i. ladies and gentleman, greetings from austin, texas. it's a pleasure to see you. all here today as we're beginning to wind down the second day of the texas festival, the greatest book festival in the country. thank you for being here. i love that and glad to see that weather hasn't dampened anything in terms the turnout.

it has been an absolutely fantastic. my name is brian sweeney. i'm a principal at genuine article eight, which is a public engagement firm in dallas, texas. i'm also a very proud member of the texas book festival board of advisors, and i'm very fortunate to be here. thank you very much. we are so grateful for all of the work that the book festival does and all of the volunteer and donors and supporters who make it happen. we are here with a terrific panel discussion today and we're one to welcome our guests. rachel and seth garfield. great rachel is the author of the new book i feel mdma and the quest for in a fractured world. she previously written for new york times scientist the american national geographic and her previous book was an unbelievable tour de force called poached. it was a study of the billion dollar a year illegal trade in which she traveled to more than a dozen. speaking of, she joins us today

here from brooklyn. welcome to austin and a pleasure have you, rachel. thank you so much for having me. and then a little closer to home is my friend seth garfield, who has written the book warrior. now how brazil embraced the world's most rich plant. seth is a distinguished professor at the university of texas at austin. didn't to come quite as far as rachel did to attend here today. and one thing that i'd like to say in terms his role as a history professor at ut, we just found out this week. i believe that his book won the grand prize for the distinguished hamilton award, which is both by the university texas. so these books are related. but what is amazing, the differences between their approach, reporting, the narrative style and certainly the subject is what we are talking about. seth warren, which has been harvested and growing for thousands years in brazil, in the amazon rainforest. rachel mdma, which first synthesized and received the

patent 1912, i believe. so a little bit of the difference there but the notion of how does something synthetic manmade versus something natural in naturally occurring kind of influence our culture influence our behavior and bring this level of connectedness and. so i thought i would read just one quick thing from seth's book to start us off, because i feel like it's a little of a narrative thread that ties them together. he writes very early on psychoactive drugs such as warren are said to state a seemingly universal human desire for altered consciousness. much prayer, meditation, music fasting, sleep, physical exercise and sex. and you make that notion in terms of that, that idea of these substances have gone back thousands of years. and so, seth, i wonder if i might start with you, since you've got kind of the history on your side. tell us a little bit about warren on its origins, the indigenous the seattle aymara who were it was on their their native lands just the history of that thank you first i wanted to

thank the texas book festival for the invitation to present my work to the audience for coming out on this very dreary day. warren is a plant, is native to the amazon. it has the highest caffeine content of any plant in the world. the seeds where the caffeine is concentrated about 2 to 5 times the amount of the caffeine that's in arabica coffee seeds. so it's a strange way people who are still live in the region where guano was domesticated, that first domesticated this plant to the arrival of the portuguese and they have a whole myth of origin that they associate with the plant that. the plant originated the plant bears an uncanny resemblance to berry is about the size of a cherry so human eyeball. and so they believe that indigenous child was dismembered and after he was murdered by his uncles that his mother chopped up his parts and planted the different parts of his body in the earth and from those different parts emerged different beings. the guarani tree, the governor bush should say, but also other beings and. this signifies in many ways the

way peoples of the amazon believe this transmute ability this interchangeability among different beings plants, animals, individuals, human beings. and it tells us a lot about they see the environment in which they live and their respect for that environment. and so, rachel, i wonder if you could bring us a little bit into modern day and. i mentioned the date 1912, which when the first patent was was filed for mdma, but then it sort went dormant for many, many decades. wonder if you could just kind of pick us up on the sort of the snapshot history of it and kind of the conversation leading us here today? yeah, absolutely. thank you brian. so i love the intro, seth, and it just speaks to this really fundamental primal human desire to alter consciousness consciousness. alter excuse me, consciousness substances have been used throughout british history and basically every civilization we we can note mdma plugs right into that. it's a synthetic drug. but at the end of the day, a molecule is a molecule.

