 The future is psychedelic. Welcome to the psychedelic 20s. Rick Doblin is the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. Founded in the late 80s, MAPS has spent decades working to get FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related conditions. He says that should happen within the next year. This is about humans helping humans. He sat down with Doblin at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference held in Denver this June where a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about all aspects of today's psychedelic renaissance. Talk a bit about the beginning of the psychedelic kind of revolution. LSD was synthesized in the 40s, but then it kind of made its way into scientific endeavor as well as political ones in the 50s and 60s. What was the main lesson to take away from the first era of psychedelics? I think one of the first things is that when you identify as a counterculture that you're sort of sending up a signal that the culture is going to be scared of it, and so there was that rebelliousness that Tim Leary had. I mean, he was kicked out of West Point, so he was the culture he was. Well, he was kicked out of West Point just for drinking alcohol. Yes. And before he even learned about psychedelics, and then he sort of voluntarily left Harvard even though it was getting more controversial. And so I think the lesson there was that we need to think about us as moving into the heart of the system rather than becoming a counterculture. And then the other part, I think, was that there was this parallel that the advocates often were exaggerating the benefits of psychedelics. One dose, you're spiritually, mystically educated, and then was minimizing the risks. And the government on the other side was exaggerating the risks. I was told that if you take LSD six or seven times, you're certifiably insane, and they were suppressing the benefits. So I think one of the big lessons now is that we have to really talk about the risks and the benefits. And at the same time, I think there was an overestimation, an overvaluation of the substance itself that all you had to do is take this drug LSD or psilocybin, and there wasn't enough focus on the relationship, that the relationship is what makes it either valuable or harmful. So I think once we've learned those lessons, the other big thing was that psychedelics in the 60s were very much identified with anti-war, with anti-Vietnam. Myself, I thought Vietnam was a tragedy, and we never should have done it. But now we've sort of come back through working with veterans who've been traumatized. So I think the political symbolism of being anti-war, it became an anti-soldier instead of anti-the policy. And so now we need the military to protect our freedoms. We see that with Russia going into Ukraine. And so we're not anti-soldier, even though going into Iraq was a terrible mistake and what's happened in Afghanistan is tragic. Psychedelics can help heal soldiers who are following orders and doing good things or bad or having tough experiences. But the psychedelics, which was a sign of being anti-war, they are now kind of being pro-soldier. Yes, yes, and we're still pro-peace in different ways, but there are times when you need to defend yourself. I think the whole psychedelic movement has come to see that it's a dangerous world we live in and that we do need to protect our freedoms in a lot of different ways. And so we need to focus on the policies, not demonize the people. You know, one of the cornerstone activities of MAPS, if not the, is working with the FDA to get approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Talk about how important the substance is to that therapy. Why is that therapy better than regular talk therapy? Yeah, well, to sort of knit these things together, just walking here, I heard a story about one of the Vietnam vet who was in therapy with MDMA and was still able to heal. But every day up until the time that he went through MDMA therapy, which was very recently, he had suicidal thoughts. So I think what the MDMA does is it helps reduce our fear response to emotional threats, to memories that are painful. And they can be overwhelming. And we can get stuck in these patterns of reaction that make us feel that these experiences and these memories are overwhelming. So every time they come up, we feel that we have to suppress them. And so what MDMA does is it helps people to feel calmer, to feel more through, we could say, oxytocin, the self-love, self-acceptance that people can have a diminished sense of fear. The fear is manageable. They can control their reaction to it. And then they can be more calm as they look. And MDMA also enhances memory for the trauma. So a lot of times things that have been buried that have been so painful to remember under the influence of MDMA, they can come to the surface. Because as long as they're buried, they have an unconscious influence. And they create anxiety. They create fear. They create hypervigilance. But with MDMA, it makes the therapy more effective. But again, what I was saying before is it's not in the substance that people have taken MDMA. And if they're unprepared, the difficult emotions come up. And then they end up worse off destabilized. And we've heard many stories like that. So it's the MDMA in the therapeutic