Speaker 1: M Hi. I'm Ethan Natalman and this is Psychoactive, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is
Speaker 1: the show where we talk about all things drugs. But
Speaker 1: any views expressed here do not represent those of I
Speaker 1: Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,
Speaker 1: heed as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they
Speaker 1: may not even represent my own and nothing contained in
Speaker 1: this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement
Speaker 1: to use any type of drug. One of the most
Speaker 1: popular episodes the Psychoactive to date has been the one
Speaker 1: where I invited my friend Julie Holland to service my
Speaker 1: co host and answer questions with me from you the audience.
Speaker 1: So we're going to record another one of those episodes,
Speaker 1: and we need your questions. Leave us a voicemail with
Speaker 1: a question as deep else as possible at one eight, three, three, seven,
Speaker 1: seven nine sixty, or he can record a voice memo
Speaker 1: and send it to Psychoactive at protozoa dot com. I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's going to be a great second go with this. Hello,
Speaker 1: Psychoactive listeners. I thought this episode to have me talking
Speaker 1: with Kat Packer, who's in charge of regulating cannabis for
Speaker 1: the city of Los Angeles. But instead this being Valentine's
Speaker 1: Day week, we're gonna talk about love drugs with the
Speaker 1: bioethicist Brian Earp. He's a bioethicist and a philosopher and
Speaker 1: interdisciplinary researcher. He's currently the Associate director of the Yale
Speaker 1: Hastings Program and Ethics and Health Policy at Yale University,
Speaker 1: and he's also a research fellow with the Oxford u
Speaker 1: Hero Center for Practical Ethics. He's co authored a book
Speaker 1: with a title that just captivated me at the start.
Speaker 1: In the US, it's called Love Drugs The Chemical Future
Speaker 1: of Relationships. If you get into the UK, it's called
Speaker 1: Love Is the Drug, with the same subtitle. He co
Speaker 1: authored it with a faster at Oxford named Julian Sevalescue.
Speaker 1: Our conversation is really going to focus on his writing
Speaker 1: about drugs and drugs and love, drugs and breakups, drugs
Speaker 1: and relationships. So Brian, thanks so much for joining me
Speaker 1: on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me on. Your book's got
Speaker 1: a great provocative title, at least in the US, Love Drugs.
Speaker 1: You gotta give the elevator pitch four or five sentences
Speaker 1: about what that books about? How do you sum it up?
Speaker 1: I guess it's right there in the title. It's a
Speaker 1: book about love, it's a book about drugs, and it's
Speaker 1: a book about the effect of drugs on love. So
Speaker 1: partly we try to understand what are the chemical possibilities
Speaker 1: for intervening in our romantic neurochemistry that can really influence
Speaker 1: our relationships, both commonly used medications that are already available
Speaker 1: and you know, psychedelic drugs and m d m A
Speaker 1: and other drugs that are sort of coming down the pipeline.
Speaker 1: And then in thinking about the ways that love can
Speaker 1: be manipulated neurochemically, what does that teach us about love?
Speaker 1: Is love something that we can gain insights into by
Speaker 1: thinking about it as a sort of thing that's to
Speaker 1: some extent under our control or that we can at
Speaker 1: least influence, rather than something that just happens to us passively.
Speaker 1: What I love about the book is you go much
Speaker 1: deeper in terms of exploring not just m DUMA and
Speaker 1: other drugs, but trying to lay out ethical frameworks for
Speaker 1: how we think about using psychoactive drugs. Um In facilitating relationships,
Speaker 1: and not just facilitating relationships, but also helping people break
Speaker 1: up from relationships or avoid bad relationships. What's been the
Speaker 1: principal reactions to the book that you and Julian put
Speaker 1: out there. Well, the feedback from people who have read
Speaker 1: the book has been overwhelmingly positive. But when people hear
Speaker 1: about the book where they think they have a sense
Speaker 1: of what the book is about, they often have an
Speaker 1: extremely skeptical response. So they think something like, well, if
Speaker 1: you if you have to take a drug in order
Speaker 1: to feel love for your partner, surely whatever you're feeling
Speaker 1: can't be authentic. It's not real. It's just the drug
Speaker 1: that's doing the talking, so to speak. And I think
Speaker 1: what's surprising is just how readily convinced people seem to
Speaker 1: be when you get down into the details of what
Speaker 1: it's actually like two approach your own inner emotional life
Speaker 1: under the influence of a drug, and how under some
Speaker 1: circumstances people will report that they feel it enhances the
Speaker 1: authenticity of their relationship to themselves but also to their partners.
Speaker 1: And as you point out, it seems like it should
Speaker 1: be self evident if we're going to be bringing these
Speaker 1: powerful drugs back into mainstream medicine as part of this
Speaker 1: so called psychedelic renaissance. We shouldn't only be studying the
Speaker 1: effects of these powerful agents on individuals and their clinically
Speaker 1: diagnosable symptoms. You know, we're all embedded within relationships and
Speaker 1: social networks. And this is a broader fault of so
Speaker 1: called Western medicine and that it tends to atomize, and
Speaker 1: it tends to focus on the individual and their symptoms
Speaker 1: and ignore the relational and the wider social context. But
Speaker 1: of course, you know, psychedelic drugs have been used in
Speaker 1: social context as part of religious and spiritual ceremonies in
Speaker 1: in some groups for many generations. And as you pointed
Speaker 1: out right at the get go, m d m A
Speaker 1: was used in a Western medical context therapeutically four couples
Speaker 1: as recently as the nineteen eighties, and we've we've forgotten
Speaker 1: about that, it seems, and we're now back to the
Speaker 1: individual focused model. But we think that we should really
Speaker 1: expand out and look at how drugs affect us in
Speaker 1: relational and social context. You know, my first encounter with
Speaker 1: m d M A was when I was in my
Speaker 1: early thirties and going through a difficult time in my marriage,
Speaker 1: and a friend of mine gave nesa m d m
Speaker 1: A and my wife and I did it, and initially
Speaker 1: it felt like it was a thing that was going
Speaker 1: to save our relationship, the type of communication it opened up.
Speaker 1: You know, we were committed to doing it in a way,
Speaker 1: so we understood we would just keep going back to
Speaker 1: the drug to facilitate this feeling, but that there will
Speaker 1: be certain ways to bring back the feeling and the
Speaker 1: lessons of the m d m A without using the
Speaker 1: drug itself. And in the end um, after trying to
Speaker 1: number more times, we ended up getting divorce. But I've
Speaker 1: always thought that our use of m DUMA helped us
Speaker 1: to a softer landing and better enabled us to be
Speaker 1: very good co parents for our our young daughter. So
Speaker 1: I thought that that was really a beautiful story that
Speaker 1: you told, and I think it's important for people to
Speaker 1: understand that that gives us a better sense of how
Speaker 1: m d m A works than just this this blunt
Speaker 1: love drug kind of stereotype knee jerk response that I'll
Speaker 1: sometimes get when talking to people about the subject matter
Speaker 1: of the book is that they think, well, m d
Speaker 1: m A is a pro love drug. It's something that
Speaker 1: just binds people together, no matter how incompatible they may
Speaker 1: be with the thought that again it it just takes
Speaker 1: you over zombie like and causes you to feel these
Speaker 1: these kinds of ways towards your partner, whoever you're taking
Speaker 1: the drug with, and as your experience illustrates, and as
Speaker 1: we also mentioned in the book, that's just not the case.
Speaker 1: In some ways, the way that it's been used for
Speaker 1: PTSD is illustrative for how it can be used in
Speaker 1: a relational context, because what happens in PTSD is somebody
Speaker 1: brings up a topic that you don't want to talk about.
Speaker 1: It's very triggering for you, and you shut down and
Speaker 1: you divert the conversation to practically anything else, and as
Speaker 1: a consequence of that, you never really face and work
Speaker 1: through and deal with whatever is the underlying trauma. And
Speaker 1: most contemporary medications for PTSD sort of paper over the
Speaker 1: symptoms and help you cope with the fact that you
Speaker 1: haven't dealt with the trauma. But precisely why m d
Speaker 1: m A and in some cases sylo cyberin asisted therapy
Speaker 1: seems to be helpful for these sorts of conditions is
Speaker 1: that in some ways, it takes the lid off, and
Speaker 1: it allows you to confront difficult thoughts and uncomfortable truths
Speaker 1: and buried emotions rather than coming from a place of fear,
Speaker 1: approaching those emotions from a from an open minded and
Speaker 1: almost loving stance. And so the love that you feel
Speaker 1: when people think of it as a love drug isn't
Speaker 1: just a sort of one dimensional love for the person
Speaker 1: sitting across from you or for whoever you're romantically involved with.
Speaker 1: There's also sort of loving attitude that you take towards
Speaker 1: your own emotions again under the right conditions. If if
Speaker 1: you happen to be among the subset of people for
Speaker 1: whom it works this way, it can lead you to
Speaker 1: think to yourself, maybe I shouldn't be with my partner.
Speaker 1: Maybe what I've been hiding from, Maybe the buried emotion
Speaker 1: that I haven't been wanting to confront is the fact
Speaker 1: that my partner and I are fundamentally not suited to
Speaker 1: each other, or we've grown apart in a way that
Speaker 1: means we should let each other go. And as you say,
Speaker 1: with a soft landing or from a place of compassion,
Speaker 1: rather than you know, throwing dishes across the room, and
Speaker 1: having some big storm out. I mean, M d m
Speaker 1: A seems like one of those drugs where, when used
Speaker 1: in the context with a therapist or responsible knowing way,
Speaker 1: the ratio of good outcomes too bad is about as
Speaker 1: high as you can get with psychoactive drugs. Is that
Speaker 1: fair to say? I think or can you think of
Speaker 1: cases where we're doing M d m A in a
Speaker 1: controlled environment has actually led to significantly bad results, well
Speaker 1: in terms of just the effects on the brain and
Speaker 1: subjective consciousness and so forth. In order to get neurotoxic
Speaker 1: effects with m d m A you have to take
Speaker 1: several doses and higher doses, and and over repeated use.
Speaker 1: You can have a physiological risk from the drug. But
Speaker 1: as you say, when it's taken at a relatively low
Speaker 1: dose or controlled dose on a handful of occasions spaced
Speaker 1: out over time, in terms of its effects on the
Speaker 1: brain and the body, it's very very low risk, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't have a risk of an addiction for example.
Speaker 1: So among the various drugs that are used in the
Speaker 1: psychopharmacopeia that's rolled out in psychiatry, m d m A
Speaker 1: is certainly among the safer of those drugs. Now, because
Speaker 1: M d m A is used in conjunction with counseling,
Speaker 1: or it should be under this model that we're discussing.
Speaker 1: It's true that the drug can sometimes put people into
Speaker 1: a state whereby they come to have to deal with
Speaker 1: some things that maybe they aren't prepared to deal with.