they act by plugging into receptors in our brain and, mimicking endogenous chemicals that we produce to have an effect. so mdma was in 1912 by the german pharmacy record company merck. it actually wasn't they weren't looking for a mind altering substances that they were looking for a blood clotting agent and mdma, just a chemical intermediary on, that stepwise synthesis to get to that blood clotting agent. whether or not merck actually discovered mdma psychoactive properties, a big mystery. i tried get access to their archives, but they stopped responding to my emails that's very fishy, but we do know from merck's records that their chemists return to mdma about every 20 years or so. they'd be like, you know, that's something interesting to take a look at. but we don't know if they used it. mdma came to the attention of the u.s. army in the 1950s during an exceptionally

unethical and shameful chapter in history, when the army, the cia, were looking for mind controlling agents during the cold war, they thought russians and the north koreans were developing this and they, like we need to develop our own chemical agents to do this again, whether or not they actually tested mdma in humans is open. question we know that they performed trials in rats monkeys and dogs. there's hints that perhaps the army did give this to people covertly and also without their consent, but there's no sort of smoking gun document that identifies. but in all the more recent talk of using mdma as, a therapeutic agent to help veterans, among others, with ptsd, i think it's really important to acknowledge that. some of the first people who were given mdma could have been done so under duress and without their consent. well, i think so. the history of both of these are

absolutely fascinating. again, related but working clearly on parallel paths, both in terms of the timeline involved sort of the geographic location, the pressures that were put on that. but might ask both of you and just sort of jump ball of in turn, both of these came have a very important role from a cultural standpoint and from a social standpoint most people probably don't mdma as mdma and they may not know guarani as the same. so i wonder if you might jump in in terms of that from a cultural standpoint, what these substances represent and kind of what do they stand for. and so i begin by saying following up on the first question that psychoactive substances do have that general appeal, but their relative success in different societies varies. and that's one of the things that my book emphasizes. it also depends on the scale of production and distribution. it on the social interactions in which the drug is introduced, on the cultural meanings, the meanings, the question of criminalization or decriminalization so. all of these questions also

affect the relative popularity so or not, although the most caffeine rich substance the world, it's not the most popularly consumed know that that's coffee and that's interesting because coffee has a longer history in terms plantation agriculture, slave based production. what i is a small crop grown in the amazon. its circuits were traditionally limited in terms of the market where it was consumed largely in the amazon in and the heartland of south america, bolivia. so it only becomes what it is today. a national soft drink. it is the national soft drink of. brazil. for those who've not been to brazil, it's the equivalent of coca cola in the united states in terms of its economic cultural, nationalistic cachet. right. so it only becomes that over the course of the 20th century, after been studied by chemist and botanist and it's found new uses basically. so the science has transformed the very like substance into an extract put into a soft drink. and then marketers ad agencies convince brazilian to buy this

drink by telling them it's going to make them healthy and young and sexy, athletic and all the ways that soft drinks are marketed to consumers. so it's a very interesting story then is what it tells us about not only about the drug itself. right. and its properties, but the way these various interventions, social, political, cultural affect, the way product that good is consumed. yeah, i mean, mdma plugs right into? that although clearly a very different story so mdma was actually recent in 1975 by a chemist the bay area named alexander shulgin of his friends called him sasha. he's a real figurehead and pioneering psychedelics. so sasha synthesized this drug and. he he had a very interesting method of testing substances. he would take them himself in, small quantities, and then build the dose until he felt an effect. and the effect was interesting. he would share it with his wife and and a close group of friends, and they would all sit

around and taking notes. and he later published those in his book tickled pink, co-written with his wife and anyway, so sasha took mdma. he thought it was very interesting indeed. he compared it to a low calorie. it was something he could with his friends and have a conversation completely in control. feel good and also be very sociable. but at the same time, another word kept popping into sasha's and that was window he felt like mdma was opening him up. you know, he could communicate more clearly. his fears, his narrow fell away and he thought huh. this might be a really excellent therapeutic sub substance. and he wound up introducing to a therapist friend of his named leo zeff. leo was literally retiring and took mdma and was like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. this can so helpful for my therapy practice that i'm going to come out of retirement. leo zaf became a sort of johnny

