Dr. Deepak Chopra
The year was 1965 and a 17-year-old Deepak Chopra was in his first year of medical school in India and intrigued by a call for students to join a psychedelic experiment on campus. The institute he attended in New Delhi, partially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation at the time, included a group of American professors and exchange students from Harvard University. Back in Cambridge, two young psychologists, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, were at the same time exploring the effects of psychotropic substances on the human mind. One drug they were tinkering with was the psychedelic called LSD.
Hearing about those psychedelic studies on campus in India, Chopra relates that he was immediately game. The research experiment, comprised of a group of medical students — half American, half Indian — would have them all under the influence of LSD and asked to view a poster of Mother Teresa.
“In the news there was this myth — or maybe it was true — that Mother Teresa was licking the wounds of children with leprosy, and they were being healed,” Chopra recently told Forbes. “I was very curious about that. So we took this LSD together, the professor and medical students, and we were asked to look at the poster. And I have never felt such a deep empathy and compassion as I felt then. I was crying. I just wanted to leave medical school and become a volunteer for Mother Teresa. It influenced the whole trajectory of my life, because, you know, medicine is not about just treating people. It's about healing suffering.”
Chopra says following that experience using psychedelics, he didn't have any desire to have another LSD experience. One profound trip was enough. He credits that experience with having a significant impact on him as a physician — and a first step in many that led him to his eventual status as a powerhouse advocate for mindfulness and meditation. With countless bestselling books and seminars under his belt, and a popular nonprofit (The Chopra Foundation), which seeks to help at-risk children, low-income women, and prisoners, Dr. Chopra’s name has become synonymous in the West with mind-body practices on health and wellbeing.
His encounter as an inquisitive teenager in medical school is now, over 50 years later, being proven out in research that illustrates the effectiveness of psychotropic drugs as therapies for mental trauma. Rigorous studies at Johns Hopkins University, NYU Langone, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (and a host of other prominent institutions globally) are showing psychedelic drugs can ease the crushing symptoms of depression, PTSD, and addiction.
Now the guru of unleashing your infinite potential has put the might of The Chopra Foundation to work alongside MindMed, a clinical-stage psychedelic medicine biotech company, which in April commenced trading on Nasdaq. Their collaboration seeks to educate and build public awareness around the use of psychedelic medicines to treat mental illness, remove outdated stigmas, and ultimately research mental wellbeing approaches that can be used in psychedelic-related psychotherapy. To date, MindMed has raised $204 million and assembled a compelling drug development pipeline of treatments based on psychedelic substances including LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT and the ibogaine derivative, 18-MC.
Asked how he thinks his very public support for psychedelic therapies will be viewed by the mainstream audience that knows him best from the likes of The Oprah Winfrey Show, he is bold and enthusiastic. One of his main goals with the MindMed venture is to help remove the negative association around psychedelic drugs as medicine. “I have a bit of a reputation for being a renegade anyway,” says Chopra with a smile, “and I've been talking about this stuff for over 40 years, ever since my own first experience with LSD in medical school. I don't mind helping remove stigma around controversial issues. And there's been a lot of stigma around psychedelics, number one. Also, a lot of stigma around depression and mental illness and suicide. And I think that's a shame because science should not be influenced by stigma or personal opinion.”
Prior to the 1970s, drug research in the U.S. was not as politicized of an issue as it is today. Research back then was propelled far more by science and objectivity rather than opinion and ideology. All that research hit the skids after the sweeping Controlled Substances Act in 1971 and Richard Nixon’s doomed War On Drugs. One swipe of a pen in American politics impeded scientific progress in the field for nearly 50 years. “The research has been hampered by people who have no idea about the science and yet the science suffers,” says Chopra. “So, you know, I feel at my age particularly now, I can be totally honest about how I feel about whatever and that's wonderful.”
Popular opinion seems to be behind Chopra, having morphed over a half a century. More minds are now open to the idea of psychedelics being added to the mental health toolkit, thanks to scientific rigor.
MindMed CEO J.R. Rahn says a key challenge he now faces is winning hearts and minds. “I think one of the biggest problems as a company that we deal with is the stigma around psychedelics,” says Rahn. “I think the only way to overcome that is to get popular opinion to understand the benefits, which will be proven by clinical trials, but also through thought leaders like Deepak Chopra. That's the first part of this collaboration. Let's have a conversation about this. Let's make it the conversation in every house in America and give psychedelics a second shot.”
MindMed CEO J.R. Rahn
So much of the conversation around psychedelic treatments is about health and happiness — topics that Dr. Chopra is expert at having on a global scale. (“My goal is to reach at least a billion people,” he’s famously said.) The way we think, the way we eat, the way we behave, all can influence our lives, says Chopra. Psychedelic therapy is just another piece of the wellbeing puzzle.
“The combination of psychedelics, psychotherapy, food, diet, behavior modification, yoga, all this becomes a very holistic way of actually stimulating healing in the body,” he says, and references the polyvagal theory. “This theory is how various modalities can increase vagal tone, which overrides sympathetic overdrive. This is the basis of all inflammation, stress and depression.”
MindMed CEO J.R. Rahn and Deepak Chopra, M.D.
The partnership between MindMed and The Chopra Foundation comes shortly after MindMed’s $5 million donation to NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine. Rahn notes that it will “help to establish a psychedelic-based training program for clinical investigators skilled in the study of psychedelic-inspired treatments for serious mental health needs. The donation will also help advance and deploy an emerging category of medicines, including psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder and MindMed's ibogaine-derived molecule 18-MC for opioid use disorder patients.”
Chopra acknowledges that psychedelics are not a panacea. Like much of his philosophy, he sees them as part of a broader holistic plan. Rahn echoes that sentiment, saying, “Ultimately, we believe psychedelics can act as catalysts in a person’s journey toward their best health.”
At 74 years old, Chopra says he feels better than he did at 17 in medical school. His mission to foster health and happiness, and to help relieve suffering, resonates with his supporters. And there’s a reason for that. It’s clear he cares for them. “You know, doctors often say, I practice or I treat, they never say, I heal,” says Chopra. “A person, if he's a doctor, he should come with deep compassion, deep empathy, deep love, and I'm grateful for that.”
