interviews (2013)

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Amanda Feilding, Countess Wemyss and March (born 30 January 1943) is a British artist and scientific director. She founded and directs a charitable trust, The Beckley Foundation, which does fundamental academic & scientific research in the field of human consciousness. The Foundation also organizes seminars of world leading experts into the regulation of psychoactive substances on a global basis  She grew up at Beckley Park, a 14th century great Tudor house outside Oxford.

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Charles S. Grob, M.D., Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine and Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, has been conducting studies on the effects of psilocybin on anxiety in cancer patient, and who was lead researcher on the first US government approved study with MDMA.  Dr. Grob is also the principal investigator of an international biomedical psychiatric research project in the Brazilian Amazon of the psychedelic, ayahuasca.

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Jeremy Narby, Ph.D. is an anthropologist and writer. Narby grew up in Canada and Switzerland, studied history at the University of Canterbury, and received a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. He spent several years living with the Ashaninca in the Peruvian Amazon cataloging indigenous uses of rainforest resources to help combat ecological destruction. He has sponsored an expedition to the rainforest for biologists and other scientists to examine indigenous knowledge systems and the utility of Ayahuasca in gaining knowledge. Since 1989, Narby has been working as the Amazonian projects director for the Swiss NGO, Nouvelle Planète. He is the author of several books, including: The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1995); Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge (2001) edited by Narby and Francis Huxley; Intelligence in Nature (2005); and, Psychotropic Mind: The World According to Ayahuasca, Iboga, and Shamanism (2010).

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Wade Davis has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His discussions of drugs such as the Amazonian entheogenic brew ayahuasca reveal how some human uses of psychoactive substances can be profound and culturally enriching.

He is currently employed with The National Geographic Society as Explorer in Residence.

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Roland Griffiths, Ph.D. is a Professor of Behavioral Biology, Department of Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs. His research has been largely supported by grants from the National Institute on Health and he is author of more than 300 journal articles and book chapters. He is the lead investigator of the psilocybin research project at Johns Hopkins, which includes studies of psilocybin-occasioned mystical-type experience in healthy volunteers and cancer patients, and a pilot study of psilocybin-facilitated smoking cessation. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, and to numerous pharmaceutical companies in the development of new psychotropic drugs. Dr. Griffiths is also currently a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization Organization and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Heffter Research Institute.

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Rick Doblin, PhD, is the president and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Born November 30, 1953, he obtained a psychology degree from New College of Florida in 1987 and later earned a doctorate in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He organized MAPS in 1986 with the goal of making MDMA (or Ecstasy) an FDA-approved medicine.

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Dr.Gábor Máté is a Canadian physician who specializes in the study and treatment of addiction. In this position, he has written several best-selling books – Scattered Minds and When the Body Says No have been translated into nine other languages – and he has become a regular columnist for the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail.  He is currently involved in studying the healing potential of the Amazonian sacred brew: Ayahuasca. He works in harm reduction clinics in

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Most recently, he has written about his experiences working with addicts in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

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Dr. Dennis J. McKenna  — For the last twenty-five years, Dennis McKenna has pursued the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. He is co-author, with his brother Terence, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching (Seabury Press, 1975; Citadel Press, 1991), a philosophical and metaphysical exploration of the ontological implications of psychedelic drugs which resulted from the two brothers’ early investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens in 1971. He received his doctorate in 1984 from the University of British Columbia. His doctoral research focused on ethnopharmacological investigations of the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca and oo-koo-he, two orally-active tryptamine-based hallucinogens used by indigenous peoples in the Northwest Amazon. Following the completion of his doctorate, Dr. McKenna received post-doctoral research fellowships in the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology, National Institute of Mental Health, and in the Department of Neurology, Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a founding board member and Vice-President of the Heffter Research Institute, a non-profit scientific organization dedicated to the investigation of therapeutic applications for psychedelic plants and compounds. He has conducted extensive ethnobotanical fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brasilian Amazon. He has served as invited speaker at numerous scientific congresses, seminars, and symposia. Dr. McKenna is author or co-author of over 35 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, European Journal of Pharmacology, Brain Research, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neurochemistry, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Economic Botany, and elsewhere.