appleseed for mdma in the late seventies. he was going around the country teaching other here also in europe how to use mdma in conjunction with their therapy as a sort of catalyst to get people deeper. they they likened it to doing a year of therapy in an hour, basically. and interestingly enough. there was already a framework for doing psychedelic assisted therapy. it wasn't like leo and sasha were just making this up in the fifties some 40,000 people took lsd therapy and this was mostly government funded research that wound up that molecule, wound up being criminalized. in the 1970s and taken off the market. so these therapist knew because of what happened to lsd that, if they were about their work with mdma, that this would absolutely be criminalized. and go the same route because. this was the height of the war on drugs. indeed, mdma wound up escaping

the therapist couch onto the dance floor, as people say where it became a recreational and basically created the entire rave scene, which eventually led us to the multibillion dollar electronic dance music festival scene today. so there you have, again, different tensions in the books but very similar narrative throughline wins rachel with yours that is that tension from the initial notion of this could be an effective therapeutic drug. right that it can really be helpful to people. ptsd, you know, repressed memories and like that. but then there's that social pull. what is it being used from? from recreationally. and in fact, there are two kind of interesting moments in the book that i sort of made me chuckle. number one, the club in dallas is all sort of mixed in this. and then also phil donahue mean, can you shed a little light on that? yeah, well, first of all, was anyone in the audience, did anyone get to go to the start club when it was open in dallas? yeah, there's one right. and there's one. yes. if i could time travel.

that is one of my destination star early eighties dallas. so this phenomenal club opened in dallas texas in the early called the start club and it was supposed to be the best nightclub in the world you know everyone from tom cruise to owen wilson to george w bush went here and it was such a phenomenon not because everybody inebriated on alcohol, because everybody was on mdma and it was known as this place where you could go and just dance your heart out and love everybody up on the dance floor and hug it out. and, you know, no matter, you know, gay trans, white, black, you know, anything. everybody was just there to have fun. and it really changed notion of what a southern city could be and like just popped dallas off in the mid before it was criminalized. so, yeah, texas was a center of mdma culture and unfortunately also wound up being the impetus for criminalizing mdma. it came under the attention of a

texas senator at the time and he was like, you know what is going on with this hippie thing going on in these clubs in dallas elsewhere? we have to take this thing off the market. if i could please go ahead. just to make something connections. you know, i don't know if it's powdered, which is the more natural form. also had another sort of unsavory reputation as being an. so it does have, you know, that appeal perhaps some. but it's a stimulant, right. it has a psychoactive effects. right. it stimulates the central nervous, the heart, the muscles. it's an adenosine receptor. so it inhibits sleep, but it's very much the history of caffeine in europe, the popularization, coffee, teas, these are beverages that were embraced by the middle class, by the bourgeoisie in the early modern modern period as a way to themselves from the beer drinkers and the wine drinkers. so the whole idea of temperance, of sobriety, of hard work is

very much associated with caffeinated product. so that's why we have a coffee break at work, not a heroin. right. in terms of. but what an not to actually was from the research i did, it was also commercialized, sold that way. so brazil also had a movement. it also had a eugenics movement in which alcoholism was demonized as was condemned. and so and other types of soft drinks in the united states where you have, you know, soft consumption skyrockets during the prohibition era, this was seen as a more respectable beverage for the middle class, also for women in particular, because of the stigma associated with alcohol consumption. actually, i want to just quick to that. i'm speaking of the middle class and, you know, stigma and the very interesting thing about mdma use in texas especially before 1985, it wasn't illegal and, you know, everybody was doing it and it became thing that, you know, people could do. it was it was permissive. it was fine because it wasn't