Speaker 1: That's a possibility, and it's why the psychotherapeutic context is
Speaker 1: so important. So one way to misuse the drug is
Speaker 1: to take it in large doses, well, dancing all night
Speaker 1: in a hot warehouse and not drinking enough water and
Speaker 1: having other drugs through your system and so forth. That
Speaker 1: can be dangerous as well as enormous fun and pleasure,
Speaker 1: right Well, of course, of course, I mean so that
Speaker 1: you're you're right, there's always there's always a benefit to
Speaker 1: risk ratio. But let's say that that raises the risk
Speaker 1: side of the Asian. Whereas another way to potentially go
Speaker 1: astray is to, you know, take it in a sort
Speaker 1: of self directed attempt at therapy with your partner or
Speaker 1: something like that, but where you haven't really laid the groundwork. Now,
Speaker 1: you don't necessarily need to have a trained therapists sitting there.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that people have had self experiments and experiments
Speaker 1: within the relationships that have been successful without all the
Speaker 1: paraphernalia of the therapeutic context. But what we advise in
Speaker 1: the book is that really the best case scenario and
Speaker 1: where where we should center the discussion is around a
Speaker 1: carefully controlled session where somebody who has training in helping
Speaker 1: people work through difficult matters is part and parcel to
Speaker 1: the whole experience precisely so that when difficult things arise,
Speaker 1: you can work through them in a productive, in a
Speaker 1: therapeutic way, rather than make a rash decision in response
Speaker 1: to them or whatever it might be. You know, you
Speaker 1: point at one point that actually, most divorces aren't about
Speaker 1: people in this horrendous, horrible throwing dishes thing. It's more
Speaker 1: about you know, married couples, oftentimes with kids, you know,
Speaker 1: just getting to a point where everything's flat and not
Speaker 1: working and not good communication what you call gray relationships,
Speaker 1: and that this is sort of an optimal use or
Speaker 1: most likely to be successful use of m d M.
Speaker 1: A just say a little more about that we're aware
Speaker 1: of concerns that people have and we think they're they're valid.
Speaker 1: That people when they seem to have access to some
Speaker 1: drug based solution or so they think to their relationship
Speaker 1: that when a couple is fundamentally incompatible with each other
Speaker 1: and really what they should do is break up, they
Speaker 1: might turn to this medication or this drug as a
Speaker 1: kind of chemical band aid to just patch things over,
Speaker 1: rather than accepting the reality of their situation and moving on.
Speaker 1: The thing about these gray relationships that you mentioned is
Speaker 1: that they aren't fundamentally characterized by abuse or toxic behavior
Speaker 1: or or what or what have you, But rather, as
Speaker 1: you say that the feeling of love has basically faded
Speaker 1: from the relationship, and the couple maybe continues to have
Speaker 1: shared values and shared projects. Maybe they have children they're
Speaker 1: raising together, Maybe they've got plans for the future that
Speaker 1: they've oriented themselves around, and and they value the relationship
Speaker 1: and want to work on it. And it seems like
Speaker 1: if you've got a case of a relationship that has
Speaker 1: a lot of valuable components to it and you're not
Speaker 1: ready to throw in the towel, and there's a possibility
Speaker 1: that partly what you need to to rekindle a sense
Speaker 1: of intimacy with your partner is, you know, in addition
Speaker 1: to talk therapies, you know a chemical agent that will
Speaker 1: hopefully enhance the effects of the talk therapy you were
Speaker 1: going to do anyway, Well, then it seems like that
Speaker 1: would be the best case scenario for for introducing the
Speaker 1: drug in addition to the other therapeutic means you want
Speaker 1: to try to try. Yeah, you know, probably there was
Speaker 1: a connection that you did not make, I think in
Speaker 1: the book, but which really struck me because it came
Speaker 1: through to me from reading your book, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, m d m A looks like
Speaker 1: it's going to be approved for PTSD, and you talk
Speaker 1: about the importance thill of primarily using M d m
Speaker 1: A and gray relationships. But then you have this little
Speaker 1: couple of pages where you talk there's a researcher at
Speaker 1: McGill University who makes the point that oftentimes heartbreak bear's
Speaker 1: a remarkable resemblance to PTSD, And then you talk about
Speaker 1: a study or that he's done in which people try to,
Speaker 1: you know, reduce the heartbreak, that the symptoms of heartbreak,
Speaker 1: not within d M A actually, but with another drug.
Speaker 1: What are the other drugs that can also help in
Speaker 1: these loving in either enhancing a love relationship or dealing
Speaker 1: with the trauma of it. The drug that the researcher
Speaker 1: uses as pro panelol, which is a beta blocker, and
Speaker 1: the particular therapy is called reconsolidation therapy. It immediately bears
Speaker 1: a resemblance to what people might think of with the
Speaker 1: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, tampering with memories sort
Speaker 1: of an intervention. A major difference is that the Eternal
Speaker 1: Sunshine of the Spotless Mind plot revolves around the technology
Speaker 1: that as I recall, sort of deletes certain memories, just
Speaker 1: races them from your consciousness and your ability to recall them,
Speaker 1: whereas this real world, real life reconsolidation therapy works a
Speaker 1: bit differently. Basically, come into the lab, do you take
Speaker 1: preparing a law which kind of suppresses part of your
Speaker 1: nervous system so that you're automatic kind of emotional responses
Speaker 1: and fear responses to things is settled down, and then
Speaker 1: you write out a memory, the memory of the betrayal,
Speaker 1: a memory of the breakup, whatever it is that's really
Speaker 1: torturing you, and you experience what it's like to reflect
Speaker 1: on that content without the emotional response that's been so
Speaker 1: crippling for you before undertaking this treatment, and then you
Speaker 1: restore the memory you sort of you know, through this exercise,
Speaker 1: you you re encode the memory again with some of
Speaker 1: that emotional drama stripped away from it, and then you
Speaker 1: you do this on a number of occasions, and the
Speaker 1: idea then is that you're able to remember what happened.
Speaker 1: So it's not that you have a break in the
Speaker 1: continuity of your biographical narrative or anything like that. But
Speaker 1: when you remember it, it just doesn't trigger the trauma response.
Speaker 1: And so that's the logic of that kind of therapy.
Speaker 1: So the researcher Elaine Burnett has made the point that
Speaker 1: what he calls romantic betrayals or other sorts of romantic
Speaker 1: traumas can be among the worst experiences of people's lives,
Speaker 1: and he thinks that we shouldn't treat them with kind
Speaker 1: of rolling our eyes and saying, oh, it's just a breakup,
Speaker 1: you'll get over it. You know. He primarily treats people
Speaker 1: with post traumatic stress disorder from all the usual causes,
Speaker 1: assault and violence, and you know, serving in a war environment,
Speaker 1: and what he was noticing was that some people were
Speaker 1: coming to him talking about their partner of twenty years
Speaker 1: walking out on them suddenly, or other such shocks to
Speaker 1: the system that come about through you know what feels
Speaker 1: like a broken heart, and and he's right to say that,
Speaker 1: in the long course of a life, some of these
Speaker 1: romantic upsets and breakups and betrayals and so forth can
Speaker 1: certainly be among the most psychologically jarring and difficult to
Speaker 1: deal with. So once again we're in a situation where
Speaker 1: people might be worried that when you go through a breakup,
Speaker 1: the thought is you don't want to just take some
Speaker 1: drug to make those sad feelings go away, because part
Speaker 1: of the sadness is giving you an opportunity to slow
Speaker 1: down and reflect and learn from what happened. And then
Speaker 1: as you begin to emerge from your shell and try
Speaker 1: to pursue relationships going forward, hopefully you've you've figured out
Speaker 1: some pitfalls that you don't want to fall into again.
Speaker 1: Pain sometimes is something that you know makes you stronger,
Speaker 1: but pain is also sometimes something that just crushes your soul.
Speaker 1: And figuring out when somebody's in a position where a
Speaker 1: drug assisted treatment modality would help them get from the
Speaker 1: soul crushing kind of pain to the instrumentally useful kind
Speaker 1: of pain, that seems like something that's useful, you know, Brian,
Speaker 1: I just say I'm prepping to have this conversation with you.
Speaker 1: I actually watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a
Speaker 1: couple of nights ago, and so one of the other
Speaker 1: things that you know. Obviously the book is called Love Drugs,
Speaker 1: but a big part of your book is about love,
Speaker 1: and you go through a kind of systematic analysis of
Speaker 1: love in a way I've never really read before, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean breaking it out, the dual nature of love,
Speaker 1: in the ways in which it's both biological and psychlosocial,
Speaker 1: the different brain systems of lust and libido and a
Speaker 1: action and attachment all being components. Just explain more about
Speaker 1: why that sort of analysis was important is sort of
Speaker 1: us and enabling people to think about more productive and
Speaker 1: ethical ways of dealing with quote unquote love drugs and
Speaker 1: anti love drugs. Sure. I think one way that people
Speaker 1: in just popular discussions think about love, and it's maybe
Speaker 1: reinforced through films and poetry and so forth, is the
Speaker 1: idea that it's something that happens to you. Love strikes you,
Speaker 1: like with Cupid's arrow, and then it's out of your control.
Speaker 1: And part of what we were thinking about is when
Speaker 1: you imagine intervening into some system with a technology. Partly
Speaker 1: what you're trying to do is not necessarily to control
Speaker 1: it in some deterministic sense, but you're trying to exert
Speaker 1: some influence over this system so that it moves in
Speaker 1: a direction that is conducive to your flourishing. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: you can mess up systems by intervening in them and
Speaker 1: make things much worse, which is partly why we wanted
Speaker 1: to write this book. We wanted to try to sketch
Speaker 1: out what kinds of interventions are likely to be good
Speaker 1: for us and which one are likely to have, you know,
Speaker 1: potentially very negative individual or society level consequences. But when
Speaker 1: you think about the system of love as the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that could be tampered with in a way,
Speaker 1: then you have to think, well, what are the moving parts,
Speaker 1: what's susceptible to influence? And here's where we begin to
Speaker 1: realize that thinking about love as something that's disconnected and
Speaker 1: just floats around in your soul is going to lead
Speaker 1: lead you astray. Now, you can influence your feelings of
Speaker 1: love through non chemically mediated interventions, Like if you're obsessed
Speaker 1: with someone and you're trying to create some distance, you
Speaker 1: can just stop looking at their pictures on Facebook, and
Speaker 1: you can, you know, delete their phone number from your phone.
Speaker 1: There's all sorts of low tech ways to change the
Speaker 1: way you feel about someone that show that we're already
Speaker 1: used to the idea that we should be able to
Speaker 1: exert some influence over love. And then we just realized that,
Speaker 1: however much there is a psychosocial and historical component of love,
Speaker 1: which there surely is, there's also something going on in
Speaker 1: our brains and something going on in our biology. And
Speaker 1: we thought that as we're taking drugs for other purposes,
Speaker 1: you know, just common medications like S S R eyes
Speaker 1: for depression and so forth, we should be alert to
Speaker 1: the possibility that we're already influencing the biological dimension of
Speaker 1: love inadvertently. And then the book kind of shifts from
Speaker 1: a warning, you know, let's be sure that we aren't
Speaker 1: taking drugs for other purposes that are influencing our romantic
Speaker 1: neurochemistry in ways that might be interfering with our relationship
Speaker 1: goals too, then you know, promoting this more positive account.
