the patients in those studies show effects that look a bit like a cure.
Yes.
Andy, has this research, especially since it resumed in light of the FDA’s special for psychedelics, produced evidence of significant dangers or harms for psychedelics as a medical treatment?
Well, I think the answer is that it’s too early to know the full extent of how those compounds go to people. But most researchers caution that it’s still very early in this new phase of research, and we don’t really know what the long-term effects of those drugs will be.
And we also don’t know how they’re going to behave toward other people who have pre-existing psychiatric problems. For example, other people with schizophrenia, bipolar. But the maximum studies to date suggest that those drugs are effective and safe. And for veterans who have reveled in this profound benefit, it has become a kind of concentrated of their efforts to bring them to a wider audience, to more veterans, so that they can also revel in healing.
What exactly are veterans for?
Above all, they call for decriminalization. And they are for more systems that allow veterans to access them. More opportunities to have this treatment and not have to wait the two, three, 4 years before the FDA approves those drugs.
Droite. Et it is difficult to embark on a clinical trial. So if you need to enjoy the benefits of those drugs, it’s hard unless you’re one of the lucky few who is selected to participate in one of those study programs.
And veterans calling for greater breadth have banded together in a tough advocacy group. And that’s what Juliana is doing right now. She works as a lawyer. And it seeks to pressure veterans management to more fully embrace psychedelic treatments and ensure veterans have access to those new treatments.
A few years ago, I made the decision to speak openly about my party because I knew how valuable the voice of veterans was.
And Andy, what was the reaction to this plea from veterans like Juliana?
Well, the reaction has been remarkably positive. It has elected officials on both sides of the aisle who embrace the message and the kind of factor we care about. And that’s the most unexpected thing about this movement.
The elect I’ve spoken to, I know because I’m a veteran myself, they listen to me, and my voice carries weight when it comes to talking about veterans’ issues.
And it is similar to who the messenger here is.
I can assume that their decisions are part of the explanation for why we ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think because of that sacrifice, other people feel compelled to find a way for us to heal.
You know, let’s face it. We are a very patriotic country that admires and values our veterans. And having veterans as the face of this motion to decriminalize psychedelics has been a wonderful success.
I would have conservative Republicans like Rick Perry, the former Republican governor of Texas, and others who have taken up this cause in a very open and visual way. And this has led to a wave of legislative achievements. From Washington, D. C. , to Seattle, Washington, Oakland, Santa Cruz, California. In the last 3 or 4 years, cities across the country have decriminalized, for example, psilocybin mushrooms, which is the drug Juliana took.
And more recently, Oregon and Colorado have decriminalized psychedelics and, in the case of Oregon, have already implemented a formula for curative use of psilocybin mushrooms. And state legislatures across the country are now contemplating similar measures that would decriminalize psychedelics and other spending. to direct state investment towards studies of these compounds. So, it’s a sea change in the way this country views those drugs.
Droite. Et I’m curious to know what Juliana thinks about the speed of this she’s asking for.
Me amazing.
Well, she is stunned.
I pinch myself every day because it doesn’t feel real. So I’m delighted.
Just like most of the other people involved in this movement. I think this sense of disbelief that the country can replace so temporarily in terms of attitudes toward psychedelics.
The thrill of having those answers is one thing, however, the concept that in a few years we will be treating veterans for PTSD on the VA formula is not something I have dreamed of in my wildest dreams.
So in your mind, Andy, what is the long-term of those psychedelic drugs now given the trajectory they seem to be following?
Ouais. Je I think it’s undeniable. There’s incredible momentum and promise here. But the veteran researchers I’ve talked to are also nervous because they’ve noticed this screen before. And they worry that the closing of the box that occurred in the 70s may be repeated. .
That said, this time there are things that are different. There is much more basic and systemic help for those compounds. Getting veterans to announce it is really huge. It could revolutionize the remedy of intellectual fitness in the coming years.
Well, Andy, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
‘Ll.
Here’s what you want to know most today.
But there deserves no doubt. Our Ukraine will not waver. NATO will not be divided and we will not get tired.
In a strong circular on Tuesday, President Biden traveled to NATO member Poland to present his most powerful rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his brutal invasion of Ukraine a year ago this week.