illegal and because your friends doing it. so, you know, you had people from like religious universities doing it. you sunday school teachers doing it. it was kind of it was like alcohol. it was something that we all agree. okay, this mind substance is one that we are all allowed to do and can enjoy together, you know, unlike these other ones that we put into this box of illegality. seth, i wanted to ask you just going back to that in terms of that the pride that the brazilian take in it, the popularity, the dollars that it represents from a global economy, we were visiting earlier, you said that this was a book that was ten years in the making for you. but in fact, you had first visited brazil as undergraduate and it was offered to you with this great sense of pride. so i wonder if you could tell just a little bit about that sort of kind of on the ground. one of the really neat aspects seth's book, when you go through, is incredible kind of historical and then kind of coming up through time advertising myths and how this drink was marketed both locally and internationally and so tell us a little bit about that. yeah. so i do have a personal

connection like most foreigners who come to brazil that will inevitably be introduced to watanabe cause if they're invited out to dinner for drinks with the brazilian hosts, there are often offered the drink because there's a tremendous amount of pride in the beverage. this represents an authentic brazilian. that's how. can't the soda markets itself. it's also a source of pride because it's part of national industry. and from the get go, quite often. so does the originate in the early 20th century? antarctica is the one that starts in 1922. but when coca-cola arrives in 1942 because of world war two and you have u.s. servicemen and servicewomen in brazil and coca cola is introduced why don't i really have the antarctica really has to ramp up its advertising and emphasize that this is the true beverage that brazilians have to, too. so there's a lot of pride around it. and so i was told that this was and, you know, it came from an amazonian fruit. i would say that most non-indigenous brazilians do not know about the indigenous origins. and the myths, but they do know about that. berry originates in the amazon and. so there's a lot of pride around this. and i also to find out in doing

my research that many, as i said before, many very illustrious foreigners they came to brazil are introduced to this beverage. so when cary grant and ingrid came to film notorious in the 1940s, the local magazines were preened over the fact they loved about an hour and jacques cousteau came or this royalty from, the family and the royal family in denmark came they loved water now so it's it's very much part of this pride and, cultural nationalism. i mentioned notorious. think of ingrid bergman looking out the plane down at rio de janeiro. so absolutely amazing. rachel let me come back to you because what you're what you've been talking about with mdma is that sort of tension between, the freedom of use and its therapeutic effects, social use and sort of what that led to it is a schedule one drug, right. and so but you're also like with the of your book, you're kind of sitting right top of the news, right? this is happening right now in terms of what is its how is the government recognizing it. and one thing i just wanted to read from your book that sort of

sets the stage for, again, this kind of decades long conversation about how do we think about substances how do we think about drugs, both medicinal and otherwise. and it's a quote from a gentleman by the name of lester grinspoon, who is a psychiatrist at harvard medical school. as the conversation was happening about mdma and being schedule one. and he rock, he says in rejecting the absurd notion promoted by that these drugs were a panacea, we have chosen to treat them as worthless and extraordinarily dangerous. the time has come to find intermediate position. i wonder you tell us a little bit about what is the intermediate position look like now and the news that literally is happening that kind of your book is sitting on in terms of how the government is thinking about mdma? absolutely. i will say to follow up lester's quotes, you know, mdma isn't good or bad it's just a neutral substance. you know, we choose how to use it, how we will it can be dangerous or it can be extremely

beneficial depending on the context, depending on dosage. you know, water be deadly if we drink too much of it too quickly, that deadly. so, you know it's not good or bad. it just is so mdma wound up being in 1985, it was placed on schedule one, which is the list of strictly controlled substances defined as having no medical use. and a high potential for abuse. lester, the harvard professor that brian just quoted from was of a lawsuit against, the dea to try to stop this from happening. so it was a group of psychiatrist therapists. so sasha shulgin was on this as who brought the dea to court make the case that indeed mdma did have a value. they'd been practicing with this substance for almost ten years at this point and had lots of evidence, had published papers it and they actually won that case. there's the civil judge sided with them and said yes you know you've made case it should be