Speaker 1: What if we could actually harness these technologies to change love,
Speaker 1: or nudge love, or assist love in a direction that
Speaker 1: we want, and the only way to do that is
Speaker 1: to realize that love is a biopsychosocial phenomenon. It's all
Speaker 1: of those things. There's a way it feels like to
Speaker 1: be in love. There's the psychology of love. There's the
Speaker 1: social context, which shapes what kinds of phenomena account as
Speaker 1: love or get labeled as love or talked about as love,
Speaker 1: or have poems written about as as as constituting love.
Speaker 1: And that of course influences how we feel about our
Speaker 1: own relationships, because you know, we don't know if what
Speaker 1: we're feeling is love until we look out there in
Speaker 1: the culture and see what people are talking about, and
Speaker 1: then we kind of triangulate what we think we're feeling
Speaker 1: with what we see getting identified as love and the culture.
Speaker 1: And then this, this previously under explored aspect of love
Speaker 1: which we try to bring out in the book, is
Speaker 1: that there's also a subterranean aspect of love, which is
Speaker 1: what's going on in our brains and our bodies when
Speaker 1: we form attachments and feel lust and attraction toward people,
Speaker 1: and develop a sort of bond with a partner over
Speaker 1: the long haul. All of that is the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that's increasingly susceptible to being studied in a in
Speaker 1: a scientific way. I was thinking back to the lesson
Speaker 1: I learned from reading Andrew Wild's book The Natural Mind
Speaker 1: many years ago, where he makes the point that any
Speaker 1: alteration of consciousness that we attained or can attain by
Speaker 1: using psychoactive drugs can also be attained without using these drugs.
Speaker 1: It just oftentimes takes more discipline or effort, and that
Speaker 1: psychoactive drugs are, for better or worse, the quick and
Speaker 1: easy ways of getting these alterations of consciousness. That would
Speaker 1: that ring true with what you've studied about drugs and love.
Speaker 1: I think it's true that certain altered states of mind
Speaker 1: that otherwise might only be achievable through you know, dedicated
Speaker 1: meditation and stream sort of bodily practices and so forth,
Speaker 1: some such states of mind can be fairly, readily, fairly
Speaker 1: directly and with relatively little effort be achieved through ingesting
Speaker 1: certain substances. And I think worry people have is that
Speaker 1: that might somehow cheapen the insights that could be gained.
Speaker 1: There's an understandable cultural association between effort and value, the
Speaker 1: idea being that if you really work for something and
Speaker 1: you achieve some some outcome, that outcome is just simply
Speaker 1: worth more than the very same outcome that's gotten through
Speaker 1: some more efficient means. Let's say, and you know, I
Speaker 1: think you could even concede that point. You could say,
Speaker 1: maybe it is more valuable to achieve a certain kind
Speaker 1: of state of consciousness or insights that that may a
Speaker 1: company that state of consciousness through you know, decades of
Speaker 1: meditation and so forth. But unless you think that the
Speaker 1: value of that state drops to zero if it's gotten
Speaker 1: through m the ingestion of a substance, then you might
Speaker 1: still want to acknowledge that it could still be valuable.
Speaker 1: And the way that people talk about their experiences on
Speaker 1: psychedelics and sometimes in the case of m d m
Speaker 1: A assisted psychotherapy, is that they feel that it's dramatically
Speaker 1: transformative of certain aspects of their lives. Again, not everybody
Speaker 1: has this experience, as lots of individual differences depends on
Speaker 1: the dose and the setting and all that stuff. But
Speaker 1: for a lot of people who have just been enrolled
Speaker 1: in these trials, let's say, the drug assisted psychotherapy trials
Speaker 1: for PTSD, many of them, the majority of them in
Speaker 1: some cases, will say that the experience that they have
Speaker 1: is among the most meaningful in their life. And so
Speaker 1: it's clear that the value isn't zero. And even if
Speaker 1: you think you can somehow squeeze some more value out
Speaker 1: of that state of mind by struggling for it without
Speaker 1: any chemical assistance, you know, what people are experiencing is
Speaker 1: clearly something that is not just a hedonic experience, but
Speaker 1: something that that is striking to them as very meaningful
Speaker 1: and something from which they feel that they learn that
Speaker 1: they gain real insights into their life and their relationships
Speaker 1: and their own emotional world and so forth. So there
Speaker 1: may be a tradeoff there, but the tradeoff isn't one
Speaker 1: that that should cause us to dismiss the use of
Speaker 1: the drugs altogether. We'll be talking more after we hear
Speaker 1: this add there's one point where you say that the
Speaker 1: quote unquote naturalistic fallacy is one of the oldest and
Speaker 1: most famous mistakes in ethics. You know, on the show,
Speaker 1: we've oftentimes had this issue about, you know, whether or
Speaker 1: not psilocybin or mescal in or d m T or
Speaker 1: whatever it might be, is more good, is better if
Speaker 1: it comes directly from the plan as opposed to being synthesized.
Speaker 1: And there's been a discussion about this but I guess
Speaker 1: that same debate happens with ethics as well well. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a sense in which things that are natural,
Speaker 1: if that means that we've co evolved with them and
Speaker 1: therefore we have some deep knowledge about how they work
Speaker 1: and we have a very good sense of of how
Speaker 1: to use them responsibly, then there's a sense in which
Speaker 1: naturalness is a proxy for something that we value. But
Speaker 1: if you can recreate the chemical structure of something in
Speaker 1: a laboratory and you can learn to use it in
Speaker 1: a responsible way over time, then it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: see what the ethical relevance is of something merely being
Speaker 1: natural versus artificial, Because of course, some natural things are
Speaker 1: quite bad, like cancer, and some artificial things are obviously good,
Speaker 1: like corrective eyeglasses and so forth. So yeah, people have
Speaker 1: to get over the natural equals good and unnatural equals
Speaker 1: bad dichotomy. But you know, both of those concepts maybe
Speaker 1: proxies or approximations for other things that we do care about,
Speaker 1: you know, Brian, at what point you mean you obviously
Speaker 1: talk about the dual nature of love and both the
Speaker 1: biological on the one hand, is psychological, and how they
Speaker 1: interplate with one another. But one of the most fascinating
Speaker 1: things you talked about was how powerful two people looking
Speaker 1: deeply into one another's eye and remaining silent could be
Speaker 1: in terms of love. I found that fascinating. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: this is even a trans species effect. So there's evidence
Speaker 1: that looking into a dog's eyes also releases oxytocin in
Speaker 1: both the human and the dog and seems to be
Speaker 1: part of the process by which humans and dogs form
Speaker 1: a bond with one another. And contrariwise, in the same
Speaker 1: chapter where I was talking about some anti love remedies,
Speaker 1: people say, well, if I'm if I'm hooking up with
Speaker 1: someone and I don't want to become attached to them,
Speaker 1: what should I do? And the answer is you should
Speaker 1: close your eyes while you're having sex with them so
Speaker 1: that you don't form this attachment. Now, again, there's whole
Speaker 1: sorts of ethical critiques that can be raised about the scenario,
Speaker 1: but nevertheless, as a practical matter, closing your eyes and
Speaker 1: blocking the release of oxytosein is helpful, and keeping your
Speaker 1: eyes open will foment a bond in many cases. You
Speaker 1: know what I was thinking about the extremes of biological
Speaker 1: love versus psychosocial I guess the extreme of the psychosocial
Speaker 1: one might be where you have an arranged marriage where
Speaker 1: the couple comes together and ultimately full deeply in love.
Speaker 1: And conversely, on the extremely biological. I just saw the
Speaker 1: remake a West Side Story, and there's that seed where
Speaker 1: Tony and a real lock eyes without ever knowing other,
Speaker 1: and it just seems it's biology on steroids, right, So
Speaker 1: that does happen. You know, people have something like this
Speaker 1: phenomenon of love at first sight. Now, usually there's all
Speaker 1: sorts of background conditions, like they're in proximity to each other.
Speaker 1: You know, if they live far apart, they probably wouldn't
Speaker 1: have this experience and so forth. But you're right to
Speaker 1: point out that there's different ways that relationships are um
Speaker 1: normatively constructed in different environments. In the case of an
Speaker 1: arranged marriage is very interesting because in the quote unquote
Speaker 1: west we think of love matches as being the ideal.
Speaker 1: And in many cultures, you know, there's forced marriages, which
Speaker 1: we object to in the book. But in some cases,
Speaker 1: the families get together and they try to find a
Speaker 1: mate for you, and you have a veto but you
Speaker 1: meet the person and maybe you you have to create
Speaker 1: love with them, and we think that's a very interesting
Speaker 1: case study for the kind of thing we're talking about,
Speaker 1: which is what if you could use not only the
Speaker 1: psychosocial tools but also biotechnological tools to help bring love
Speaker 1: into a relationship that you want to be relationship where
Speaker 1: it doesn't necessarily start out that way. So let's go
Speaker 1: through a few of the drugs now, because this is
Speaker 1: where I learned I think the most from your book,
Speaker 1: from everything like oxytocin to SSR eyes to a range
Speaker 1: of others, but starting off with oxytocin, you know, which
Speaker 1: I guess is sometimes called the cuddle drug or the
Speaker 1: love drug enhances bonding, but it's also something that you
Speaker 1: can get in a nasal spray. And so is oxytocin
Speaker 1: is something that we see potentially coming along as something
Speaker 1: that might be used in addition or separately from m
Speaker 1: d M A to accomplish somewhat similar objectives or is
Speaker 1: m d M A going to be more appropriate for
Speaker 1: certain context and oxytocin not? And is the research really
Speaker 1: in on oxytocin is yet? Yeah? Well, one thing is
Speaker 1: m d M A also stimulates the release of oxytocin
Speaker 1: just endogenously, So it's not a clean break between those
Speaker 1: two interventions. You know, we started by researching oxytocin. When
Speaker 1: we have this idea for what what we're biotechnological ways
Speaker 1: of intervening in certain aspects of love. What we notice
Speaker 1: was all this stuff coming out about oxytocin, and we
Speaker 1: thought it seemed very promising. There were all these headlines
Speaker 1: coming out about you know, people sniff oxytocin and it
Speaker 1: improves trust, and it improves eye contact and all these
Speaker 1: other things and bonding cues and so forth, and so
Speaker 1: we thought, oh, well, that seems relevant to our project,
Speaker 1: and we did a literature review, and what we found
Speaker 1: was a couple of things. One the most recent and
Speaker 1: and probably most important concern is that a lot of
Speaker 1: the initial findings simply don't seem to replicate. So what
Speaker 1: you'll find is that a handful of laboratories will be
Speaker 1: conducting basically the same experiment. And let's say that, just
Speaker 1: to simplify, let's say twenty laboratories run this experiment and
Speaker 1: one of them gets a statistically significant result that looks publishable,
Speaker 1: and the other nineteen laboratories don't don't find anything publishable. Well,
Speaker 1: what happens, just as a matter of sociology of science,
Speaker 1: is that those nineteen labs will simply file away their
Speaker 1: non significant result in the file drawer. This leads to
Speaker 1: something called the file drawer problem. And then that one
Speaker 1: lab that thinks it's found something, but just mathematically we
Speaker 1: can tell from the situation it's got to be a fluke.