President Putin’s thirst for land will fail and the Ukrainian people’s love for their country will prevail.
While Putin, speaking in Moscow, blamed the United States and Ukraine for the higher death toll in the war and, in a rebuke from his side to Biden, suspended Russia’s participation in a primary nuclear arms treaty.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
This treaty limits the amount of nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States can possess. As a result, Putin’s resolve may allow Russia to create as many nuclear weapons as it needs and potentially provoke a new nuclear arms race.
Today’s episode produced by Nina Feldman and Eric Krupke with assistance from Michael Simon Johnson. Edited by Patricia Willens with assistance from MJ Davis Lin, verified by Susan Lee, it includes original music by Diane Wong, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. and designed through Dan Powell. Our theme song is through Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbarian. See you tomorrow.
transcription
This transcript was created with speech popularity software. Although it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the audio of the episode before quoting this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes. com if you have any questions.
From the New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro.
More than 50 years ago, the United States banned psychedelic drugs. Now, in a primary shift, states and towns across the country will legalize them as medical treatment. According to my colleague, Andrew Jacobs, the sudden change has a lot to do with who is now asking for those drugs.
It’s Wednesday, February 22.
Andy, tell us about this woman, Juliana Mercer, and her affair with those medical remedies you talked about.
So Juliana is 40 years old and lives in San Diego, but she went to the best school in Arizona.
I was in my senior year of high school. I had an athletic scholarship and went on to college and run.
And one day, he visited his local mall in Arizona and saw all those army recruiting offices.
I’m bored and curious.
And she came in and talked to the other recruiters.
And the last workplace in that row, the Marine Corps workplace.
And she ended up as a Marine Corps recruiter.
And everything they told me about being a Marine, everything I wanted to be. And that day, I signed on the dotted line and pledged to go to education camp.
And by the end of that conversation, she had checked in. And shortly after completing the educational camp, it happened on September 11.
I saw the towers fall. I hadn’t even signed up for my first unit yet.
And in 2005, she was sent to Iraq and saw a lot of troubling things during her time there.
Day after day, I saw the truth of the war in our country.
And after about six months, she was transferred to an Army hospital in San Diego. There he worked with young foot soldiers who had been horribly wounded during the war.
I work with Marines who were usually very, very young and limbless, who came back with brain damage, post-traumatic stress. And then I work with them to help them reintegrate into a life after an injury.
She was dealing with those young men and women who were in the prime of life and who were not only physically mutilated, but also emotionally very damaged and scarred.
So we had a lot of injuries, a lot of brain damage, that were new to us. And a lot of post-traumatic stress, which we hadn’t faced en masse before.
So, after five years of working at that military hospital in San Diego, he sent her back to the battlefield. He went to Afghanistan.
In 2010, I deployed to Helmand, Afghanistan.
And that’s when he started to feel some of those kinds of mental repercussions from the last few years of his work.
And really, a while after I arrived, I hallucinated that some of my wounded Marines were there. And I may see them walking towards me.
She said she would see the infantrymen she believed to be the men she had worked with at the San Diego hospital.
And I was scared and I would run up to them and ask, like I thought I was one of my guys who had an amputation, and I was like, why are you here?And then I would come over and realize that it wasn’t them, that I was hallucinating. And so I knew very temporarily that something was wrong.
And at the same time, he continued to delight in many horrorsmurdered soldiers.
We had those ceremonies where you would walk into the flight line and pay your last respects to the flagged coffins on them. And I ended up losing count of how many coffins I had greeted.
And as she says, she kind of bottled everything. And then she goes back to the États-Unis.
Around 2018, 2019, I myself in a position where I had no purpose.
Depressed, anxious, but unable to serve as in civilian life.
LAW. All of these like the rather old symptoms of PTSD.
Exactly.
So I’m talking about therapy. And that helped a little bit.
It’s not that I’m ignoring those problems. She went to see a therapist she was going to for depression, but it didn’t relieve the pain she felt.
I just didn’t move the needle for myself and didn’t perceive what the real challenge was.
And that’s when he turned to psychedelics.
So it’s a very high dose of psilocybin, called the hero’s dose.