substance are scheduled to or scheduled three substance which would allow research to go on which would allow medical use to go on but because this was an administer straight of law case, because of legal technicality is the dea wasn't bound to that judgment. they could just throw it out, do what they wanted to do all along, which was mdma and indeed that's where it's been for nearly 40 years now. and it's really hindered research. and the only reason we're starting to see mdma in the news now is because there was really basically one dedicated individual, this guy named rick doblin. he founded a nonprofit group called the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, and he made it his entire life's to bring mdma back into the light of scientific and medical. and his group has grown now to, you know, be 200 people or so. and they've just worked tirelessly over the last decades to work within the federal system.

so be like, how do go fda and actually a schedule one substance through clinical and they've had to do that through fundraising and you know, just incredible, incredible bureaucratic obstacles. and that's why it's taken so long. but the results from trials for mdma, assisted therapy treat ptsd are just you know, they're pretty breathtaking. yeah. it is not a panacea at all but in so the first clinical trial on phase three which is the last step a new application goes to the fda. two thirds of participants, the 100 participants half took mdma, half took a placebo with therapy, two thirds of those who took mdma came without a diagnosis, ptsd at all. and these were people with severe cases of ptsd. they had had it for, you know, nearly years on average, you know, people who had tried everything and and hadn't gotten any help but who have groundbreaking revelation and healing through this this and

terrific again, in terms just something i honestly did not know about. i mean, i think the book was so illuminating on a subject that i truly did not have very much prior knowledge of. and then to realize that this is something that is not history. this is still in process and it's it's happening. seth, i want to ask you another question, but just for the audience, we again are so pleased that you are here. i'm going to ask one or two more questions of rachel and seth. but then we do want to leave time for audience questions. there is a microphone in the middle. the only thing that we ask is with the limited time that we have available, do keep your questions direct as is. it can be so that rachel or seth can kind of give a full answer and also would like to make the standing announcement that rachel and seth after our session ends at 345, we'll be over to the book. people signing tent the book festival so grateful for its partnership with book people and the support that it's provided. and as you any funds that come from the purchase of the books at the festival do help to support the programing. so that will be right after we finish this session at 345.

but just a few more questions. but if people do want to begin lining up to ask their own more than happy to do that? seth one of the things that i was saying to terms of my true ignorance in terms of culture in history, we were talking about the indigenous people who were living there, then sort of the portuguese expansionism, kind of colonialism, sort of that stamp kind of economic. and then what began to happen in the 1800s in terms of countries, very much the states, for example, this grand demand for plant based medicines and herbs and things like that. and then how then guarani became, this marketable soda, $1,000,000,000 industry within of that was sort of your study in history of brazil and its culture. and we were talking about this a little bit earlier. what is sort of one of the big things that you learn maybe you weren't as familiar with or was sort like a light bulb going off for you in research related to this. let's thank you for that question. i would say several things. one is methodological. it was just writing about

history in different ways, asking different types of questions so looking at history as complex, multifaceted and my book interrogates environmental history, food history, drug history, social history, cultural history, advertising. and i think historians often limit themselves to a narrower field of the way in which the discipline has defined in the academy. but think by taking on a broader perspective and thinking about big questions. so that book traces centuries of history. and although it's not able to tell by history of brazil, because brazil is a very complex with a very complex history, i think it's able to tell different chapters or aspects that history, the great composer antonio carlos being who wrote the girl from ipanema, also said that brazil is not for beginners. and i fundamentally believe that it is a very complex country as complex. but what i was trying to do in that book is give people a sense of the different different actors, the different historical processes, the different movements that have shaped that country's history by and by getting sort of a kaleidoscopic

approach. and i'd also add that in terms of the indigenous history, you know, the history of guarani, it's not only about the history of capitalism, industrialization, agro industry, mass consumption, all of that stuff, but it's also about the resilience of an indigenous population. this saturday, most peoples have survived centuries colonialism for specialization, epidemic disease. brasilia national projects for integration. and what i argue has really been central to that maintenance of a distinctive as an ethnic group and also a way of integrating into the dominant society. because since we know that the 18th century, probably earlier indigenous saturday, they were trading that good with other indigenous peoples, with west western or non-indigenous populations. so that commodity has been key for them to access to access western goods, which has contributed to their adaptation to what we would call modern world and to their cultural survival.