Speaker 1: They published their fluke as a result, and that that
Speaker 1: gets in the literature, and that's what everybody thinks the
Speaker 1: finding is. But unless you know what all the unpublished
Speaker 1: studies were, you actually can't even interpret the statistical values
Speaker 1: that are present in the paper. So some researchers with
Speaker 1: integrity decided to look in their own file drawer and
Speaker 1: taken an accounting of how many versions of experiments they did,
Speaker 1: if you count pilot studies and things that are kind
Speaker 1: of near misses and so forth, And they said, you know,
Speaker 1: if we're honest, if we look at the bulk of
Speaker 1: all the work that we've done, not just our published papers,
Speaker 1: it's not clear that we have very good events for
Speaker 1: a lot of these these findings. Now some of them
Speaker 1: may hold up over time. All that is just to
Speaker 1: say that we're at a stage in the scientific research process,
Speaker 1: where it's unclear which of the published findings will prove
Speaker 1: to be replicable over the long run, in which of
Speaker 1: them will turn out to just be flukes. Nevertheless, I'm
Speaker 1: still not certain that oxytocin is going to be a
Speaker 1: major player in this area. One reason is that you know,
Speaker 1: our our brains release oxytocin under certain conditions through touch,
Speaker 1: through orgasm and kissing and hugging and eye contact and
Speaker 1: all sorts of things, so we're capable of producing our
Speaker 1: own oxytocin. It's conceivable that somebody who has a deficit
Speaker 1: in that capacity, who actually isn't able to release oxytocin
Speaker 1: on their own, or potentially somebody who's unable to engage
Speaker 1: in the sorts of activities that would allow them to
Speaker 1: do so. Maybe somebody has some sort of trauma that
Speaker 1: disables them from certain kinds of physical contact, let's say,
Speaker 1: but they nevertheless want to enhance their bond with a partner.
Speaker 1: It's conceivable that some such people maybe candidates for an
Speaker 1: oxytocin based treatment. But what we're seeing with these nasal
Speaker 1: sprays where you just spray the oxytocin right up through
Speaker 1: the blood brain barrier and into the brain through the nose.
Speaker 1: Is that the effects are pretty short term. The effects
Speaker 1: are measured on these highly artificial economic games and so forth.
Speaker 1: So if you're trying to operationalize trust in the context
Speaker 1: of a study, it's through these these pretty staged kind
Speaker 1: of interactions that it's not clear how they reflect anything
Speaker 1: we do in real life, and the effects seem to
Speaker 1: seem to wear off. So I'm not I'm not too
Speaker 1: keen on oxytocin as being very likely to be a
Speaker 1: significant intervention in this area, but the jury is still
Speaker 1: out because it's still a young research field. Hello, and
Speaker 1: maybe wonder whether there could be almost a deliberate weaponization
Speaker 1: of oxytocin that you would have, whether it's a sports
Speaker 1: team or a military unit or some other group where
Speaker 1: you want to enhance their kind of intro group sense
Speaker 1: of loyalty and fidelity and closeness and enhance the sense
Speaker 1: of alienation and maybe even hostility to the other group.
Speaker 1: That maybe oxytocin could be weaponized. Well, that's an interesting idea. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there are all sorts of psychosocial methods to achieve the
Speaker 1: same thing. In military training, for example, so a lot
Speaker 1: of what's done is precisely to strip away some of
Speaker 1: the person's sense of independent personal judgment, to socialize people
Speaker 1: into obedience to authority within a hierarchical structure, to feel
Speaker 1: a sense of real brotherhood and familial connection among the
Speaker 1: the troops that are all on the same side. And
Speaker 1: also a sort of vilification and demon demonization and dehumanization
Speaker 1: of the enemy. And so you know, that's all accomplished
Speaker 1: with traditional standard military training. Whether that could be enhanced
Speaker 1: through the strategic use of oxytocin, it seems possible, But again,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that the science is is evolved enough
Speaker 1: to be able to make any sort of strong prediction.
Speaker 1: So we typically don't think about animal studies as being
Speaker 1: so key to understanding love relationships and humans. But you
Speaker 1: have a number of pages where you talk about research
Speaker 1: involving a type of rodent called voles. Just just tell
Speaker 1: our audience a little more about voles in the research
Speaker 1: and why they're relevant to think about humans. Possibly relevant,
Speaker 1: I should say, so, voles are a species of rodent,
Speaker 1: there a mammal. There are for our purposes two main
Speaker 1: variety of voles. There's prairie voles and montane voles, and
Speaker 1: one of the species is more or less monogamous in
Speaker 1: the sense that we think of. They bond together with
Speaker 1: one partner, they protect the nests from competing potential mates,
Speaker 1: they really raised the offspring together, and so forth. The
Speaker 1: other species of val, which is closely related, nevertheless has
Speaker 1: an important difference in its mating style, which is that
Speaker 1: it's uh polygamous. And so these voles take multiple partners,
Speaker 1: they aren't as involved in protecting and guarding the primary
Speaker 1: bond with one partner and so forth. And so this
Speaker 1: this is part of what caused researchers to realize that
Speaker 1: there's certainly has got to be some kind of biological
Speaker 1: basis to aspects of our romantic or mating psychology, and
Speaker 1: it's just so so obvious in the case of voles,
Speaker 1: where you can also manipulate these variables. So you can
Speaker 1: intervene in the oxytocin system through injecting certain chemicals into
Speaker 1: the nucleus cucumbents of these voles, and you can in
Speaker 1: essence flip the monogamous voles to become polygamous by introducing
Speaker 1: an oxytocin blocker, and you can similarly get the polygamous
Speaker 1: voles to behave in a more monogamous way by tampering
Speaker 1: with their brain chemistry as well. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: there's always the question of how much about humans can
Speaker 1: be learned from these kinds of animal studies. But some
Speaker 1: researchers think that this basic oxytocin system and its role
Speaker 1: in bonding and our attachment to a close partner is
Speaker 1: something that seems to have been highly conserved through you know,
Speaker 1: many different mammal species, and that there's good reason, evolutionary
Speaker 1: reasons to think that that a very similar system would
Speaker 1: be conserved in humans. You know, there may be technological
Speaker 1: developments that allow us to administer oxytocin in a way
Speaker 1: that's more comparable to what you can do with a role,
Speaker 1: where you can do these direct injections, and if that's true,
Speaker 1: it might be that you could, you know, assert a
Speaker 1: stronger sway over human mating dispositions, which which would be
Speaker 1: quite a striking outcome. He reminded me of conversation I
Speaker 1: had with the guest some weeks ago about kenemy, you know,
Speaker 1: and that's one where it's oftentimes used in the party
Speaker 1: scene by stiffing it right and you know, nasally, but
Speaker 1: that would the therapists tend to prefer the intramuscular administration
Speaker 1: is way to going more directly there, But people haven't
Speaker 1: really tried the intramuscular or i the administration of of
Speaker 1: oxytocin and evaluated that is yet well. Oxytocin it works
Speaker 1: in two different ways depending on if it's active in
Speaker 1: the brain versus active in the blood stream. So it
Speaker 1: works as a neuro hormone in the in the blood stream,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, how it's used. For example, in
Speaker 1: the context of birth thing it's part of what causes
Speaker 1: the letdown of milk, and it stimulates the cervical contractions
Speaker 1: and so forth. When oxytocin is active in the brain,
Speaker 1: it works more like a neurotransmitter. And the issue is
Speaker 1: just that the blood brain barrier causes the brain based
Speaker 1: oxytocin and the bloodstream based oxytocin to not intermingle very much,
Speaker 1: and so injecting oxytocin into the bloodstream isn't necessarily going
Speaker 1: to have the strong brain based effects that allow it
Speaker 1: to work as a neuro transmitter. I see, So another
Speaker 1: drug you talk about, it's some length in all sorts
Speaker 1: of ways are the SSR eyes, you know, I mean
Speaker 1: this is something that what roughly ten percent of the
Speaker 1: population over the to twelve in America. But you make
Speaker 1: the point not just that ss OUR eyes need to
Speaker 1: be looked at in terms of their impact on the individual,
Speaker 1: but that one of the biggest mistakes that we make
Speaker 1: in therapy and medicine and in research is not looking
Speaker 1: at the impact of drugs on people's relationship. There's looking
Speaker 1: just solely doesn't reduce their depression, help them, you know,
Speaker 1: get a bottom of that depression. But actually there's a
Speaker 1: whole relationship that people are involved in, and obviously we
Speaker 1: assume if you can reads to depression, that should help
Speaker 1: the relationship. But you point out that there's a whole
Speaker 1: lot of ways in which this could also go the
Speaker 1: other direction, right, So one thing people should should realize
Speaker 1: is that when you run a clinical trial to test
Speaker 1: the effect of some drug, you have a hypothesis about
Speaker 1: what you think it's gonna do, and you prepare the
Speaker 1: trial to be able to capture data that's relevant to
Speaker 1: your hypothesis. So once people started using selective serotonin reptake inhibitors,
Speaker 1: which are s R eyes as intended and to pressence. Well,
Speaker 1: the questionnaires and the measures they use in the study
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly have to do with symptoms of depression. Often these
Speaker 1: trials aren't set up in such a way to even
Speaker 1: capture the full range of bodily harms, but they certainly
Speaker 1: are not including questionnaires to do with interpersonal relationships or
Speaker 1: how's your relationship working out? And so this is a
Speaker 1: general point. You know, the drugs that we ingest for
Speaker 1: medicine are just chemicals. They're just molecules, and they act
Speaker 1: on our brain in whatever way they act. But when
Speaker 1: we give them a name, when we call the drug
Speaker 1: an antidepressant, we're just saying what we mean to use
Speaker 1: the drug for. We're not saying what is the overall
Speaker 1: effect of the drug. The drug may have all manner
Speaker 1: of other effects that we simply haven't measured properly. And
Speaker 1: then what happens is over time, when people are using
Speaker 1: these drugs, especially on the wide scale like we're seeing,
Speaker 1: you start to get stories anecdotes, case studies where people
Speaker 1: are coming and saying, Doc, you put me on these pills,
Speaker 1: and you know, maybe my symptoms of depression are a
Speaker 1: little bit alleviated. But I found that I'm just not
Speaker 1: in love with my partner anymore. And we've had a
Speaker 1: strong relationship for fifteen years and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you know, after three months into taking these drugs, I
Speaker 1: just find that my my love of life and love
Speaker 1: for my partner are diminished. And what's going on? And
Speaker 1: if you start to hear enough of those stories, you think, well,
Speaker 1: maybe this is the sort of thing we should be
Speaker 1: studying systematically rather in this slap dash anecdotal way. But
Speaker 1: you are finding that in some cases, when you, in
Speaker 1: a prospective study ask people about their relationships who are
Speaker 1: taking ss R eyes, you find some disturbing outcomes. One
Speaker 1: of them is is that people will say, Okay, I
Speaker 1: feel that the drug is dampening my chronic, maladaptive feelings
Speaker 1: of sadness, which is maybe the point of the drug,
Speaker 1: But I also find that it's dampening my ability to
Speaker 1: care about my partner's feelings as well. It's not just
Speaker 1: my own feelings that I'm sort of detaching from. UH.
