HIGH TIMES MAGAZINE (MAY 2009)

MAPS QUEST: INTERVIEW WITH RICK DOBLIN
Meet the head of the world's only non-profit psychedelic pharmaceutical company.
BY DAVID BIENENSTOCK

In 1972, at age 18, Rick Doblin decided to become an underground psychedelic therapist, after his own early experiences with LSD left an indelible impression. Psychedelics could prove transformative, Doblin reasoned, but many people would require a qualified attendant to shepherd them through what can sometimes be a difficult experience.

"I had fears and anxieties that I wasn't strong enough to break down," he recalls of his own introverted, often acid-soaked, coming of age. "A lot of people think breaking down is a sign of weakness, but in many ways, opening up emotionally is a sign of strength."

At the time, as a draft resister, Doblin stood a better chance of going to jail than becoming a licensed professional anything--never mind psychedelic therapist. Meanwhile, the United Nations International Drug Control Treaties, under pressure from the DEA, were effectively slamming the lid on promising research into the potential of psychedelic drugs for personal growth and healing. And so, still deeply committed to his idea of helping the world come together through first-hand "mystical" experiences, Doblin envisioned a life lived underground by necessity.

At Florida's New College, his decidedly informal experiments included ingesting increasingly large doses of acid and mescaline while participating in the school's celebratory, all-night, outdoor dance parties, floating in his homemade sensory depravation tank, going au naturale at the campus' clothing-optional swimming pool, and pouring over the as yet unpublished manuscript of LSD researcher Stan Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious.

When it all became too much--not to mention far out--Doblin embarked on a decade-long retreat from academia. With the reelection of Richard Nixon, the continuing war in Vietnam, and the collapse of the sixties counterculture, the early seventies felt, personally and psychically, like a time of self-examination.

"We weren't able to take psychedelics, become enlightened and usher in a new era because we had a lot of internal flaws, and carried within ourselves the seeds of our own destruction," he says. "We were still sexist, racist, hierarchal, or simply not compassionate enough towards those in the mainstream."

Profoundly shaken by a steady diet of altered reality at perhaps the most freewheeling college in America, Doblin dropped out after just one semester and turned to a string of construction jobs to "get grounded," including designing and building Arcturus, a suitably psychedelic home of cedar, granite and stained glass specifically designed to support and enhance the experience of tripping out. Such physical acts of creation helped Doblin to successfully integrate his ethereal experiences in the inner realms of the mind, while reinforcing his core belief that even the most esoteric psychedelic epiphanies must find practical application in order to truly effect positive change.

Meanwhile, President Jimmy Carter pardoned the draft resisters on his first day in office in 1977, but it still took another five years before Doblin returned to college. And even then, he made a major detour along the way, after successfully petitioning his academic advisor to approve a trip to Big Sur, California, for a month-long workshop with his would-be forbearer Stan Grof.

Doblin arrived at the prestigious New Age institute Esalon carrying a heavy load. As far as he knew, science-based psychedelic research remained nonexistent, and that fact didn't seem likely to change anytime soon. After ten years of wandering in his personal wilderness, a now decidedly more mature young seeker finally had a chance to work alongside his idol, but only expected to learn about holotropicsÑa new breathing technique intended to help replicate psychedelic mind states. Instead, he got let in on a little secret, one that would change his life forever.

At first, Doblin was skeptical about MDMA. An accomplished pyschonaut, he dismissed what sounded like a "feel good" drug with a "Why bother?" attitude. After many long, often painful years of using LSD to dredge the depths of his soul and battle the demons that emerged, the obscure molecule lovingly dubbed Adam sounded superficial. Still, Doblin's inquisitive nature made an experiment inevitable, and after hearing a few glowing reviews, he broke down his resistance and set aside an afternoon to take the still legal analogue along with his girlfriend.

The results were "gentle yet profound," according to Doblin, and taught him that important psychological work could be accomplished under the influence of MDMA, particularly its ability to usher in a state of joy, empathy and self-acceptance without significantly impairing sensory perceptions or cognitive function. Rather than dismiss the MDMA love trip as a "false" experience, he saw it as a brief glimpse of our true human potential, once we step outside the fear and repression systematically imparted by society.

Equally important, Doblin had finally stumbled into exactly the kind of underground community of psychedelic researchers he'd been dreaming of since reaching adulthood. Starting in the late seventies, when Sasha Shulgin "rediscovered" MDMA (first synthesized by Merck Pharmaceuticals in 1912), the powerfully psychoactive molecule had been secretly shared among likeminded therapists and used on patients in controlled sessions. As long as MDMA remained legal, the treatmentsÑmore than half a million in numberÑwere legal too, though previous experience had taught the concerned parties that reactionary elements within the government would try to ban "Adam" as soon as they discovered it, no matter how much promise the substance showed in a therapeutic setting.

Inevitably, a genie that good jumped the bottle, and soon enough MDMA--renamed ecstasy on the street--found its way into nightclubs and fueled an early rave scene that drew the kind of recreational use prohibitionists always use as a pretext for their purges. In the meantime, Doblin made it his personal mission to help amass as much credible information as possible on MDMA, in order to best prepare for the legal storms gathering on the horizon.

In July 1984, when the DEA announced its plans to outlaw MDMA, Doblin caught the authorities off-guard by hand delivering a petition from the underground researchers and therapists behind the ongoing Adam experiments, along with other well-pedigreed acolytes he'd recruited through a discreet word-of-mouth campaign. The case went to court, and a DEA Administrative Law Judge recommended treating MDMA as a regulated, prescription drug, but the head of the DEA nonetheless succeeded in getting "ecstasy" placed on Schedule 1, the most restrictive category, alongside heroin.