context that really makes the healing possible. You're also a big supporter and proponent of cognitive liberty. So for you, psychedelics are not simply about helping people who have trauma. Can you talk about that other dimension of kind of self-actualization or really getting to be the person you want to be? Yeah. It's interesting that this idea of self-actualization comes from Abraham Maslow and this hierarchy of needs and self-actualization realizing your full potential, the start of the human potential movement and humanistic psychology. But what is not taught in school and what a lot of people don't know is that in the last few years of his life, Abraham Maslow changed the hierarchy of needs. And above self-actualization, he put self-transcendence. And what that means is that you become your full self, but then you realize that yourself is connected to everything and everyone, even people that are very difficult, different than you, and then you start working to heal the collective. And so I think psychedelics have this possibility of helping people work through their own individual traumas and their own psychedelics. But I think that everybody is traumatized when we think about the mass extinctions that's going on. We think about the climate change. We think about the rise of totalitarianism, the decline of democracy in many places, that everybody's got this base level of fear and anxiety. And often people get overwhelmed by it and then they look for strongman leaders. I think that explains why a lot of people, it's not rational anymore. It's just an emotional tribal identification. And so if we can help the people that may not necessarily have a diagnosis but help everybody, and then also we need to spiritualize people more, we're stuck I think with a lot of literalisms, fundamentalisms, ways in which people see their nationality or their religion as the one best thing. And they discount others and then they're fearful of other cultures and that's where we have a lot of the fear of immigrants, even though America is a country of immigrants. So I think that we need to go beyond the medicalization and that the legalization and legal access is absolutely essential to achieve the kind of mass mental health and spiritualized humanity that we're looking to have, that we think we need for us to survive and thrive as a species. Would you say that that kind of baseline of anxiety and polarization and whatnot, is that why we're having a psychedelic moment now? I think there's a lot of that, that there's a lot of the perceived need. I mean with the pandemic and there's a much more widespread understanding of the mental health crisis, of the crisis of addiction in America, over 100,000 people dying from opiate and fentanyl overdoses. So I think that's one of the reasons. But I think the other is that we look at what happened in the 60s and a lot of the things that came about from the psychedelics were frightening to the culture. There was a lot of talk about the death rebirth process and in the 60s, if people had cancer like you didn't talk about it, you didn't talk about death. Women were tranquilized to give birth and men were not allowed in the delivery room. So birth and death were kind of separate. I think there was so much death in World War II that there was this counterreaction to kind of push it away. I think meditation was seen with the Beatles bringing Maharishi, Maas Yogi, these weird people in robes and from a different culture, that seemed strange. And then even yoga, people were worried if you practice yoga, you're going to be coming to Hindu or a Buddhist or whatever. So what we realized over the past 50 years or so, the culture has changed its attitude towards death. We have hospice centers now. The first hospice center in the U.S. wasn't until 1974. We have changed our approach to birth, we have more birthing centers and women aren't as tranquilized as much and men are in the delivery room. And meditation and mindfulness are now taught at the YMCA. It's not going to take you away. And then we also think about the psychedelic imagery that people have during psychedelic experiences and that's made its way into art and to culture and to movies. And so I think we've integrated a lot of the things that were flashpoints during the 60s that people were new and scared about. And in a sense, we've integrated everything except for the psychedelics. I think the other part that's been happening is the space is going to the moon and all of the telescopes and all these things that we're we're having a much more cosmic perspective and where humanity sits. So before it used to be that humanity, you know, Earth was the center of the universe and everything was all about us. And now we see how we're just a small part of this incredible infinity. And so I think people are adjusting and that's difficult. And also through the Internet and other ways that we're all connected, people are bumping up against each other cultures that were separated. And that's where people are often retreating into fundamentalism. But underneath it, there's awareness that those are not really true, that we need to work in a more metaphorical way about religions, seeing religions more like languages. So I think it's about this greater understanding of the mental health crisis. But it's about all these