Speaker 1: In a controversial way, some people think that that's that's
Speaker 1: not the way to deal with these problems is just
Speaker 1: by you know, muting the feelings. Um. But if you're
Speaker 1: muting your ability to respond to your partner's feelings. That's
Speaker 1: something that could have pretty severe consequences for the relationship.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we we argue that it's a major mistake
Speaker 1: not to systematically study these interpersonal variables. And I'll say,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm familiar with a number of researchers who
Speaker 1: are extremely critical about s s R is. The one
Speaker 1: point that they'll make is that the known risk of
Speaker 1: a side effect on libido in dampening people's sex drive
Speaker 1: is very robust, and some studies put the risk of
Speaker 1: that upwards of Now, I do want to just add
Speaker 1: a caveat to this, which is that a given physical
Speaker 1: side effect, if we want to know morally how to
Speaker 1: feel about it, we have to understand how does it
Speaker 1: fit into the whole dynamic of the relationship. And I'll
Speaker 1: just add to that. One reason why I think a
Speaker 1: lot of this research hasn't been done is precisely because
Speaker 1: it starts to get complicated when you put two people
Speaker 1: in the picture, Because now you're not just checking off
Speaker 1: symptoms with person A. You have to ask yourself questions
Speaker 1: like what style of attachment does this person have with others?
Speaker 1: And what's really going on in the relationship and what
Speaker 1: are the background conditions of their story and so forth,
Speaker 1: and it's just increasingly hard to scientifically capture all of
Speaker 1: that variance, which I think is part of the reason
Speaker 1: why it hasn't been done. Um but just finally on
Speaker 1: ss R I s, as some researchers think that the
Speaker 1: the therapeutic effect that's been reported is most of it
Speaker 1: is probably down to placebo, and that there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of good evidence that over and above placebo, ss
Speaker 1: R E s are for most people very effective even
Speaker 1: in treating depression, in other words, doing the thing that
Speaker 1: they're intended to do well. I mean, I was struck though,
Speaker 1: because you said there is this limited evidence. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not just about blunting libido and arousal and the
Speaker 1: duration intensity of orgasms, but also blocking empathy. You know,
Speaker 1: quite a substantial and real SSR I sort of just
Speaker 1: not caring as much about their partner. The depression gets
Speaker 1: lifted a bit, but then it's counteracted by this actually
Speaker 1: serious negative effect on that and that that seems to
Speaker 1: be fairly common, although, as I guess you say, there's
Speaker 1: not enough research to really know, but you did report
Speaker 1: a few studies which indicated that was a pretty sick
Speaker 1: nificant impact of S s R EYES, right. I mean,
Speaker 1: so people who are taking ss R E s and
Speaker 1: who have noticed diminishments in their libido sometimes will just
Speaker 1: spontaneously report to their doctor as well that it's not
Speaker 1: just their sex drive that's been diminished. It's, as you say,
Speaker 1: their sense of empathy, their their ability to care about
Speaker 1: others feelings, and their ability to cry, their ability to
Speaker 1: imagine and to dream. I mean, all sorts of things
Speaker 1: seem to be dulled by S s R E s
Speaker 1: for many people, and we think that figuring out what
Speaker 1: the interpersonal and social aspects of that are is something
Speaker 1: that should be front and center in this research going forward.
Speaker 1: You know, Brian, you talked about oftimes people don't pay attention,
Speaker 1: whether it's physicians researchers to the quote unquote side effects,
Speaker 1: which may include, you know, decreased libido and what that
Speaker 1: would mean for relationships. But one of the interesting ones
Speaker 1: you talked about was in pointing out that oftentimes with
Speaker 1: O c D that an emotion like intense jealousy are
Speaker 1: some of the assessive aspects of amorous relationships can effectively
Speaker 1: be treated quote on well with the same drugs that
Speaker 1: we use to treat O c D. Yeah, A couple
Speaker 1: of researchers have noticed that at the level of symptomology
Speaker 1: and behavior and mindset, there are some striking parallels between
Speaker 1: classical symptoms of o c D and certain experiences of jealousy,
Speaker 1: one of which is this checking behavior. So I have
Speaker 1: O c D, and for years, whenever I would get
Speaker 1: out of the car and i'd i'd locked the door
Speaker 1: and start walking to the store, I think that I
Speaker 1: really locked the door, and I go back and check
Speaker 1: it and Okay, it's there. And then I do it
Speaker 1: and I go and I do this, you know, fifteen
Speaker 1: times before I finally leave. It's a totally compulsive thing.
Speaker 1: I know, it's irrational. I can't help it. Well, some
Speaker 1: people who experience jealousy do the same thing, you know,
Speaker 1: they check in with their partner. Who were you talking
Speaker 1: to and what were you talking about? And this kind
Speaker 1: of a thing, and they start to obsessively interrogate the
Speaker 1: partner because they're really just trying to deal with their
Speaker 1: own compulsion. I mean, the partner maybe is giving them
Speaker 1: no legitimate reason to feel this extreme jealousy. And so
Speaker 1: in those cases where you have an irrational jealousy that's
Speaker 1: causing you to engage in these compulsive, repetitive behaviors that
Speaker 1: you know are really not helpful. It seemed likely to
Speaker 1: these researchers that there might actually be a neurochemical basis
Speaker 1: for both of these kinds of symptoms. And so there
Speaker 1: are a couple of instances where the psychiatrists actually prescribed
Speaker 1: S s R e S in conjunction with cognitive behavioral
Speaker 1: therapy as a treatment for jealousy basically and found that
Speaker 1: in the cases described it was effective. Yeah. I mean
Speaker 1: you also talk about how you know, some of some
Speaker 1: of these things like m D M A almost cannoperate
Speaker 1: directly in terms of our love relationship by affecting our emotions.
Speaker 1: But then you take a drug like viagra, right, which
Speaker 1: I guess, like I says, all, I can go cut
Speaker 1: both ways. I mean, on the one end, if viagra
Speaker 1: by enabling you know, an older man to get an
Speaker 1: erection and have sex, and if that's a desirable thing
Speaker 1: in the relationship, that could be a good thing, and
Speaker 1: not least be a good thing, because then if you're
Speaker 1: having sex, it's gonna be releasing oxytocin, which is going
Speaker 1: to be another kind of love making or love feeling drug.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, if your partner is not interested
Speaker 1: in that part of thing, and maybe you know, viagraphy
Speaker 1: if you want to just left well enough alow, and
Speaker 1: a couple is aging into a fairly non you know,
Speaker 1: conventionally sexual relationship, or their sexual relationship is evolving away
Speaker 1: from being so focused on erections, maybe viagra does more
Speaker 1: harmening good. Yeah, I think that's right. There's been some
Speaker 1: interesting feminist critiques of viagraa which is that it prioritizes
Speaker 1: and promotes a certain kind of penile vaginal intercourse, which
Speaker 1: often for women is not necessarily the most enjoyable form
Speaker 1: of sexual activity. And so it might well be that,
Speaker 1: you know, as people are going into older age, you know,
Speaker 1: assuming a heterosexual couple, a lot of women would prefer
Speaker 1: to have non penetrative forms of sex and to explore
Speaker 1: their bodies in different ways and so forth. But if
Speaker 1: there's this imperative to you know, have a certain kind
Speaker 1: of uh sex into old age, and to to take
Speaker 1: a pill to accomplish that, some people would say the
Speaker 1: pill is having a certain physical effect that maybe narrowly
Speaker 1: conceived do you think is desirable? But maybe you should
Speaker 1: step back and think about the bigger picture here, you know,
Speaker 1: is there more to sex than just the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that this pill enables. Well, you also talk about,
Speaker 1: you know, different types of relationships and the role of
Speaker 1: sex in and I remember reading once Brian. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's accurate or not, but that if you
Speaker 1: look at the relationships that oftentimes are the most successful
Speaker 1: over a long period of time, it's where the couple
Speaker 1: is more or less evenly matched in their desire for sex.
Speaker 1: So that a couple which remains highly sexually oriented is
Speaker 1: more likely to do well. Or conversely, a couple where
Speaker 1: both are are not particularly sexually oriented, for whom they
Speaker 1: have a loving relationship that's almost maybe more like a
Speaker 1: sibling relationship, you know, with little or no sex can
Speaker 1: also be highly successful. And that some of the greatest
Speaker 1: tensions can result when the when then there's a mismatch there.
Speaker 1: And then I think in the book which you raises
Speaker 1: the issue that one could use drugs either to bring
Speaker 1: these things more into a greater commonality, that in one
Speaker 1: sense it might be helping the less sexually oriented person
Speaker 1: to become more so or conversely diminishing the person who's
Speaker 1: more sexualized, who wants more sex, in order to create
Speaker 1: a greater meeting ground, and that this can be done
Speaker 1: an ethically either way. Yeah, there's a there's a certain
Speaker 1: possibility here that, you know, adjusting libidos of one or
Speaker 1: the other partner to try to make them more harmonious
Speaker 1: could be helpful. An early critique of some of our
Speaker 1: work I don't remember who raised this was that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's an alternative here to to try and get this
Speaker 1: couple's libidos matched, Which is supposed one partner is interested
Speaker 1: in having sex once a month and the other one
Speaker 1: would really prefer to be having sex once a day.
Speaker 1: It seems like, gosh, how are they going to deal
Speaker 1: with this problem now? Of course, the problem assumes that
Speaker 1: they're in a monogamous relationship. There's a background norm here
Speaker 1: that's causing this particular mismatching libido to amount to a problem.
Speaker 1: Whereas it could be the case if this couple was
Speaker 1: in an open relationship and the partner with the stronger
Speaker 1: libido was allowed to have sex with other partners under
Speaker 1: certain agreed upon conditions and so forth, it might be
Speaker 1: that there's no problem at all in the relationship. And
Speaker 1: so this just drives to a broader point, which is
Speaker 1: partly what we're trying to do in the book is
Speaker 1: say it's not ever enough to just ask what's the
Speaker 1: local effect of technology? We have to rather ask what
Speaker 1: are the set of norms within which the technology is working,
Speaker 1: What are the set of social background assumptions that are
Speaker 1: shaping how we evaluate the technology? And so you're right,
Speaker 1: I think that for a couple who overall values of monogamy,
Speaker 1: and they have strong reason too, and maybe they've considered
Speaker 1: open relationships and so forth, and they've thoughtfully rejected that
Speaker 1: given their particular you know, dispositions and values for them,
Speaker 1: it might be that the use of a drug to
Speaker 1: sink things up in terms of libido could be the
Speaker 1: best solution for them. But this is always a risk
Speaker 1: of technologies, is that they sometimes allow us to they
Speaker 1: disincentivize us, I should say, from having to think about
Speaker 1: the norms that we're taking for granted, Whereas if we
Speaker 1: didn't have the technology available, we might have to confront
Speaker 1: certain things about our implicit value system that otherwise we
Speaker 1: wouldn't be interrogating. And that's something that that has to
Speaker 1: be kept in mind. That technologies can draw our attention
Speaker 1: away from social conditions and from background norms, and that's
Speaker 1: something that we should be wary of. Let's take a
Speaker 1: break here and go to an ad h Of course,
Speaker 1: you keep making the point that we just need to
Speaker 1: be aware of the ways in which drugs can affect
Speaker 1: our relationships. You know, one of the things you come
Speaker 1: back to oftentimes is about hormones and drugs that affect hormones,
Speaker 1: like birth control pills, And there was some study I
Speaker 1: think you pointed out about, you know, the impact of
Speaker 1: birth control pills on the types of mates that women
Speaker 1: may end up choosing and whether those relationships turn out
Speaker 1: to be successful long term or not. Right. So, this
Speaker 1: is research where some of it seems robust, some of
Speaker 1: it seems contested. But the standard narrative is that part
Speaker 1: of what drives our attraction to particular mates is something
Speaker 1: to do with our old factory system. We seem to
Speaker 1: be picking up through our nose and through all faction
Speaker 1: evidence of the genetic compatibility of ourselves with the partner
Speaker 1: in terms of passing on healthy and in systems. It's
Speaker 1: called immunohisto compatibility complex is something that supposedly is detectable
Speaker 1: in this semi conscious, unconscious way through you know, molecules
Speaker 1: that we can we can smell off the person. And
Speaker 1: so the thought is birth control, hormonal birth control may
Speaker 1: disrupt this process. It may make it so that we're
Speaker 1: less sensitive in terms of these subtle cues that we
Speaker 1: pick up through a person's smell to our sort of
Speaker 1: underlying compatibility with them that normally would be driving our
Speaker 1: sense of attraction. And so here's the risk. Suppose that
Speaker 1: I'm on birth control, I'm I'm dating around and I'm
Speaker 1: trying to figure out who a good might mate might be,
Speaker 1: and I've I've got this process blocked so that I'm
Speaker 1: missing a certain amount of important information, and I'm going
Speaker 1: off of other information. You know, this person is charming
Speaker 1: and friendly, and they seem nice, and we get along well,
Speaker 1: and they make me laugh and so forth, and so
Speaker 1: you you decide to go along with that partnership. And
Speaker 1: then at some point, let's say you want to have
Speaker 1: children with this person, so you you go off birth control.
