Rick Doblin
Appearances
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from throughout Ukraine. We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous area. But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens. But then they look at their phone and they see the area that the air raid sirens are supposedly about, and they could be like 100 miles away.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it was working because when you treat people as humans like that, they will often seek other treatment. And then if they're not necessarily criminals, but then... people come from all over and overwhelm the capacity because it's this one humane site. And then it became an open-air drug market. Just people from all over Europe started coming, and then they had the backlash.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I think it's something somewhat similar in Portland where you try some of these things on a local basis, but then it attracts people from all over, and then it turns into the opposite of what they'd hoped.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it's hard to have these local solutions because it attracts those people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
They did. So these kind of solutions, I think people take the wrong idea from them, that the solution itself was the wrong idea. But I think it's when you do it on a local basis like that and not have it widely distributed. So basically, the idea is that you have people that have problems with substance abuse of all kinds. We don't criminalize people who are alcoholics. They can go to AA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
stigmatized and they're not worried that they're going to be arrested and yet they can go for help and you have a lot of people that actually do that and I think that's the kind of humane approach that's where we should be leaning as a society that's a healthy intelligent society and also we should be paying attention to the people that report great benefits
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yes. Well, Rick Perry will be speaking at the conference. Fantastic. Love that guy. Brian Hubbard. Love Brian Hubbard, too. The work that you did to have Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard on your show and how much that brought attention to the Ibogaine possibilities was incredible. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Quick talk. What a turn of events. This is absolutely incredible, Joe. Absolutely. A series of unexpected things have led to this day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
square, something like that. So nobody seemed to care. Nobody moved to shelters and we just ignored these air raid sirens and heard nothing. But it's just, it was so emotionally moving because we went to the cemetery in Lviv and they have these in cities all over Ukraine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I think that there are so many possible benefits from having psychedelic clinics all over.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. I mean, we're talking about right now there's several thousand ketamine clinics. But one of the issues with ketamine clinics is that many of them provide ketamine without therapy. Whoops. Yeah, I've met a lot of those people. Yeah, yes. So I think the key point is that when we talk about psychedelics, when we talk about the clinics, it's not here, take this pill.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It's here, take this pill in a therapeutic context with therapists there to help you process the emotions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, and then with the therapy afterwards, which we call the integration process. So it's not just the experience itself. It's the preparation to be open to whatever happens. It's the experience. And then I just was the other day with a woman, Gould Dolan, who is a neuroscientist.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And what she's talked about and what she's discovered is that psychedelics are these rare substances that have the open up what they call the critical periods. So it's neuroplasticity. It's this ability to rewire your brain that stays for sometimes weeks or longer. With Ibogaine, it can be several months.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
After you have the experience so that the therapy that happens afterwards, the work that you do to integrate it has special potential to make long term changes in your behavior, in your brain circuitry. And so psychedelics are unique among substances. People are trying to develop non psychedelic psychedelics that do have this neuroplasticity. property.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But they open up this potential for long-term change if you do the therapy afterwards, if you focus on what the insights that you had during the experience and then try to make them into permanent behavior patterns.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Right. Well, one of the things that was really impactful for Rick Perry was Morgan Luttrell, who is now a member of Congress. Right. And so Morgan had very terrible trauma from his military service. and eventually was able to experience Ibogaine. And from that, he was able to get a lot better.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they have something that I've never seen before is that they have just enormous numbers of graves, terrible, they've lost about 250,000 people. But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the person that's dead, the person that's buried there. And I've never seen that anywhere else.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And there's a researcher, Nolan Williams, who will also be at the conference, who's done work with Ibogaine and a lot of the Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico, and he's done studies of their brains with traumatic brain injury. And it was shown before and after that some of them actually do have this recovery from traumatic brain injury.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yes. And that is where it could make sense in certain ways to have non-psychedelic psychedelics.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