Undaunted, Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, an umbrella organization from which he has consistently--and effectively--championed legitimate research into the utility of psychedelic drugs. Working to turn on the world from the inside out, MAPS has since gotten FDA approval to study MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder, undertaken the first study analyzing the effectiveness of marijuana vaporizing, won a lawsuit against the DEA for its refusal to license a MAPS-funded medical marijuana production facility, and obtained final approval for the world's first LSD psychotherapy study since the early seventies.

HIGH TIMES sat down with Doblin at MAPS' low-key headquarters in Northern California, nestled at the edge of a redwood forest, with a clear, mountain stream running through the property. Thirty-five years after dropping out of college, Doblin now holds a doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and considers himself, primarily, the head of the world's only non-profit psychedelic pharmaceutical company.

He's got some pretty amazing plans for the not so distant future.

What are your hopes for the incoming Obama administration? What do you think of the transition so far?
So far, President Obama has been slow to comment on drug policy, which is rather good since it puts the War on Drugs in perspective as mostly a battle in the culture wars rather than a war we can believe in. His selection of Seattle police chief Gil Kerlikowske as Drug Czar is also a positive step, since Kerlikowske is a pragmatist and not an ideologue. However, it would have been even better to have a Drug Czar with a public health, rather than a criminal justice background.

The Obama administration, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have also publicly repudiated and ordered stopped the DEA's raids on medical-marijuana dispensaries in California, which the DEA blatantly continued after the inauguration as a way to test Obama on this issue. Whether the administration will reverse the DEA's refusal to end the National Institute on Drug Abuse's monopoly on the supply of marijuana for research remains to be seen.

What is the current state of MAPS' MDMA study?
We completed Phase 2 of the study with outstanding results. Now we need to replicate our US results in studies by other therapist teams, and also conduct studies with different doses and in different patient populations in order to prepare for our "End of Phase 2 " meeting with the FDA, which will take place in about two years.

Recently, Health Canada accepted our protocol design for a Canadian MDMA/PTSD study, which will probably start in a few months, following the importation of MDMA from Switzerland. Meanwhile, our Swiss and Israeli studies are moving forward, and our Jordanian study looks likely to be approved.

Do you think MDMA and other psychedelic drugs should be legal for adult, recreational use?
Politicians always talk about staying on message, but I've sort of violated that, because from the very beginning I've had a dual message. We're working on medical use, which is a narrow area, but one of the advantages is that science gets involved, and so the results that we're generating have a certain accepted validity. And so I talk about psychedelics in terms of medicinal use because it's a necessary step, but I'm also strongly in favor of seeing drug use as a public health issue as opposed to taking a criminal justice approach. That stance has complicated my efforts in a lot of ways, but I feel more intellectually honest.

Do you ascribe any specific meaning to the existence of psychedelics?
The value of psychedelics has been affirmed for thousands of years. Our culture is an anomaly in that we don't have an accepted place for psychedelics. I think that leaves an incredible imbalance. We're way overdeveloped intellectually--our technology is destroying the world--but we're way underdeveloped spiritually and emotionally. Which means we create tools that we don't have the maturity to handle properly.

Psychedelics can help us grow up as individuals and as a culture, while giving richness and meaning to our lives. Some of my most profound experiences happen to have been on psychedelics, and they've informed my non-drug life too. When we talk about MDMA for therapy, what happens while you're under the influence of the drug is not the most important thing. It's what you bring back. So when you think about a psychedelic experience, that integration is key.

How have you managed to succeed by working inside the system?
I've been able to not demonize the other, and I think psychedelics play a major role in that important ability. In my mind, I'm trying to legalize marijuana or MDMA or any other psychedelic as a medicine for the DEA. They need it as much as anyone. So on the one hand they're my opponents, but on the other hand there's a deeper connection between us.

You also need to have a willingness to become educated in a way that allows you to speak the language of the power structure. My diagnosis of the sixties is that once you identify yourself as the counterculture, you're going to be smashed. But if you identify yourself as kind of an advanced scout for the dominant culture, that's a different situation. You're now part of the culture, but you just happen to being seeing things that they haven't seen before, or you're helpfully exploring new areas.

In the past, you've brought volunteers to Burning Man to work as sort of psychedelic medics in the field. How do you prepare them to deal with people's difficult trips, and what advice would you offer someone contemplating their own psychedelic experience?
We recognize that people are taking psychedelic at these events, searching for these initiatory experiences, and a certain small percentage of them will go wrong because they don't have a safe context. So it's very much like the problems I had when I first started taking LSD and I wasn't prepared for it.

For many people, Burning Man is an expression of the future, and in a post prohibition world there will be people doing psychedelics. We brought volunteers to help take care of anyone experiencing a difficult trip, and in many cases were able to take people who might have been scarred for life, and help them learn from these experiences. And so I think we're demonstrating that once society opens the door to psychedelics, there will still be problems, but we have good ways to deal with those problems.

Now what would I say to someone who is contemplating taking psychedelics? Well, it isn't my role to say you should or shouldn't. The government says you shouldn't, but I believe it should be your choice based on honest information. If someone does decide to do such a thing, they should keep in mind four basic principles: 1) Do it in a safe space, because you've become vulnerable in certain ways. 2) Someone not under the influence should be there to watch over you, but that person is not "the guide." Your unconscious is your guide. 3) If problems come up, think in terms of "talking through" rather than "talking down," which means address the problems head on. 4) Remember that difficult is not the same as bad. You need to surrender to your unconscious and work with whatever emerges.

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