Hardman: While your interpersonal relationship might be boring in that there’s not much drama, at least you have the psychedelics bit to make it more exciting!
I know it’s a busy time, so I’ll skip past the usual opening questions of how you became interested in psychedelics and so on. Instead, can you share what you have achieved in the last two years, and what is most pressing this year?
Bergman: I think one of the strengths of the PATH Caucus when we started putting together our roundtables was that we brought in some really high level researchers that had decades of research in new therapies.
A gentleman came down, I think was from New York City, and talked about the fact that there had been no breakthrough therapies in this area since the 1950s, since the beginning of ‘the pill society’. The energy behind creating breakthrough therapies had dissipated over time.
Well, here we are. Now we have a chance. As we’ve seen, there’s enough evidence, and so many of our veterans have experienced it, especially those who have gone outside our country to get their therapies (and Lou has visited the places just South of the border). Why wouldn’t we take a look at a breakthrough therapy that could save lives, and help others deal with their issues?
What struck me as the big bell ringing on the front end: We’d been sitting in a way of doing business for over a half a century without the change we knew we needed.
Correa: I think you’re right on, Jack. We’ve had 50-60 years of a war on drugs that has essentially shaped a way of thinking in the United States when it comes to some of these possible solutions that we’re talking about.
I started my career in this area, essentially talking to veterans. I used to Chair the Veterans Committee in the State of California State Senate and I would have roundtables talking to veterans, asking them, ‘What is it that we can do for you?’ Most of the time I would have a few veterans coming very quietly to tell me things like, ‘I prefer cannabis to these pills to take care of me’. And so that started my quest looking into cannabis for veterans. We haven’t made too much progress in that area, but nonetheless it was an alternative that veterans looked at.
I get to Congress and I started getting veterans telling me, ‘These psychedelics work for me’; other veterans telling me, ‘I’m cured because of these treatments.’ To me, it was just shocking to hear that; I’d never heard psychedelics as a medicine. And as Jack said, I got to the point where I actually went down to Tijuana to look at one of these clinics.
I found some very interesting facts. First of all, the therapy works. Under controlled conditions, with the appropriate therapist present and doctors, you can be cured of your PTSD. You can be cured of other mental illnesses, like nothing can cure.
At the same time, I found out that this is serious stuff. When patients go through this therapy they’ve got a nurse, an ambulance standing by, heart monitors connected to the patients going through this therapy, heart doctors because it’s very easy to overdose, very easy for you to go essentially flat-line, so to speak, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So I learned two important things. Number one, this stuff really works, and number two, you gotta know what you’re doing when you’re administering it.
This gave me the conclusion that we need to research it. We need to find out how to calibrate the doses for patients, and we need to make sure that we begin to write rules and regulations on how to treat patients.
In many ways this therapy is going to become more and more popular. As I discussed this issue with my neighbors here in California, I find more and more people telling me, ‘I microdose with this stuff’, ‘I don’t tell anybody, but I microdose.’ It’s becoming very, very popular, which is an impetus for us to move quickly ahead and get our research done and figure out what works and what does not work.