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Dr. Julie Holland, M.D., is on the faculty of the NYU School of Medicine.  Dr. Holland has discussed Ecstasy in the Lancet, Harper’s, and the Washington Post. She has been interviewed for the ABC Australian TV show Catalyst, CNN’s Paula Zahn, ABC Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show and others. She is the editor of “Ecstasy: The Complete Guide”.

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Dr. Michael Winkelman received his B.A. from Rice University (1976), a Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine (1985), and a Masters in Public Health in Community Health Practice from the University of Arizona (2002). He served as the Head of Sociocultural Anthropology and is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He also teaches in the Human Health Program on the ASU Polytechnic Campus. Dr. Winkelman is past-president of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness and the founding president of the Anthropology of Religion Section of the American Anthropological Association.

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Michael Mithoefer, M.D. — “On November 13, 2008, CNN presented data from a pilot study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at the 24th Annual Meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in Chicago. The presentation resulted in extraordinarily positive international media attention on CNN, Nature News, and Nature CNN’s chief health correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta stood in front of an image of a healthy human brain under the influence of MDMA and shared with the nation the possible benefits of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.”

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Stanislav Grof, M.D., PhD, Psychiatrist, consciousness researcher. Author, founder of the International Transpersonal Association. Psychedelic pioneer. “Vision 97 Prize Laureate 2007”, Prague.

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Stephen Ross, M.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine and an Assistant Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Radiology and Medicine at the NYU College of Dentistry. He is the Clinical Director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction, and the Associate Director for Addiction Fellowship Training at the NYU School of Medicine. Dr. Ross has received 9 teaching awards related to education of medical students and psychiatry residents, locally at NYU and nationally. His research interests revolve around exploring novel diagnostic and treatment approachesto opioid, alcohol, and stimulant use disorders. His other addiction research interests include approaches to treating addicted adolescents and interventions that have a more broad-based public health impact. Dr Ross is an expert in psycho-oncology and is studying novel pharmacologic-psychosocial approaches to treating psychological distress associated with advanced or terminal cancer. He is the Principal Investigator of the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Project. Dr. Ross receives his research funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Heffter Research Institute.

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Dr. Ingrid Pacey and Andrew Feldmar, Vancouver psychotherapists who in late 2008 received permission to conduct the first Canadian trials with MDMA from the government.

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Kathleen Harrison, Ethnobotanist, early investigator of Mexican aboriginal community use of psilocybin mushrooms.

Kathleen continues to document the many faces of ethnobotany with photographs, which she combines with stories in her slide presentations. Based in Northern California, where she is active in local watershed restoration, she is also a widely published illustrator and enjoys teaching people how to see and draw the plant world.

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Lynn Sumida, MSW, RSW, President Miruspoint Facilitators Inc. She began traditionally, getting a Masters Degree in Social Work from the University of Toronto, then obtained the real “tools of her trade”, becoming a Senior Faculty for the William Glasser Institute, studying the Satir Model of Family Therapy with Maria Gomori and becoming a Trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Lynn is an outstanding teacher and trainer, and has traveled globally training others. She has experience in health, education, mental health and opened a private practice firm in 1981, specializing in treating trauma and abuse, and searching for ways to heal those deep wounds.

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Bob Jesse – the Council on Spiritual Practices.  Bob Jesse is convenor of the Council on Spiritual Practices , which aims to shift modernity’s awareness and practices with respect to primary religious experience (www.csp.org/PRE). CSP also encourages people to imagine and develop social contexts to contain such experiences and help them yield lasting benefit. Through CSP, Bob and his colleagues initiated a study, conducted at Johns Hopkins and reported around the world, of the psycho-spiritual effects of psilocybin in healthy volunteers (www.csp.org/psilocybin). This expands the emphasis in hallucinogen research beyond the medical treatment of ill people to include the betterment of well people, contributing to a science of pro-social development.