Speaker 1: And now it happens is in some cases you have
Speaker 1: information now made available to you that in some cases
Speaker 1: just turns you off, where through these subtle, subconscious cues
Speaker 1: that you're getting through your factory system, something in your
Speaker 1: brain is saying, warning, this is not a good genetic match. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is not somebody who you should be combining your
Speaker 1: genes with for the sake of the health of your offspring.
Speaker 1: And the way that that plays out phenomenologically is that
Speaker 1: you just feel not into the person. Your your sexual
Speaker 1: chemistry is not there, and so this can be a
Speaker 1: very devastating kind of a situation for people. There's evidence
Speaker 1: that this sometimes happens. How often it happens, how robust
Speaker 1: this story is is unclear, but that's kind of the
Speaker 1: starting point for research in this area. But the result
Speaker 1: being that a couple of that gets going when a
Speaker 1: woman's using the birth control that later in the life
Speaker 1: she may find herself being maybe sexually less connected, less frustrated.
Speaker 1: But I think you also make the point, or these
Speaker 1: studies make the point that sometimes that same person who
Speaker 1: she's feeling more and more dissatisfied with may actually turn
Speaker 1: out to be good on the parenting level or something
Speaker 1: like that. Right, there seems to be some paradoxical findings
Speaker 1: in this area. So yeah, We'll have to see how
Speaker 1: this research develops. But it's it's it's it's a very
Speaker 1: sort of thing that we're talking about should be done.
Speaker 1: I mean, lots of people are und hermonal birth control,
Speaker 1: and as many women know, hormonal birth control can have
Speaker 1: radical effects on your subjective experience, on your moods, on
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes how you relate to other people, and
Speaker 1: so understanding the full swath of of potential effects beyond
Speaker 1: just you know, you might experience nausea or breast tenderness.
Speaker 1: It's like you might experience relational difficulties, and we should
Speaker 1: be aware of the range of relational difficulties that people
Speaker 1: may face. Well. A big part of the book, also, right,
Speaker 1: is talking about the role of drugs in terms of
Speaker 1: our unhealthy or dangerous or abusive relationships, as well as
Speaker 1: relationships that might not be any of those, but which
Speaker 1: for religious or cultural reasons, may be disfavored relationships. Right,
Speaker 1: And you talk about obviously, when it comes to drugs,
Speaker 1: are sums that are gonna help reduce you know, sort
Speaker 1: of anti lust drug and that may be the easiest,
Speaker 1: and anti attraction drugs are harder, and anti attachment drugs
Speaker 1: even harder. Than that, But you have a whole discussion about,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to block lust, right and obviously with pedophilia,
Speaker 1: you know there's testosterol blockers and this chemical castration, but
Speaker 1: you know there's also other situations you talk about where
Speaker 1: people may want to be blocking the lusty field, blocking
Speaker 1: their feelings of wanting to have sex with somebody from
Speaker 1: the same sex, where that's not something that their culture
Speaker 1: or religion permits. Just expand on that part of it, Brian,
Speaker 1: if you would, right, So, we were thinking about these
Speaker 1: hypothetical anti love drugs, and some of them are not
Speaker 1: so hypothetical. So as as you mentioned, intervening in the
Speaker 1: testosterone system can very much dampen in person's libido. And
Speaker 1: if you have a damp in libido, that means that,
Speaker 1: as you said earlier, you're not releasing oxytocin in certain contexts,
Speaker 1: which can affect attachment and so forth. So you can
Speaker 1: institute a kind of global anti i don't know, bonding,
Speaker 1: anti romance effect in some cases through these libido impairing drugs,
Speaker 1: which which have been used in the case of sex
Speaker 1: offenders and in the case of some people with pedophilia,
Speaker 1: in the case of sex offenders or people of pedophilia.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, are there cases of just, you know, ordinary
Speaker 1: folks who might also be interested in somehow taking an
Speaker 1: anti love drug just to use that shorthand. And we
Speaker 1: noticed in looking through the literature that there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who think to themselves, gosh, you know,
Speaker 1: my life would be so much better if only I
Speaker 1: could not be in love with this person. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe you're pining after somebody who won't ever return your feelings.
Speaker 1: Let's say, unrequited love can be an absolute disaster for
Speaker 1: your sense of self esteem, your ability to focus on
Speaker 1: anything else. And so it seems like, wow, if I
Speaker 1: could take some pill that would allow me to just
Speaker 1: focus more on myself and my own goals and not
Speaker 1: be so obsessed with this person who will never be
Speaker 1: interested in me, maybe that would be a situation where
Speaker 1: it could be ethically appropriate or even prudent to use
Speaker 1: this technology. We also thought of somebody who is desperately
Speaker 1: attached or attracted to someone who abuses them and who
Speaker 1: they know rationally, I ought not to be in this relationship.
Speaker 1: What's best for me is to leave this this household
Speaker 1: and get out of here and set up my life
Speaker 1: somewhere else. But many people will report that, and this
Speaker 1: is often a side effective abuse where you have a
Speaker 1: kind of Stockholm syndrome kick in, where people will feel
Speaker 1: even more attached to the person who abuses them, maybe
Speaker 1: because partly they're trying to rationalize the abuse in some way.
Speaker 1: And so this is a very difficult situation where if
Speaker 1: a person has a higher order awareness of the fact
Speaker 1: that they ought to leave the relationship, and they wish
Speaker 1: that that first order attraction that they feel were diminished
Speaker 1: because it would help them achieve their important and sensible
Speaker 1: goal to leave the relationship, we thought that might be
Speaker 1: a good use of these drugs as well. But then
Speaker 1: we came on too. Well, you know, once you have
Speaker 1: a technology available, once you you know, put the gun
Speaker 1: on the on the stage set, somebody might use it
Speaker 1: for something other than how it was intended. And so
Speaker 1: we thought about the way that people with minority sexual orientations,
Speaker 1: gay people in many cultures historically certainly, but also in
Speaker 1: many places today have been forced to undergo various forms
Speaker 1: of chemical castration and attempted conversion therapies and so forth.
Speaker 1: And we think this is a real worry because the
Speaker 1: main refrain that you hear now in the case of
Speaker 1: conversion therapy is well it doesn't work. They say, well,
Speaker 1: it's harmful in any way. It doesn't work these various
Speaker 1: techniques that people employ in in conservative religious communities to
Speaker 1: try to turn a gay person straight to to use
Speaker 1: that lingo, and and we thought, well, that's maybe a
Speaker 1: bit myopic, because insofar as there is some neurochemical, genetic,
Speaker 1: biological basis to sexual orientation, it might be that in
Speaker 1: the future technologies could be developed that would be effective
Speaker 1: and you'd have a kind of high tech conversion therapy.
Speaker 1: And we thought this is something we should actually take
Speaker 1: seriously as a concern because it would undermine one of
Speaker 1: the main arguments that's used to promote the human and
Speaker 1: civil rights of gay people, which is sexual orientation can't
Speaker 1: be changed. Sometimes there's actually conflation, which is they'll say, well,
Speaker 1: a person is born this way, and that implies that
Speaker 1: it can't be changed, but that doesn't actually follow. You
Speaker 1: might be born with the trait that can nevertheless be changed.
Speaker 1: But basically that's what people mean is think I didn't
Speaker 1: choose it, and also I can't change it. Therefore you
Speaker 1: shouldn't discriminate against me, And we think that's a bad
Speaker 1: argument because if it turns out that you can change it, well,
Speaker 1: then it suggests that your ethical argument for why gay
Speaker 1: people should have human rights is suddenly the empirical premise
Speaker 1: is refuted, and that just seems like a really bad
Speaker 1: way to go. The claim for human rights and fair
Speaker 1: treatment and non discrimination of sexual orientation minorities um follows
Speaker 1: the same logic as why you shouldn't be able to
Speaker 1: discriminate against people because of their religious beliefs. But you
Speaker 1: can change your religious beliefs. It's not like they're immutable.
Speaker 1: In fact, Dan Savage has made this point. The idea
Speaker 1: that something has to be immutable in order to be
Speaker 1: worthy of respect is just a nonsense premise, and so
Speaker 1: we should come up with stronger, more principled arguments to
Speaker 1: support gay rights rather than things that hang on a
Speaker 1: potentially contingent empirical premise about what I also see you
Speaker 1: do any of the book, and it's very nu odds right.
Speaker 1: Is on the one hand, you say, look, it's not
Speaker 1: enough to just look at the impact of drugs and
Speaker 1: individuals and relationships in a laboratory set, and you need
Speaker 1: to look at it in the real world to real
Speaker 1: you understand this stuff. And then I think the same
Speaker 1: point you make in some respects in terms of the
Speaker 1: ethical views, right, which is that you and I and
Speaker 1: many other people, especially people are progressively minded, would say that,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to change the morays and the
Speaker 1: values so that people can have a loving, sexual intimate
Speaker 1: relationship with somebody of whatever sexual orientation or or gender.