So he took a single dose of psilocybin mushrooms, known as magic mushrooms, at home.
You know, an eye mask. You pay attention to the music. And you allow him to do what psilocybin does.
And the way he describes it is that he lifted the veil over his depression and anxiety.
What I was able to do was nevertheless feel all those feelings that I had trapped inside.
It’s not like she relives it beyond the trauma. It’s more like I’ve just had a new perspective.
Every time I couldn’t cry when we greeted a Marine returning home in a casket. Every time I couldn’t show that I was disappointed and had empathy for my Marines who struggled to find their prosthetics and their circle of relatives. life, and all those things that had stuck inside me because I had never been given the opportunity to feel them. I could let them go crying for hours on end.
What she described is just a kind of huge, repressed emotional release from everything that had been bottled up in recent years.
That one session, overnight, 20 years of that trauma, grief and pain completely left my body. And I woke up, looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize who I was seeing. I loving, cheerful and original. And he, someone he hadn’t noticed in a long time. And I looked at myself, and I thought, what just happened to me?
So, Andy, help me understand what kind of mechanics was going on with Juliana when she took this single dose of psychedelic mushrooms, and why did it allow her to access all this pain that she had been locked up for so long?
Well, one thing I will say is that the science of psychedelics is still evolving, and there are many scientists who don’t perceive the mechanics of psychedelics. But top experts would say that it promotes what’s called neuroplasticity, which is necessarily a rewiring of the brain.
Because what happens in many problems of intellectual fitness, depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, is that your thinking gets stuck in a kind of loop. And top experts would say that what psychedelics do is break that loop and allow you to see your life, experiences, and traumas from a whole new perspective.
So if a user is stuck on a symbol or self-doubt that is just bending and cycling, the concept of this elasticity here is that it suddenly gives them the area to get out of it and enjoy something different.
What psychedelics do is they allow you to sit on the sidelines, look almost and dispassionately at those experiences, those traumas, and allow you to revisit them, process them, communicate them, and think about them in a way that doesn’t cause debilitating pain. and anxiety
This is precisely what Juliana said happened to her.
Yes, that’s right. For her, it was such an eye-opening experience. It was so profound that I was going to spread the gospel, so to speak, and take those compounds to other people. But there’s an annoying problem, and it’s under federal law, those drugs are all illegal.
And when I was doing my studies, I discovered that wasn’t the case. And there was a time when there was a genuine burgeoning box in psychedelic studies in the United States. And the effects were really promising. And that’s until the federal government shuts everything down.
‘Ll.
So, Andy, help us understand when and why those types of psychedelic remedies are illegal in the United States.
Well, I think it’s worth investigating how those drugs were administered to the United States first. In the 1940s, a Swiss chemist experimented with another psychedelic compound, LSD, and ingested it. And when I was cycling home, I started to feel all the effects of this compound.
The strangest and most glorious motorcycle ride in history?
Yes. I like it
And he was so inspired by this experience and the promise LSD could hold for intellectual fitness issues, that he sent it to universities around the world to inspire other researchers to experiment. And that sparked the golden age of psychedelic research.
And what does that time look like?
Here’s an interview with the topic just before LSD management.
There ends a flowering of studies and research.
Everything is in color, and I can air. I can see it. I can see all the molecules.
Underway all over the world, but especially in the United States and Canada. And the researchers were experimenting with patients who had intellectual fitness issues, from depression to anxiety to alcoholism.
After all those years of searching for this secret drug, it’s the only thing starting to look like this for the first time.
And it looked like those drugs were going to have such a profound effect on the psychiatry’s box.
And then he jumped from the lab to society.
This is the Now generation.
And the young Americans protesting at the time of the Vietnam War.
They are disenchanted with the global around them.
I really embraced those drugs.
Tune things in to herbs. Take off your shoes. Return to concord with God’s concord.
And they are components of the counterculture movement.
And they can tell us that we are crazy. And we can say, well, you haven’t noticed anything yet.
And a catalyst for deeper social change.
America’s public enemy in the United States is drug addiction.
And this alarmed the powers that be.
To combat and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to carry out a new all-out offensive.