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Dr. David Healy completed an MD in neuroscience and studied psychiatry during a clinical research fellowship at Cambridge University Clinical School. In 1990, Healy became a Senior Lecturer in Psychological Medicine at North Wales and in 1996 became a Reader in Psychological Medicine. He is currently a full professor. He is the author of over 10 books on psychopharmacology, the pharmaceutical industry and mental health and became well known around the world for his critical and often cited ground breaking work on Prozac, other SSRIs, and suicide.

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Manuel Schoch is a Swiss mystic and spiritual healer, best known for developing the healing method of “time therapy.” He established his own practice in 1971, and in 1974 he helped found the HiHo-Collective, which was well known in the 1970s for its anti-psychiatric views.

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Ralph Metzner (born May 18, 1936 in Germany), is a psychologist,writer and researcher, who participated in psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass). Dr. Metzner is a psychotherapist, and Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he was formerly the Academic Dean and Academic Vice-president.

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Dr. Dave Nichols currently holds the position of Professor of Medicinal Chemistry, and a joint appointment as Professor of Pharmacology, in the School of Pharmacy and Pharmacal Sciences at Purdue University. The focus of his graduate training, beginning in 1969, and of much of his research subsequent to receiving his doctorate in 1973 has been the investigation of the relationship between molecular structure and the action of psychedelic agents and other substances which modify behavioral states. His research has been continuously funded by government agencies for more than two decades. He consults for the pharmaceutical industry and has served on numerous committees and government research review groups. Widely published in the scientific literature and internationally recognized for his research on centrally active drugs, he has studied all of the major classes of psychedelic agents, including LSD and other lysergic acid derivatives, psilocybin and the tryptamines, and phenethylamines related to mescaline.

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William A. Richards, Ph.D. is a psychologist in the Psychiatry Department of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Bayview Medical Center. His graduate degrees include a Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, a Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) from Andover-Newton Theological School, and a Ph.D. from Catholic University. Richards also studied with Abraham Maslow at Brandeis University and with Hanscarl Leuner at Georg-August University in Goettingen, Germany, where his involvement with psilocybin research originated in 1963. From 1967 to 1977, Richards pursued psychotherapy research with LSD, DPT, MDA and psilocybin at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. His research included protocols designed to investigate psychedelics as a treatment for alcoholism, severe neuroses, narcotic addiction, and the psychological distress associated with terminal cancer, and also their use in the training of religious and mental-health professionals. He helped design and served as the primary guide in the John Hopkins research that demonstrated the positive correlation between psilocybin and mystical experiences.

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James Fadiman — co-founder, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology

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S. (Ayahuasca initiate/practicing curendero/healer)

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J. [Western Curadera]…Jen spent 15 years in India studying Adwait philosophy, meditation, Indian classical singing, Sankrit prayers/formulas and scriptures. After moving to Canada, she realized that her studies had emphasized the intellectual and spiritual aspects of life, but had largely ignored the heart and body. To address this imbalance, she travelled to Mexico and Peru and began learning about the sacred plant medicines and shamanic practices, which give equal credence to the body, heart, mind and spirit. She apprenticed with three teachers in order to learn the preparation of the medicine, as well as the ceremonial ways of healing and holding space for others as they embark upon the Heart Medicine Work. The inspiration to work with others came about through having received so much personal benefit and healing from this work herself. She offers individual, couples, family and group ceremonies utilizing shamanic practices that have been used for millennia to bring balance, healing and insights into life.

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Duncan is a psychotherapist, college instructor and meditation teacher who also carries the living traditions of the first nations Blackfeet people of eastern Montana.. He has extensive experience with plant based indigenous approaches to healing and bridges this world view with conventional approaches to addictions treatment and therapy.

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Gillian Maxwell is the Project Director of Keeping the Door Open:Dialogues on Drug Use (KDO). KDO is a multi-sectoral, community-based coalition that organizes dialogues on problematic substance use to educate the public and inform public policy in Vancouver. Maxwell is a knowledge exchange broker and is well known in British Columbia as the host and facilitator of many public forums that have taken place at Simon Fraser University’s Wosk Centre for Dialogue. An experienced organizer, public speaker and facilitator, Maxwell brings human warmth to match a sophisticated and well-crafted rigour to public debate and dialogue events.

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