What, are you scared? Well, and then you get the insights, though, as well. Yes. But there's people that might not want that, it's difficult.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, there is actually a situation with cluster headaches. So cluster headaches are like suicide headaches. They're worse than migraines. And this is now back around 2003. A bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches, which are terrible.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so they contacted me, and they formed this group called Cluster Busters. And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore. We would like to study this. Can you help us study this? And I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School. And I approached them and I said, would you want to study these people with criminality? cluster headaches.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they said, sure, this is really interesting. So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case, that psilocybin and LSD blocked cluster headache cycle and postponed the next cycle. And so we did all this research, and then the next step would have been to actually give LSD or psilocybin to people with cluster headaches.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the people at Harvard, like, oh, Timothy Leary, he was here. We don't want to do this. God damn it, MKUltra. All of that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, we're trying to get over that, but they did. But then the people at Harvard said, well, we will do this LSD or psilocybin, but only if it's the last resort, only if everything else fails. So the scientists, Torsten Pasi and John Halpern, decided that they would use a non-psychedelic version of LSD called bromo-LSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures. And most of them are younger and tragically interrupted their lives, a fair number of women. And they put them in the center of the cities. They're having to build new grave sites all over. And this was next to a really large old historic cemetery. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the plan was that they would give this bromo LSD to a bunch of people with cluster headaches. It would not work. And then they would come back and say, hey, we need to do this LSD and psilocybin research. So I said, okay, that makes sense. We have no idea why LSD or psilocybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany. And I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results. And they wouldn't, I heard nothing. And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the Bromo LSD works even better than the LSD and the psilocybin. Because with LSD, it's effective in micrograms.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
For psilocybin, you take 25 milligrams for a major, major trip. But with Bromo LSD, you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high. And whatever it does, it's still a mystery what it does in the brain, but it works better. You just flood the brain. So that's actually a good example of a non psychedelic psychedelic for a physiological problem. That could make sense as a medicine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Yeah. And actually, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know... I'm interested in psychedelic therapy, also what's best for patients, so that if this bromelasty is best for patients, that's great. It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing, and I'm interested in the therapy part of it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating. Kerry Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make bromoalasty into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that. And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder that was identified over about 20 years ago. And it's still not been made into a medicine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so those are the things that are frustrating because it's not even psychedelic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. So Morgan Drell was a big example to educate Rick Perry. Morgan will be at the conference. Congressman Jack Bergman, who's leading an effort in Washington to have a group that's trying to collect a lot of support, bipartisan support, to make psychedelics into medicines, will be there. I think.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You are a good bridge for that. I'm the bridge. Here I am. Oh, you know what Timothy Leary said, which is phenomenal? And tell me if this is true for you. Okay. He said, if you want to be a bridge, you have to get used to being stepped on.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And he had to hide that, though, for decades because he was worried he would lose his security clearances.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand some of these new technologies, meaning psychedelic therapies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Right. Well, Lester Grinspoon was the doctor at Harvard Medical School who was one of my mentors. And he was close personal friends with Carl Sagan. And Lester was an expert on medical marijuana. And he had a book about experiences with marijuana. Carl Sagan had to tell his story under a pseudonym because he didn't really want to be known for that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Oh, yeah. And his wife, Andrean, was on the board of directors of the NORML to legalize marijuana, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, you just shared with me before we started talking about the Texas law that's trying to, if you could maybe share a bit about that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, new to them. So they've been very much a conservative society. They don't have legal marijuana. They don't have marijuana. How dare you?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, the other part of it is the tax money, too. When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, alternatively, you could have it as taxes, and it could make it easier on the rest of us. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Sorry. Yeah, so it was very moving to be there. Just the fact that we were there, that people felt that we were willing to come to the country and be there with them, even though it's in this more safe part of the country. And so the thought that we would – the next steps would all be philanthropy. So I should say that I'm here representing myself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And prohibition of alcohol, actually, in the 20s led to organized crime in America.