Speaker 1: That that should just that's just what it means about
Speaker 1: to talk about the human rights of individuals and the
Speaker 1: human rights of people, you know, when it comes to
Speaker 1: their sexuality. But then you have the interesting case, right
Speaker 1: of these young men growing up in a Jewish ultra
Speaker 1: orthodox background who feel, you know, homosexual desires, and in
Speaker 1: that community there's some encouragement, if not pressure, for these
Speaker 1: young men to take SSR eyes or other things that
Speaker 1: we just simply reduce their sexual desire. I mean, the
Speaker 1: same thing might be true when it comes to people
Speaker 1: going to the Catholic priesthood are expected to be celibate,
Speaker 1: and it would also be true of Christian Islamic fundamentalist
Speaker 1: views where they just far home and sexuality. So we say, yes,
Speaker 1: these views, of course they should evolve in these are
Speaker 1: backward views and their anti human rights. But in the
Speaker 1: real world, where people may in fact sometimes be tortured
Speaker 1: by their own homosexual desires, and would you know, in
Speaker 1: their own perhaps prefer to let go of those desires
Speaker 1: so that they wouldn't be so tortured, that raises an
Speaker 1: interesting ethical dilemma, right, absolutely, it's an extremely difficult case.
Speaker 1: So I agree with you that if I could wave
Speaker 1: a magic wand and make these deep seated, religiously justified
Speaker 1: homophobic attitudes disappear, that's obviously the preferable course of action
Speaker 1: than trying to help somebody who is situated within that
Speaker 1: value system cope with or change their sexual orientation. You know,
Speaker 1: so from a progressive moral standpoint, there's simply no reason
Speaker 1: that a person should ever feel pressured to change their
Speaker 1: sexual orientation. But here's the problem. We live in a
Speaker 1: world where not everybody has a progressive moral worldview. And
Speaker 1: in fact, if you are raised in an ultra Orthodox
Speaker 1: community or you know, fundamentalists Christian community or Islamic community,
Speaker 1: where these sort of anti homosexual attitudes are embedded within
Speaker 1: the value structure of the religion, it's easy for somebody
Speaker 1: standing outside of that worldview to say well, just you know,
Speaker 1: just leave your community. It's it's that simple. But for
Speaker 1: some people who are in a relatively cloistered community, whose
Speaker 1: whole worldview, whose friends and family and everything that they
Speaker 1: ever cared about is wrapped up in this, and also
Speaker 1: who made themselves sincerely hold these religious beliefs, that's the
Speaker 1: further thing. You know, a lot of these youths that
Speaker 1: I reported on, they go to their rabbis and their
Speaker 1: counselors and they say, I have these desires that I,
Speaker 1: based on my own theological commitments, believe are separating me
Speaker 1: from the creator of the universe. Now what do you
Speaker 1: do with a claim like that. I might go up
Speaker 1: to the person and say, well, let's do a little
Speaker 1: philosophy of religion and maybe I can you know, talk
Speaker 1: you out of your commitment to your reading of the
Speaker 1: Torah or something like that. But you know, it just
Speaker 1: ain't that simple. If this other person is an adult
Speaker 1: of sound mind and they've reflected on these reviews, these views,
Speaker 1: and they've they've studied their religious beliefs, and they really
Speaker 1: have a certain kind of different premise. They model the
Speaker 1: world differently, and they see that what's most important to
Speaker 1: them and their sense of self is, say, their relationship
Speaker 1: to God, and they see their sexual desires as being
Speaker 1: not central to their identity. Again, I think there's every
Speaker 1: reason to try to persuade them of a different view,
Speaker 1: or to try to maybe provide resources whereby there's some
Speaker 1: way to reconcile their religious beliefs with their sexual orientation.
Speaker 1: But at some point I think, I think you have
Speaker 1: to try to be respectful of a person's self conception
Speaker 1: and not tell other people how they ought to feel.
Speaker 1: And then this raises an extremely difficult situation, which is
Speaker 1: suppose you're in one of these communities where as a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, you are depressed. You're depressed because you
Speaker 1: have feelings that you based on your theological commitments which
Speaker 1: obviously were socialized into having cause you to reject. And
Speaker 1: now you go to the doctor and you say I
Speaker 1: need some treatment for this. Now the doctor has an
Speaker 1: opportunity to give you a drug that is, you know,
Speaker 1: on the label it says it's going to treat your depression,
Speaker 1: which is a vale reason to prescribe the drug for you,
Speaker 1: but it also has a known side effect that it
Speaker 1: is probably going to reduce your libido. Which will make
Speaker 1: you maybe not have these feelings at least not so
Speaker 1: strongly that you had before as as a side effect. Now,
Speaker 1: if you know that that's a side effect, if it's
Speaker 1: a foreseen but now also intended outcome of the drug,
Speaker 1: it's really just being used as high tech conversion therapy. Well,
Speaker 1: it's not re orienting you necessarily, it's basically just killing
Speaker 1: your libido. But that's the situation that these counselors are
Speaker 1: confronted with. And I guess maybe structurally the way of
Speaker 1: talking about it is how much human well being in
Speaker 1: the here and now for people who are embedded within
Speaker 1: certain social networks should be sacrificed on the altar of
Speaker 1: long term social change by making certain technologies unavailable. If
Speaker 1: prescribing an s s r I to one of these
Speaker 1: Yeshiva students genuinely will help them function and live their
Speaker 1: life in a way that's not despairing, it seems like
Speaker 1: there's at least a prima facial reason that that should
Speaker 1: be done. Now again, somebody will say, well, you shouldn't
Speaker 1: do that, You should just change their entire social, moral,
Speaker 1: and religious worldview. And my thought is, okay, well, God
Speaker 1: bless you, good luck, with that in some communities it
Speaker 1: seems like that's not the most immediate way to relieve suffering,
Speaker 1: and it just puts people in this horrible, horrible dilemma.
Speaker 1: And so we really struggle with that case in the book.
Speaker 1: We don't quite know what to do with it, because
Speaker 1: it's a true dilemma with just tragedy on every end.
Speaker 1: You know, it may be also wondered about other sort
Speaker 1: of group settings, like when you know, we have an
Speaker 1: America over two million people behind bars, you know, over
Speaker 1: who are men, and in the vast majority, we presume
Speaker 1: our heterosexual who may want to have a reduced sex
Speaker 1: drive while they're behind bars to make life more manageable.
Speaker 1: We could think about, you know, as military units become
Speaker 1: more integrated of men and women, but where there may
Speaker 1: be good reasons for military discipline to discourage any sort
Speaker 1: of sexual relationship, you know, whether homosexual, heterosexual, or what
Speaker 1: have you. That you know, there could be arguments for
Speaker 1: allowing or even having these draw ugs be administered in
Speaker 1: order to accomplish other desirable objectives. Now, of course, there's
Speaker 1: a question about who says who determines, you know, it's
Speaker 1: one thing to say that, you know, the prison ward
Speaker 1: is gonna say we're gonna give this to all the inmates,
Speaker 1: or that the head of the military unit's gonna say
Speaker 1: we're gonna give this to all. But when done on
Speaker 1: a voluntary basis, yeah, it's hard to say. I mean,
Speaker 1: some people will question the degree of voluntariness of a
Speaker 1: certain choice if the choice is being made within what
Speaker 1: others construe as an unjust system. So if I'm in
Speaker 1: an oppressive institution and I think that I'm making a
Speaker 1: choice to relieve certain burdens within that institution, some people
Speaker 1: would say, well, you're really being coerced by the circumstances.
Speaker 1: Now there's a whole philosophical debate we could have about that,
Speaker 1: But that's just raising a point of nuance. Here's the
Speaker 1: way of making maybe making the point even more dramatic.
Speaker 1: I have a colleague, O the Martin Mohan, who's a
Speaker 1: Norwegian philosopher who wrote a paper about a way to
Speaker 1: potentially deal with the immense suffering that goes along with
Speaker 1: factory farming, mass factory farming of animals who are just
Speaker 1: you aren't basically being tortured all all day long and
Speaker 1: then slaughtered unceremoniously at the end of it. Now, what
Speaker 1: people like Cale Martin and I who are non meat eaters,
Speaker 1: would prefer is that factory farming was banned, and so
Speaker 1: that's what we think is the morally preferable state of affairs.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't be having factory farming. But we're also aware
Speaker 1: of the fact that for every day that factory farming
Speaker 1: continues and isn't banned because of complicated political realities that
Speaker 1: we can't change. You know, we should advocate for the change,
Speaker 1: and in the long run, hopefully it will be banned.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime, there's billions of animals just living
Speaker 1: utterly miserable lives, and so only Martin says, maybe there's
Speaker 1: a moral obligation to basically drug these animals on mass
Speaker 1: so that at the very least they can be, you know,
Speaker 1: high on some sort of drug and not feel all
Speaker 1: the pain that they're going through and not be aware
Speaker 1: of the fact that they're living in such dire circumstances.
Speaker 1: You know, when he told me this idea, I recoiled.
Speaker 1: I felt, what a horrible idea. You know, if you
Speaker 1: if you administer these drugs to these poor pigs and
Speaker 1: chickens and so forth, all it's gonna do is disincentivize
Speaker 1: anybody from pursuing the long term structural change that's needed,
Speaker 1: because they'll say, well, the the animals aren't suffering anymore,
Speaker 1: so what's the problem. And so you know this is
Speaker 1: this is an analogous kind of a dilemma, and as
Speaker 1: you can tell from my animated way of speaking, I
Speaker 1: don't know how to resolve it because I agree that
Speaker 1: those animals are suffering right now, and it might well
Speaker 1: be that the mass distribution of drugs would help these
Speaker 1: animals right now not suffer so much, but it might
Speaker 1: be at the cost of disincentivizing long term social change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, I mean this is also where I
Speaker 1: think you have a bit of a dilemma, which is
Speaker 1: when we talk about the policy implications of all this,
Speaker 1: and it's different points. You go back and forth between
Speaker 1: whether or not these drugs should be bad or be
Speaker 1: allowed by prescription only, right, And I think at one
Speaker 1: point you say M D M A should be prescipe
Speaker 1: prescription only is you know, adults should not be allowed
Speaker 1: to obtain that outside some sanctioned setting, perhaps involving prescription.
Speaker 1: While at the same time you're saying we don't really
Speaker 1: want to be medicalizing relationships and putting all this in
Speaker 1: the hands of doctors in an inappropriate way. And then
Speaker 1: you bump into the issue that even when things are banned,
Speaker 1: you know, where there's a market, people will end up
Speaker 1: using this, and that bands can have the effect of
Speaker 1: reducing the number of people of access who do certain things,
Speaker 1: but at the same time increasing the dangers and risk
Speaker 1: for people who do participate or or or obtain that
Speaker 1: drug in an illicit environment. And I see that's another
Speaker 1: issue where you're sort of struggling with where should we
Speaker 1: be going on this without coming to any clear conclusions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know you're right to raise these tensions within
Speaker 1: our our work. One thing I'll draw distinction here is
Speaker 1: we think that it would be most prudent for people
Speaker 1: to take these powerful drugs under some sort of guided hand,
Speaker 1: somebody who has the wherewithal to be able to help
Speaker 1: them have the best possible experience and to avoid some
Speaker 1: of the worst possible risks. Whether that's a doctor in
Speaker 1: a white lab code or whether it's somebody who's undergone
Speaker 1: some other form of training in a less obviously overtly
Speaker 1: medical setting. Is unclear, but we don't argue that that
Speaker 1: should be the only legal option. And I can I
Speaker 1: can tether this to another paper that I wrote with
Speaker 1: many colleagues recently, whose title is Racial Justice requires Ending
Speaker 1: the War on Drugs. So we argue that actually drugs
Speaker 1: should be not only decriminalized, We argue for the long
Speaker 1: term legalization of drugs for reasons to do with safety
Speaker 1: and making sure that the drugs that are used aren't
Speaker 1: only available in underground markets and so forth. And so
Speaker 1: I think that it should not be a crime for
Speaker 1: people to consume substances however they are obtained. It might
Speaker 1: be good for it to be a crime for certain
Speaker 1: people to sell certain substances in an irresponsible way. I mean,
Speaker 1: just in the way that if you have a you
Speaker 1: sell alcohol, you have to have a liquor license and
Speaker 1: you can't sell to teenagers. You know, maybe something similar
Speaker 1: should be true for silocybin and M D M A
Speaker 1: and so forth. But we do think it's prudent. We
Speaker 1: think it's makes sense and is the best case scenario
Speaker 1: to be using these drugs in an appropriately supported way.