things that have happened in humanity over the last 50 years that has prepared us for bringing back psychedelics. And hopefully this time, if we're careful and balanced, there won't be the backlash that has happened in the 60s. Could you give an update on where MAPS is an FDA approval for MDMA, Assisted Therapy? Yeah, so we have taken, you know, 37 years to get to this point. We have two extremely successful phase three studies, both in statistical significance and the magnitude of the effect and in the safety profile. And we have had a lot of good discussions with the FDA. And so we think around September of this year, we're going to be submitting what's called the NDA, the new drug application to the FDA. And we think there's a very good chance that by June of 2024, roughly one year from now, we think that FDA may indeed go ahead and approve MDMA, Assisted Therapy, as a prescription treatment for PTSD. But it won't be like a normal drug that's approved. It will be approved only under direct supervision of therapists. And what we're hoping is that we'll be only under direct supervision of therapists who have been trained in the method that we've used in phase three. And one of the big things for me is to try to help the politicians and the regulators understand that a big part of training therapists is having them have their own experience with the drugs that they're going to give to their patients. And so I think we're at this negotiating point with FDA where they know that the healings that are happening with psychedelics are remarkable. They've seen a lot of the data. They've also seen that there haven't been very many advances in psychiatry since the SSRIs in the last 30 or 40 years. And they want to find a way to regulate it. I think the other thing that's happened in the background has been the legalization of marijuana and the understanding that medical marijuana has a lot of benefits. Now, I just was at a meeting with FDA a few days ago in person about our marijuana project. And the woman in charge of the Division of Psychiatry said that she is very uncomfortable about the term medical marijuana because it's not medical until the FDA says it is. But at the same time, they've been making it difficult to do research. But I think that people have seen this highly demonized drug, marijuana, cannabis, you know, a puff, a party, a tragedy that that has now helped a lot of people. And that is sort of, I think there's a diminishing of the zeal for the drug word. There's a general sense. And I think that Reason Magazine and the Libertarians and others have made a really good effort over many decades to help people understand that the drug war is really a war against people. And it's tremendously unsuccessful and counterproductive. So I think a lot of the suppression of psychedelic research has been the concern that it sends the wrong message that if these studies show benefits, then it gets in the way of the drug war ideology. So I think the drug war itself has really lost credibility and is seen as counterproductive. So all those factors, I think, make it so that now we do have the psychedelic renaissance. What is the difference? In one way, what you're talking about is kind of the ultimate boomer story, right? Where the class of 64 or whatever in the Pacific Palisades, you know, starts, you know, instead of going to college, you're going to war. They turn on, tune out, or drop out, et cetera. And now they are the elders and they're kind of like, well, we want our LSD to be legal now. We want MDMA. We want... Can you talk a little bit about that journey, you know, as a generation? And then what are the sticking points with younger generations? Because we have a generation gap now that's arguably as big as the one that was in the 60s, where the term generation gap was coined. You know, what do psychedelics mean to boomers and what do they mean to millennials and Genzai? Yeah, well, it's hard for me to speak for anything but the boomers. But I will say that I don't feel that generation gap as much. I feel it's like the middle generations that grew up under the drug war propaganda that didn't have the internet so that the younger generations understand how we're all connected and how there's just this universal, you know, international community. And we have to learn how to work together. And there's also an understanding that these technologies that we have, that there's a lot of support, a lot of dangers, but also a lot of benefits. And so I think the psychedelics have been not just restricted to sort of the boomer generation. That's what I was actually worried about for a long time is, would this just be something that would rise and fall with the boomers? And when I ended up, I taught a class, the only time I've ever taught a class was at New College where I went to school in 2001. And that was going to be my question. Our younger generation is really interested in this and they were very interested. Because I think they have seen all these cultural mashups and they're hungry for deeper connections. So I feel that the younger people are more open, more willing. There's been so much of this. They've grown up under not the demonization of marijuana as much, but they've seen the marijuana legalization and medical marijuana states. So I think that from a boomer perspective, I