rachel i might ask you, we talked a little bit about the of time that seth had spent working the book on the ground reporting. i know, again sort of reading about post or just unbelief about the kind of investment you made in your time. tell us just a little bit about how you came to this particular topic on mdma and what was your sort reporting like kind of your prior knowledge and then maybe what you learned? my prior knowledge, full disclosure, i am a recreational user of mdma, so that was my sort of entry point into this because it's a drug that i enjoy taking with friends know every three or four months and have done for about ten years. but yeah, i built a career primarily writing on the wildlife and the ecology and the conservation beat and, you know, after about a decade writing about animals dying, i was just getting a little bit burnt out and looking for, you know, maybe a lighter subject and yeah, a new intellectual challenge,

let's say, and the pandemic. and this kind of gave me a, you know, a moment where i stop for a second and just think, what where is, where am i going with this? like, what else can i do that is going to serve people and help people? because that's why i became a journalist. i really wanted make a positive difference by, you know, elevating voices, getting information out to people and in pondering this question, i realized that there was no book about mdma and that soon, hopefully by maybe june next year, the fda will approve mdma assisted for ptsd. you know, fingers crossed and people are going to need a resource to go to to out the whole history of this drug, the science, the culture or the people who have shaped this and just how we came where we are today. so that's that's really i wrote it. we would be delighted if were any questions from the audience. we're to about ten or 15 minutes. if you do have questions, please stand in line by the microphone

right in the middle. and again, the only thing that we would ask of respect for the number of questions that we typically take, if you would be willing to make them as direct as possible and we a couple. and so feel free. feel free, direct either to seth, rachel or both and yes, sir, we'd love to start with you. this question is for both panelist and i was curious about the patent status of these and how that might affect. well, for mdma, merck filed the patent in 1912, and that's long since expired. however, you can patent a drug for different indications. so if maps had wanted to, they could have sought a patent for mdma, assisted for ptsd, or you for other things. they're they're testing like social anxiety and autistic adults eating disorders. they're testing a whole range of things. but maps deliberately want to patent these drugs because they're a nonprofit. they're not out to make a ton of money like a traditional pharma

company. so they strategically, as much as they could about, all of the known and suspected uses of mdma so that nobody else could actually claim that they had discovered something new and to so under the un's conference on biodiversity, under brazilian legislation and indigenous peoples like the society, no, we are not allowed to claim a copyright or patent on that plant, even though they're the ones that clearly introduced it to the world because it's seen as being part of common knowledge at this point. the brazilian corporation for agricultural research, which is the brazilian government entity, which did a lot of research into many different crops including soy, which is what led it to take off in brazil as an export, but also did a lot of research on the go out and i plan to to make to yield more caffeine producing plants you know that would come fruiting earlier that would have higher yields they were able to patent those genetic so they do hold on that

but not the indigenous population. very good. thank you. great question, ma'am. please. let's see if i can. so i'm wondering about for rachel, you know, mdma, if it were to be available on by the fda then i'm actually wondering about the recreation. i'm a harm reduction test. and so been you know people die from taking mda not from the because they're poison from fentanyl because it's produced illicit labs so if it were to be you know okayed by the fda, is it going to be i mean has to get a patent and then it would be produced. i guess what i'm wanting say is there's not going to be a route where recreational users are ever going to really access to it. well, so maps is going to be producing the mdma they formed a subsidiary, the maps public benefit corporation and they are