Speaker 1: And then as for medicalization, the main concern we have
Speaker 1: is that under the current model. If you want to
Speaker 1: make a drug available to someone, it's I there, it's
Speaker 1: a criminalized recreational drug quote unquote, or we call it medicine.
Speaker 1: And in order to give somebody a drug that we
Speaker 1: call medicine, we have to diagnose them with something. And
Speaker 1: then what happens, and pharmaceutical companies have been implicated in
Speaker 1: this for a long time, is this kind of disease
Speaker 1: monitoring where you figure out that a drug might be
Speaker 1: able to help someone, and maybe it genuinely can help
Speaker 1: them in some way, but you don't have a diagnostic
Speaker 1: category yet, You don't have a pathology or a disease
Speaker 1: label that you can apply to them, And so you
Speaker 1: make one up, and you come up with some diagnostic criteria,
Speaker 1: and you lobby for it, and you get some psychiatrists
Speaker 1: to sign onto and so forth, and now you've come
Speaker 1: up with a new disease that we can subsume human
Speaker 1: experience under and come up with, you know, here's the
Speaker 1: prescription to solve the disease. So we try to say
Speaker 1: we should think about drugs as potentially being enhancements, in
Speaker 1: other words, things that can simply help make your life
Speaker 1: go better if used in the right way under the
Speaker 1: right circumstances without having to first pathologize you. We don't
Speaker 1: have to decide whether you have a relationship disorder or
Speaker 1: some sort of I don't know, commitment phobia, or something
Speaker 1: becoming a diagnostic category. We can just say, given your circumstances,
Speaker 1: a kind of relationship you're in, your values, and the
Speaker 1: likely effects of this drug, if this drug is made
Speaker 1: available to you, you know, setting other considerations aside, will
Speaker 1: it help your life be better? And if it would
Speaker 1: help your life be better, we think that that should
Speaker 1: be a sufficient reason to make the drug available, even
Speaker 1: if there isn't some pathologization that also goes along with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I I just thinking in terms of contemporary
Speaker 1: politics to initiatives pest and our again back in one
Speaker 1: was an old drug decrime, one to sort of institute
Speaker 1: a Portugal like model with respect to drug possession and
Speaker 1: harm reduction and treatment. And the other was one to
Speaker 1: legitimize psychedelic assists. Psilocybin specifically assist a psychotherapy where one
Speaker 1: would not necessarily I think, need to have a defined
Speaker 1: medical condition where one might be able to use it
Speaker 1: just to enhance quality of life. And you know, I
Speaker 1: was just recently at a meeting looking at the next
Speaker 1: wave of psychedelic spalat initiatives, and one that's being proposed,
Speaker 1: possibly in Colorado that light include both this prescribed use
Speaker 1: of psychedelics but also ways of decriminalizing the non prescribed
Speaker 1: use as well. So it does seem like these are
Speaker 1: going to be some of the interesting policy debates going
Speaker 1: on in this area. Yeah, you're really touching on the
Speaker 1: frontier of this debate. And when the organ statute was
Speaker 1: passed or ordinance or whatever it was, I was really
Speaker 1: intrigued to see the circumstances under which they'll make a
Speaker 1: silo cybin available. And you're right, it's a sort of
Speaker 1: quasi clinic like environment where you can have access to
Speaker 1: the drug. You don't have to have a prescription. I
Speaker 1: think you just have to be twenty one and maybe
Speaker 1: you have to get a license or something like that,
Speaker 1: and then you just take it insofar as you think
Speaker 1: it will be good for you. Maybe you even take
Speaker 1: because you think it'll be fun, and maybe that's a
Speaker 1: legitimate reason to take a drug, as long as as
Speaker 1: you say, there's a certain margin of safety. And so
Speaker 1: this is the first practical thing that I've seen that
Speaker 1: actually maps onto our ethical framework where policymakers out there
Speaker 1: in Oorgan. I haven't been in touch with any of them,
Speaker 1: but they've stumbled on a solution that is saying, there
Speaker 1: should be a way to safely obtain and have access
Speaker 1: to drugs that you know are sufficiently safe and that
Speaker 1: can be used in ways that are well being or
Speaker 1: life enhancing, and the fact that you see them as
Speaker 1: enhancing is enough of a reason to have access to
Speaker 1: the drug. We don't have to go through all a
Speaker 1: rigimar role of deciding that you have some sort of
Speaker 1: treatable disease that the pharmaceutical companies can make a bunch
Speaker 1: of money off of. And so I was incredibly intrigued
Speaker 1: to see that, and I think that that's the sort
Speaker 1: of thing that's probably going to be rolling out in
Speaker 1: years to come. Okay, So, just to conclude a few
Speaker 1: random things. One other drug we haven't talked about, but
Speaker 1: you mentioned periodically as perhaps the most universal of all
Speaker 1: love drugs is boots alcohol, right are well, Well, you know,
Speaker 1: we raised the alcohol example just to show that there
Speaker 1: are certain drugs that were culturally familiar with and then
Speaker 1: have been tangled up with our romantic escapades for centuries,
Speaker 1: and so partly the use of alcohol was to prepare
Speaker 1: the reader for the idea that altered states of consciousness
Speaker 1: can be handled poorly and can be handled well. You know,
Speaker 1: some people get drunk out of their minds and blackout
Speaker 1: and hurt other people. I mean, alcohol is one of
Speaker 1: the most dangerous drugs we have, but it's also a
Speaker 1: drug that, when used responsibly, and we have certain cultural
Speaker 1: norms around how best to use it, can put a
Speaker 1: person into a state of mind where they're more open
Speaker 1: to pursuing, you know, a conversation with someone that they
Speaker 1: think is sort of cute across the way that otherwise
Speaker 1: they might not have the confidence to do. And we
Speaker 1: further wanted to say it doesn't necessarily make the conversation
Speaker 1: that follows in authentic. I mean, you don't want to
Speaker 1: have to always be drinking alcohol in order to talk
Speaker 1: to the person. Hopefully, at some point you establish something
Speaker 1: that's non drug mediated to see whether the relationship can
Speaker 1: stand on its own feet. But the idea that a
Speaker 1: drug could serve as a catalyst for some kind of
Speaker 1: interpersonal discovery is something we're familiar with, and we just
Speaker 1: wanted to to use that low hanging fruit as a
Speaker 1: way to prime the reader for our thesis. And one
Speaker 1: drug you don't talk much about, except we just briefly
Speaker 1: alluded to, we're pheromones. Pheromones we didn't include in the
Speaker 1: book for two reasons. One it seems like that's the
Speaker 1: first thing that people think about. You know, you you
Speaker 1: smell somebody and then somehow you become attracted to them.
Speaker 1: But the other reason is that they're extremely poorly understood.
Speaker 1: Nobody really knows how pheromones work. Nobody knows how they
Speaker 1: relate to why it is that particular people we find
Speaker 1: attractive and others we don't. I mentioned that we have
Speaker 1: some information about the old factory system as giving us
Speaker 1: potentially semi conscious, subconscious clues to genetic compatibility, and that
Speaker 1: came up in our discussion of formonal birth control, which
Speaker 1: might impair that process. But my understanding, which is admittedly superficial,
Speaker 1: is that pheromones are so little understood in terms of
Speaker 1: how they are related to romantic attraction that I wasn't
Speaker 1: sure we get much attraction bringing them up. But that's
Speaker 1: something I'd like to look into some more. There's not
Speaker 1: I think a mention of the word cannabis or marijuana
Speaker 1: in the entire book. How come? Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I don't have a good answer for that. For whatever reason,
Speaker 1: we started out with oxytocin and kind of took a
Speaker 1: winding path based on that, and we just missed cannabis.
Speaker 1: But maybe in the next edition of the book will
Speaker 1: have a chapter on cannabis. So Brian, I asked almost
Speaker 1: all the guests here a similar question, And I'll let
Speaker 1: me frame it this way. Are you able or willing
Speaker 1: to share any ways in your own life in which
Speaker 1: psychoactive substances and love relationships have interacted that have shed
Speaker 1: insight in terms of your work or stimulated your interests
Speaker 1: in this area. Sure, I guess there's maybe one way
Speaker 1: of saying this. So many of the academic papers that
Speaker 1: served as the basis for drafts of the book I
Speaker 1: wrote at a time when I was in a romantic relationship,
Speaker 1: and my partner was a co author on several of
Speaker 1: those papers. We both had a degree in psychology and
Speaker 1: background cognitive science and so forth, so we hadn't particularly
Speaker 1: specialized in romantic chemistry before I started on this book project.
Speaker 1: But as a consequence, of being together and working on
Speaker 1: these projects together, we started to think about romance in
Speaker 1: terms of things that we're going on in our brains.
Speaker 1: And you know, one possibility, and I think a fear
Speaker 1: people have is that if you think about love and
Speaker 1: romantic attraction and so forth in terms of neurochemistry, some
Speaker 1: people fear that that would just kill the romance of
Speaker 1: it if it becomes sort of scientifically tractable question, which
Speaker 1: therefore loses its mystery and it's it's poetry. And interestingly,
Speaker 1: we didn't experience that. Now, it might be just idiosyncratic
Speaker 1: because we're scientists and we like to talk about this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff, But what we found is it was
Speaker 1: possible both to describe in theoretical third personal neurochemical terms
Speaker 1: what was going on with us and to experience it
Speaker 1: subjectively and feel the full force of its value. So
Speaker 1: the fact that knowing about how something works doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: undermine the qualitative experience and value that's derived from that
Speaker 1: very same phenomenon, you know, experience from the inside out,
Speaker 1: was a striking discovery that came about over the course
Speaker 1: of this research. Okay, fair enough, well, Brian Listen, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for having this conversation to me, I've loved it.
Speaker 1: I love reading your book and uh I encourage our
Speaker 1: listeners to get a hold of it. The book called
Speaker 1: Love Drugs. You know what I look forward to, you know,
Speaker 1: seeing where you go with this next. So thanks so
Speaker 1: much for being my guest and Psychoactive, thanks very much
Speaker 1: for your excellent questions. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it,
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Speaker 1: at protozoa dot com, or find me on Twitter at
Speaker 1: Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in
Speaker 1: our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive
Speaker 1: producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus, and Darren
Speaker 1: Aronovsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is
Speaker 1: by Ari Blucien and a special thanks to Abbvi Brioseph
Speaker 1: Bianca Grimshaw and Robert B. B M.