think it's just a feeling of the resistance and the backlash was so great that it was never clear that we would see this change in our own lifetime. And so I think that's where it's just this sense of kind of amazement, but also the sense of a crisis. I mean, the humanity feels even more of a crisis point now than it was in the 60s. That we could see then already that we needed to move to new forms of renewable energy, that the oil industry was causing a lot of problems. And so the solutions have been delayed. Humanity as a whole has kind of waited until hopefully it's not exactly the last minute. But I think there's a sense of crisis. I mean, as an example, just to say my youngest daughter, up until a year or so ago, she was saying that she never wanted to have kids, that she didn't want to bring kids into this world. The world was so stressful and it was so going to hell and all these climate change and extinctions. And so I think she's been a little bit more hopeful lately, but I think there was just this mental health crisis of this younger generation and they've looked at what are these solutions. And I also think that the ecstasy and MDMA that came in the 80s really helped bridge the generations, that the classic psychedelics are very challenging. They're dissolving your ego. There's challenges of letting go, of being open, of sort of seeing our identity as something different. And I think the MDMA is the softener as the bridge. And so MDMA has really been helpful to sort of ease the fears of the culture about psychedelics. And once people understand that these different states of consciousness can be more beneficial, easier, controllable in a certain way, then there's an openness to the others. It's interesting that, you know, for psychedelics to kind of go mainstream, both opponents of them and proponents of them have to kind of acknowledge they're not as powerful as we once thought. Yeah, it's not like one dose, miracle cure or one dose, you're enlightened. You're gone and you have chromosomal damage or something, yeah. Yeah, I mean, but there's so much still fear and misinformation that has been promulgated in schools through the DARE program and others. What are the major political kind of economic or medical and cultural impediments to the mainstreaming of psychedelics? Well, I think the biggest challenge is going to be the cost, because what we say is that it's not a drug that you take on a daily basis and that looks like it doesn't cost that much, even though then you need it for 10 or 20 or 30 years and then the cost adds up. But what we're saying is that this is psychedelic psychotherapy, psychedelics with therapy and a lot of therapy. So there's going to be an initial cost that's going to be larger at the beginning, but over time it will save money. So the challenge is going to be getting insurance coverage, because saying most people will not be able to afford psychedelic psychotherapy in that way. That's also why we need to legalize, so that people can do this on their own with peer support. So I think that's one of the main challenges. I think because the drug war has been more widely seen as a failure, we don't have that same vested interest from police. Also, we're understanding, and we do have police officers that are interested in MDMA therapy for trauma. So we're trying to make that point that this is for police officers, this is for prison guards, this is for first responders. So we don't have that. Now we did have an interesting... A couple of years ago we spoke at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and they have since not let us back. But we had one talk and we just met one police officer who was also a psychotherapist, Sarko Gagarian, who then has gone through our training program and is now wanting to give MDMA therapy to other police officers. But we've been rejected ever since to go back to the International Association of Chiefs of Police. So there are pockets of resistance. I think people have started to understand that the private prison system is also a disaster, that they have a vested interest in keeping people in prison from a business perspective. They're not so much interested in rehabilitation. I think the challenges that I talk to worry about the most are the fundamentalists. What we're talking about with psychedelics is it deepens people's spirituality, but it also moves them a little bit more from a literal perspective to a metaphorical perspective, and that also makes them move away from there's only one right religion. So we see a rise of fundamentalism in a lot of different ways, but I think they're sort of holding on to a worldview that's being challenged in so many different ways. And so we have to demonstrate, I think our challenge is to try to demonstrate to fundamentalists that if you let go of the literalism, there's a deeper spirituality and you will not have to leave your symbols or your religions that it enriches it rather than diminishes it. And I think we do not seem to have resistance from the pharmaceutical industry. So many people are saying, what if you can help cure anxiety and depression and you do this deep and you only need a few sessions of psilocybin or MDMA or ketamine and then you don't need these daily medications, but those drugs have gone generic mostly and they're not