How to Legalize Medical Psychedelics in Your Country — Tania de Jong on The Playbook Behind Australia’s World-First Breakthrough (#883)

My guest today is Tania de Jong, co-founder of Mind Medicine Australia. Tania and her husband, Peter, helped lead the push that, in 2023, made Australia the first country in the world to allow MDMA and psilocybin to be prescribed for psychiatric conditions. I wanted to understand how the hell they helped make that happen and what the rest of the world can learn from it.

Please enjoy!

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Transcripts

Show Notes

Connect with Tania de Jong

Website | LinkedIn | Mind Medicine Australia

Timeline

• February 2, 2015: Michael Pollan publishes “The Trip Treatment” in The New Yorker, which is the article Tania credits with setting her journey in motion.
• March 21, 2015: Tim releases his James Fadiman interview, “The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide” (#66). Its show notes link to “The Trip Treatment.”
• January 15, 2016: In 5-Bullet Friday, Tim announces support for Johns Hopkins’ psilocybin research and a personal commitment of at least $100,000 toward psychedelic research that year.
• 2016: Tania and Peter travel to the Netherlands for their first guided psilocybin experience. (Source)
• 2017–2019: UCSF conducts the psilocybin-assisted group-therapy study involving long-term AIDS survivors that Tim helped support. (Source)
• May 6, 2018: Michael Pollan joins Tim for “Exploring the New Science of Psychedelics” (#313), discussing his forthcoming book (How to Change Your Mind).
• May 15, 2018: Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind is published.
• February 13, 2019: Tania and Peter publicly launch Mind Medicine Australia. (Source)
• 2020–2022: MMA applies to reschedule MDMA and psilocybin, faces rejection, and submits new applications in March 2022. (Source)
• November 21, 2022: David Nutt presents to Australia’s medicines regulator, the TGA, supporting the case for therapeutic access. (Source)
• February 3, 2023: The TGA announces restricted prescribing access to MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, effective July 1, 2023. (Source)
• January 2024: Patients begin receiving treatment under the new prescribing program. (Source)

Related Reading, Listening, and Viewing

Books

Organizations and Resources

People

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] Intro from Tim.
• [00:02:46] The article that changed Tania’s life.
• [00:04:39] A first psychedelic experience—and the year it took to integrate it.
• [00:10:17] Rick Doblin’s encouragement and the birth of Mind Medicine Australia.
• [00:13:14] Turning regulatory rejection into a stronger application.
• [00:20:48] Building a grassroots movement and training clinicians.
• [00:23:23] Cold emails, scientific allies, and singing your way into the room.
• [00:31:11] A week with Ram Dass: silence, singing, and an extraordinary LSD story.
• [00:37:54] Bringing David Nutt—and a family’s devastating story—to the regulators.
• [00:42:42] Dancing in the kitchen: Australia’s rescheduling breakthrough.
• [00:43:40] From changing the rules to treating patients.
• [00:48:18] Why Tim thinks MDMA is still underestimated.
• [00:50:23] Integration beyond the session: therapy, nutrition, and exercise.
• [00:52:29] Scaling access and collecting real-world evidence.
• [00:58:13] Getting insurers, government agencies, and philanthropists on board.
• [01:00:41] Syrian rue, psilocybin, and learning to let go of control.
• [01:09:06] Dosing, expectations, and the pressure to take more.
• [01:11:07] The promise of group therapy and shared integration.
• [01:13:28] Hiring mistakes, personal attacks, and the resilience advocacy requires.
• [01:22:43] Turning a window of change into lasting habits.
• [01:24:56] Getting through to regulators and pushing for end-of-life access.
• [01:27:32] The bureaucratic barriers that remain.
• [01:30:43] What treatment costs—and why therapist time drives the bill.
• [01:34:12] Could shorter-acting compounds make treatment more affordable?
• [01:37:52] Ketamine, kratom, and the limits of “all natural.”
• [01:42:19] The unexpected payoff from Tim’s ketamine experiment.
• [01:46:52] What might come next for psychedelic access worldwide?
• [01:48:10] Persistence versus pushiness—and knowing when to try another door.
• [01:53:27] Supporting patients and training the next wave of clinicians.
• [01:56:56] “Be curious”: exploring your inner world and walking each other home.
• [02:00:40] The ripple effects of sharing your curiosity—and simply asking for help.
• [02:05:10] Parting thoughts.

Quotations from This Episode

“Be curious.”

— Tania de Jong

“I never saw a single piece of nature the same since that [first high-dose psilocybin session]. So every seashell, cloud, leaf, blade of grass, just everything was transformed by that experience, and I could see the energy in everything.”

— Tania de Jong

“We want people to have meaningful lives. We want them to feel healthy. We want them to be able to see the sacred in everything.”

— Tania de Jong

“When you’re trying to change the law, you need people around you that are very strong and who are resilient because we got knocked down over and over.”

— Tania de Jong

“You can sort of see that anyone who’s a pioneer who’s trying to drive change is going to be attacked.”

— Tania de Jong

“We all have to become our own chief medical officers. We have to work out what’s going to work for us, what’s going to make us whole and healed so that we can live our best lives possible.”

— Tania de Jong

“One of the great things I learned was to never let anyone snatch your dreams away.”

— Tania de Jong

“Let’s just keep asking questions and not outsourcing ourselves to all of the chatbots and all of the robots.”

— Tania de Jong

Want to hear another episode with someone who spent decades turning a stigmatized medicine into approved treatment? Listen to my conversation with MAPS founder Rick Doblin, in which we discussed the founding of MAPS, MDMA’s unlikely path from the lab into the therapy room, Sasha Shulgin, the difference between MDMA and MDA, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, treating veterans and first responders, what it cost to champion psychedelics long before the mainstream caught on, the fight to reschedule MDMA, a surprise $10M challenge, and much more.

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