Specifically, Nixon was so alarmed to see thousands of young people protesting the war in Vietnam that he became convinced that those drugs were the fuel that fueled this antiwar movement.
I’ve asked Congress to provide the legislative authority and budget to push this kind of offensive.
Nixon declares war on drugs. And in 1970, at his request, Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, which banned those compounds and listed them as the most serious illicit drugs. And while the goal was to criminalize recreational use, it also halted the investigation.
Therefore, the government’s reaction to what it considers, in fact, uncontrollable recreational use of those drugs is to take such strict measures against all their uses that it even stops medical remedies that employ psychedelics. Therefore, the concept that they are a drug that can help other people with intellectual illnesses becomes collateral damage.
Ouais. Et investment is drying up. Universities that can no longer do this type of studies. It’s too risky. And so, it actually marked the beginning of an era in which maximum studies end up taking a position in hiding.
And what does that look look like given the dangers of an illegal drug?
Well, that was most commonly left to a small organization of renegade scholars who continued to do this work, who were able to unload those drugs illicitly. And they kept doing studies because they believed in the promise of psychedelics and it was too vital to just put on ice.
That’s the scenario for about 50 years until 2017, when the Food and Drug Administration bestows what’s known as breakthrough treatment prestige on the compound MDMA, better known as ecstasy. This necessarily allowed for the first type of trials of government-approved studies on a psychedelic drug and reopened the door to widespread medical studies on psychedelic compounds for intellectual fitness issues. And one of the teams that benefits from those studies are the veterans.
This makes sense given the magnitude of PTSD veterans. What are some of the effects of these studies?
A recent MDMA study, for example, that recruited PTSD patients found that two months after treatment, 2/3 of those patients no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis.
So, the patients in those studies show effects that look a bit like a cure.
Yes.
Andy, has this research, especially since it resumed in light of the FDA’s special for psychedelics, produced evidence of significant dangers or harms for psychedelics as a medical treatment?
Well, I think the answer is that it’s too early to know the full extent of how those compounds go to people. But most researchers caution that it’s still very early in this new phase of research, and we don’t really know what the long-term effects of those drugs will be.
And we also don’t know how they’re going to behave toward other people who have pre-existing psychiatric problems. For example, other people with schizophrenia, bipolar. But the maximum studies to date suggest that those drugs are effective and safe. And for veterans who have reveled in this profound benefit, it has become a kind of concentrated of their efforts to bring them to a wider audience, to more veterans, so that they can also revel in healing.
What exactly are veterans for?
Above all, they call for decriminalization. And they are for more systems that allow veterans to access them. More opportunities to have this treatment and not have to wait the two, three, 4 years before the FDA approves those drugs.
Droite. Et it is difficult to embark on a clinical trial. So if you need to enjoy the benefits of those drugs, it’s hard unless you’re one of the lucky few who is selected to participate in one of those study programs.
And veterans calling for greater breadth have banded together in a tough advocacy group. And that’s what Juliana is doing right now. She works as a lawyer. And it seeks to pressure veterans management to more fully embrace psychedelic treatments and ensure veterans have access to those new treatments.
A few years ago, I made the decision to speak openly about my party because I knew how valuable the voice of veterans was.
And Andy, what was the reaction to this plea from veterans like Juliana?
Well, the reaction has been remarkably positive. It has elected officials on both sides of the aisle who embrace the message and the kind of factor we care about. And that’s the most unexpected thing about this movement.
The elect I’ve spoken to, I know because I’m a veteran myself, they listen to me, and my voice carries weight when it comes to talking about veterans’ issues.
And it is similar to who the messenger here is.
I can assume that their decisions are part of the explanation for why we ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan. So I think because of that sacrifice, other people feel compelled to find a way for us to heal.
You know, let’s face it. We are a very patriotic country that admires and values our veterans. And having veterans as the face of this motion to decriminalize psychedelics has been a wonderful success.
I would have conservative Republicans like Rick Perry, the former Republican governor of Texas, and others who have taken up this cause in a very open and visual way. And this has led to a wave of legislative achievements. From Washington, D. C. , to Seattle, Washington, Oakland, Santa Cruz, California. In the last 3 or 4 years, cities across the country have decriminalized, for example, psilocybin mushrooms, which is the drug Juliana took.