big profit centers for pharmaceutical industry. So we actually don't see resistance from, at least I don't see it, from the pharmaceutical industry. I think the politicians, the fact that we've been able to get bipartisan support through the work with a lot of the veterans, I think one of the biggest challenges has been the next step, which is for me trying to move into the Department of Defense to work with active duty soldiers. And so there is the concern, oh, you know, they want to have a psychedelic experience and it's all peace and love and they, but I think that's not going to happen at all. And I think we do see with Russia going into Ukraine that, you know, we really need a strong military to keep us free. There's always these kind of tyrants. So I think the military is sort of the last bastion of cultural acceptance. And while we're working with veterans, we want to work with people that are closer to the trauma. And then the other is adolescents. And what people, you know, that's been a big thing about the drug war. Oh, let's protect the kids. And so what people are often surprised about is that the FDA, if we do succeed in getting permission to have MDMA-assisted therapy as a prescription medicine for adults, that we're being required by the FDA to work with traumatized adolescents. And I think that's going to be really important. And what we've seen with cannabis, when it started to be shown that CBD could help with childhood epilepsy, you start helping people, kids, that's kind of, then they're really open to that. And so I think the next steps for us will be to move into the Department of Defense, move into working with adolescents. And those will be the final stages of cultural mainstreaming and acceptance. Final, yeah, final question. You know, let's project 40, you know, you, MAPS has been working at this about 40 years. 40 years into the future. What is your dream city? I'm so glad you even picked this 40 years. Because what we're talking about is a world of net zero trauma by 2070. So that is the new animating vision for me. And what that means is that over the next couple generations, I think things might get worse. We're talking about the possibility of climate change is not mitigated very quickly. There's some estimates that there could be a billion climate refugees by 2050. And so I think the stresses are going to be amplifying over time. But also, I think if we can mainstream globalize psychedelics, and again, not just in a business model where money can be made, but in a humanitarian approach to where there's most of the places where there's massive trauma, there's also not hardly any money. And so I think the goal is to try to heal enough people so that we're not adding to the burden of trauma every year. And when you also traumatize someone, there's multi-generational trauma. People's chromosomes don't change that quickly. Their genes don't change that quickly. But the epigenetics, what turns certain genes on and off can be changed by what happens to you in your lifetime. And then you can also pass that on to your children. And so I think if we can envision a world of net zero trauma by 2070 and more of a spiritualized humanity, it'll be more like the island that Aldous Huxley wrote about. But the way that the book Island ended is the oil companies come in and crush the island. So what we want to make is the island is the world. And so I think that this moving into space that we have a chance at least on one hand of a spiritualized humanity in the next 40 years. And I do think it'll take multiple generations to get there. And if we fail at that, it's very worrisome because we're like lemmings going over a cliff in the other way. And we often wait till the last minute to make changes. And the damages are piling up. But I think over the next 40 years, there's a lot of optimism and a lot of hope that we would have a spiritualized humanity. And then what would we do? You know, we're going to have technologies that can support us all in terms of our basic needs. So hopefully we'll end up with a culture that focuses on art and science and music and creativity and love making. And this would be, you know, the spiritualized humanity that I envision over the next 40 years. So that's great. Final question. What's your favorite psychedelic? Breathing. I would say that because, you know, Stan Groff has developed hyperventilation, you know, so if you just breathe, you can have psychedelic experiences. And what that indicates that it's in us, it's not in the pill. And but I would say that if I were stranded on a deserted island and I could have only one psychedelic, which would be, it would be LSD. And I know a lot of people like plant medicines and stuff. But the reason it's not MDMA, even though I do MDMA more frequently than the classic psychedelics, is that there's a way in which you can't run away from LSD. You have to surrender to it. And we build up all these ideas and all these defenses. And, you know, you can maneuver around stuff with LSD. You just got to surrender to it. So I would say healthy dose of LSD would be, you know, if I had only one psychedelic, that would be it. But the MDMA LSD combination is tremendous. MDMA with 5MEO DMT is also tremendous. So it's a hard question. But that would be my answer. Well, thank you, Rick Groff. Thank you.