going to be the pharmaceutical supplier of mdma for the first five years. so if you go to your doctor and get remains as a therapy you're absolutely going to be getting, you know, pharmacy to call mdma in of recreational use. the goal of maps is actually to have medicalized pave the way for legalized fashion in the same way that marijuana is occurring around the country. their goal is 2035 for recreation legalization. and you do raise a really important about the problems prohibition and creating more harm. anyone who does do mdma, whether doing it recreationally or they're it with an underground therapist today, they're getting their drugs illegally and. you know, unless you test your drugs, which i really encourage anyone does take illegal drugs to do, you can buy kits or you can mail. there's a nonprofit group in spain energy control. i always mail my drugs to energy control and they tell you exactly what's in it and the purity so that you know that not

going to accidentally poison yourself. thank you. great question. yes, sir. please. hi. i'm an autistic and i'm interested in the studies for therapeutic uses, primarily for anxiety and social challenges, but also have there been any studies done regarding the long effects of mdma usage? great question. you? yeah. so have a chapter that deals with use of mdma in the autistic community. if you're not aware, there's an autistic psychedelics society and they gather all the information available about autistic acts and the use of psychedelics and they just, they built like a vibrant community of thousands of people around the world. and i interviewed of the the guy who founded it and. there also has been a clinical trial, mdma assisted therapy for

severe social anxiety and autistic adults was a really small trial, but the the impacts really profound for participants life. you know, one person got married, one person moved out of his family's house and finished college. one person actually became a public speaker. so these are really incredible breakthroughs. but just talking with autistic individuals about, mdma, a lot of them have just started using it on their own to, you know, go to parties to be more social. and the point isn't to just take mdma every time you go out. point is to take it, observe yourself being social, see the positive responses that you're getting. and then apply those lessons to your sober life. and you don't have to be neurodivergent to do that. i had a friend who also, you know, was very and he really blossomed at a club one night and realized, oh, my gosh, you know, i can be a social person and do this. and i'm to get a positive reaction. yes, ma'am, please. hi this question is again for

rachel. i was wondering in your research, if you found or came into a lot with the esketamine and and you were able to find out about that, i found it curious if you if you are given a ketamine, it's only been approved in association or in conjunction with a traditional medicine. and if you found out anything with the background of that, you know that's so i didn't research ketamine much at all for this book. but i will say that really fascinating neuroscience research that has basically discovered it's out of a lab, johns hopkins university, a professor, adam gould nolan, and she has found that ketamine, mdma, psilocybin, lsd and ibogaine survive different psychedelic drugs, things that we don't normally group together, you know, ketamine lsd, mdma, they're all thought to be actually underneath a very basic mechanistic level at the

level of gene transcription. all of these drugs in a therapeutic setting seem to be activating the same set of genes. and that seems to be why have such profound effects, why you can take something like mdma as a therapy, know three times, and this can actually your life for the good in a lasting and enduring way. so yeah, but in terms of the difference between mdma and ketamine and these other drugs, she also found that this window of learning that allows these lasting effects to occur differ by drugs. so ketamine, the window is open. the shortest of time. mdma was a medium of time. ibogaine the central african plant, that's like a 36 hour trip was the longest amount of time. so that explain why people who get ketamine treatments for depression have to go back weekly, whereas somebody who does mdma maybe does that a handful of times and then enjoys the effects. another great question with the time we have left, this will be our last question for the session. and again, thank you everyone

for attending. please. this is for both panelists. i'm a little curious about how class and identity into both like the commercialization and the criminalization of these substances in question. just like, you know, how did that affect how people consume them today, the way they're perceived, the way they're. so cutting out was never criminalized as far as i've been able to discover. the jesuits are the first ones to write about it. very enthusiastic early in the late 17th century, there was a certain repudiation or skepticism. the drug, when it's introduced far and markets in the 19th century as a patent medicine for neuroscience or migraine headaches like headaches, they were called part of it. was that there was a suspicion that the drug adulterated. so that's always issue when you're dealing with like a foreign that hasn't been tested that much, that it wasn't as effective as some other. they know in the early 19th century that coffee and corona