And more recently, Oregon and Colorado have decriminalized psychedelics and, in the case of Oregon, have already implemented a formula for curative use of psilocybin mushrooms. And state legislatures across the country are now contemplating similar measures that would decriminalize psychedelics and other spending. to direct state investment towards studies of these compounds. So, it’s a sea change in the way this country views those drugs.
Droite. Et I’m curious to know what Juliana thinks about the speed of this she’s asking for.
Me amazing.
Well, she is stunned.
I pinch myself every day because it doesn’t feel real. So I’m delighted.
Just like most of the other people involved in this movement. I think this sense of disbelief that the country can replace so temporarily in terms of attitudes toward psychedelics.
The thrill of having those answers is one thing, however, the concept that in a few years we will be treating veterans for PTSD on the VA formula is not something I have dreamed of in my wildest dreams.
So in your mind, Andy, what is the long-term of those psychedelic drugs now given the trajectory they seem to be following?
Ouais. Je I think it’s undeniable. There’s incredible momentum and promise here. But the veteran researchers I’ve talked to are also nervous because they’ve noticed this screen before. And they worry that the closing of the box that occurred in the 70s may be repeated. .
That said, this time there are things that are different. There is much more basic and systemic help for those compounds. Getting veterans to announce it is really huge. It could revolutionize the remedy of intellectual fitness in the coming years.
Well, Andy, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
‘Ll.
Here’s what you want to know most today.
But there deserves no doubt. Our Ukraine will not waver. NATO will not be divided and we will not get tired.
In a strong circular on Tuesday, President Biden traveled to NATO member Poland to present his most powerful rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his brutal invasion of Ukraine a year ago this week.
President Putin’s thirst for land will fail and the Ukrainian people’s love for their country will prevail.
While Putin, speaking in Moscow, blamed the United States and Ukraine for the higher death toll in the war and, in a rebuke from his side to Biden, suspended Russia’s participation in a primary nuclear arms treaty.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
This treaty limits the amount of nuclear weapons that Russia and the United States can possess. As a result, Putin’s resolve may allow Russia to create as many nuclear weapons as it needs and potentially provoke a new nuclear arms race.
Today’s episode produced by Nina Feldman and Eric Krupke with assistance from Michael Simon Johnson. Edited by Patricia Willens with assistance from MJ Davis Lin, verified by Susan Lee, it includes original music by Diane Wong, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano and Dan Powell. and designed through Dan Powell. Our theme song is through Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.
That’s it for The Daily. I’m Michael Barbarian. See you tomorrow.
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Moderated by Michael Barbaro
Produced by Nina Feldman and Eric Krupke
With Michael Simon Johnson
Edited by Patricia Willens and MJ Davis Lin
Original music by Diane Wong, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano and Dan Powell
Designed by Dan Powell
In a major change that would adjust legislation established a decade ago, U. S. states and peoples will legalize psychedelics for use as medical treatment.
Change has a lot to do with who asks for the substances.
Andrew Jacobs and science reporter for The New York Times.
Lawmakers are struggling to “just say no” to combat veterans seeking efforts to decriminalize drugs.
In January, Oregon was the first state to allow adults to use “magic” psilocybin mushrooms.
There are many tactics to pay attention to The Daily. Here’s how.
Our purpose is to make transcripts available the next business day after an episode is posted. You can place them at the top of the page.
Andrew Jacobs contributed to the report.
Verified via Susan Lee.
The Daily is directed by Lisa Tobin, Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, MJDavis Lin, Dan Powell, Dave Shaw, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle Bonja, Diana Nguyen, Marion Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Badejo, Rob Szypko, Elisheba IttoopArray Chelsea Daniel, Mooj Zadie, Patricia Willens, Rowan Niemisto, Jody Becker, Rikki Novetsky, John Ketchum, Nina Feldman, Will Reid, Carlos Prieto, Sofia Milan, Ben Calhoun and Susan Lee.
Our theme song is through Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk from Wonderly. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Paula Szuchman, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Wendy Dorr, Julia Simon, Desiree Ibekwe, Renan Borelli, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, Elizabeth Davis-Moorer and Maddy Masiello
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