are both the active is caffeine but that it was expensive and it was more expensive than so there's there's a certain skepticism. and one of the most interesting that i found from the 1880s is an article written by a georgia pharmacist, john pemberton, in which he repudiate he's got to know that it's not it's not useful. it can't be trusted. you know, it's not efficacious. and he also had some ulterior motives because pemberton was the person who founded coca-cola. so he definitely wanted to promote kola, which also is a heavy, heavy caffeine, that caffeinated substance, cocaine and coca leaves, i should say, is nice. so making drugs illegal has been a very common strategy that the government to suppress and criminalize certain groups of people. so for marijuana it was criminalized to basically make black activities illegal or to attack the black community for opium, it was chinese immigrants for lsd, it was the anti-war

counterculture in the sixties. for mdma, it was more seen as a it was a very white drug, you know, young white kids taking it it was more seen as a threat to. society like, oh, you know, these kids are out partying. what are they doing? like interrupting the order like so that's how we saw the hysteria in the nineties with you know, paul's being eating in the brain and things like that. it was you know, an attack on the children but it was because mdma was a threat to the social order. that being said mdma does have a diverse user group today you know it's the second most popular recreational around the world with some 30 million people taking it. and there's interesting subcultures. so i interviewed someone who's a professor at florida state and he is interviewing black hip hop users, mdma in central florida. so, you know, it's it's not just like, you know, white kids in suburbia getting wasted at a warehouse. are terrific questions.

we'd like to thank you so much being part of the session today. again before we give the authors a big round of applause. the book is i love mdma and the quest for corrective action in a fractured world by rachel nuer and warren on how brazil embraced the world's caffeine rich plant. would you please give a nice round of applause for rachel and seth? what a delight it was really lot of fun. the texas book festival is grateful for your participation you are the reason why these events been so successful and helped to fund these very important programs that promote literacy across the state of texas. so thank you so much for being here. and as a final reminder, seth and rachel will soon be heading to the book tent, you can buy their books at the book people tent. please do so and enjoy the rest of the festival. thank you all very, very much. thank you. all.

right. now. for.

your book, trees live coverage of this year's texas book continues shortly. on about books. we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates, current nonfiction authors and the latest book reviews. and we'll talk about the current nonfiction books featured c-span spoke tv. and now we want to introduce you to brewster kael. he is the founder of something you might be familiar with. it's called the internet archive. mr. kael. what is the purpose of the internet archive? the archive is a nonprofit research library largely used over the internet by people

trying to dive deeper into wikipedia articles by clicking through on the citations on the bottom and finding themselves on web pages that it might have been disappeared or on the books right at the right page to be able to follow up and learn more. how many unique visitors do you have a day per year? per day. we get about 2 million people coming to the website but about 5 million come and use the internet archive's in one way or another. it's between the 200th and most or 300th most popular website. so actually want a library and is it free? yes, everything is free. the internet archive, we collect web pages, books, music, video and the idea is that this is free public access and yes, you can borrow, you can look at all web pages. it's a it's a library. so when you founded this in

1996, what was your thought behind it? the idea is to build universal access to all knowledge. we go and make the digital library of alexandria, right? could we actually make it that people that are curious enough to want to have access to the published works of humankind, they could get access to it? that was the promise when i was growing up. you walked into a library and they said, we have everything. and if we don't have it here, we'll get it for you. that was the promise of the internet i signed on to in 1980 to try to help build the internet into that. by 96, it was time to build the library and so we've been building this library for the last 27 years. well, there was a recent headline on a website called the converse. it says that the internet archive's library has been founded in breach of copyright. what is this about so what happened is we've been with about a hundred other libraries directly and a couple of hundred libraries have been