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, this idea that we're all going to die one day, one of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying. And also for palliative care. So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life-threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying and have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So the kind of big fears that we have about illness and death are When people are not able to process those fears, it just gets worse and worse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Well, if it wasn't for my mother-in-law reading his book – You know, and he became a big supporter of maps and and he spoke out in public that those are the kind of dialogues that change people's minds.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You know, there's been some we have a lot of I live in Massachusetts where marijuana is legal. Marijuana is legal in California and Colorado and all these states. They're doing really well economically.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, this is with abuse, for sure. Abuse. Abuse, definitely for sure. One of the things that's pretty interesting is look at the cultures that have successfully integrated psychedelics, like, for example, the ayahuasca churches that are in Brazil or the Native American church that uses peyote, often for Native Americans that have problems with alcohol.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I was out on a Navajo reservation, this is about 20 years ago, And it was for a Native American church peyote ceremony. And one of the Navajo men brought his nine-year-old son to take peyote and spend the night with us. Whoa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Peyote is mescaline, yeah. And huachuma is from San Pedro. Cactus is also that has mescaline in it. But this nine-year-old did not take the same amount of peyote as the rest of us, but he took more appropriate for his body weight. And it's within a cultural context, within a family context, within a religious supportive context, these cultures tend not to have age limits.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I think when you talk about the developmental problems that come from abuse, that's totally the case. But when you talk about occasional use for inspiration, particularly when – In a ceremonial setting. In a ceremonial setting, which has been for centuries and centuries. They've refined it. There's no neurological damage that comes to your brain from mescaline.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I'm not talking on behalf of MAPS and I'm not talking on behalf of Lycos, the pharmaceutical company that – MAPS helped start a while ago. So I'm just talking for myself personally. But what we're trying to do is really respond to where the trauma is. And next week, I'm going to Beirut, which is something I never thought I would be going to.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
That's it. I'm going to be a man. I wanted to avoid all the awkwardness of adolescence. I'm the oldest of four kids. So I had no older siblings to tell me. And we did this rite of passage. And it's been used for thousands of years. And I just had this somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way that I would be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
one thing the morning of my bar mitzvah and i'd be something different the next morning and i remember waking up in bed uh the next morning after my bar mitzvah and i'm like i'm the same this particular rite of passage didn't work and and you know you're 13 you're not so smart and i was like well you know god must be busy a lot of people got got bar mitzvahed if you know it's like christmas and you're eventually god's gonna get to me
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. And so every day for a week, I would wake up and think, is today the day? Am I different? Nothing happened. And then finally, another week and another Bar Mitzvah Saturday came along. And I realized that if I was on a list, I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people at Bar Mitzvah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the rites of passage that we do have, I believe, probably worked in the past for a lot of people. And they did have this demarcation between People didn't used to live that long either. So 13 was kind of a transition point. But it was when I was 17, almost 18, that I first did LSD. And one of my very first thoughts was, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Because, you know, you're like, who am I? Where do I fit in? I'm sort of – my ego sense is dissolving a bit from LSD. I'm connected to something bigger and larger than myself. I thought this is the courage, the test of courage. This is the test of – This is something that is a part of a rite of passage.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So for me, the psychedelics became the rite of passage when the religious rite of passage didn't have the same impact as I had hoped it would.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, and then in the U.S., where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine, but they tend to use stronger drinks. Right. So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition, that when you prohibit something, it moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug. Hence fentanyl. Yeah. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Or even cocaine when you could have coca tea. I mean, Andy Weil has been promoting for decades and decades this idea of coca tea.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But I've been invited to speak at the American University of Beirut and also a YPO sort of business group. And there's the possibility of potentially at least starting research with MDMA therapy in Lebanon as well.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, there's a lot of nutrition in the leaves. Doesn't it fuck your teeth up, though? Well, if you do anything too much, it can. You sound like an apologist. Well, I think it's this idea that appropriate use—well, Paracelsus is one of the early physicians, and he said the difference between a medicine and a poison is dose.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
See what happens. Water will kill you. Yeah. Drink too much water, yeah. Yeah, hyponatremia. You dilute your blood.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, that's one of the things that has been happening in terms of the raves and ecstasy use. So that occasionally people will overheat and die from MDMA, where you dance all night, you don't drink alcohol. Right. Adequate fluid. And you can get hyperthermia. And there are some cases. So that's one of the dangers of ecstasy use outside of therapeutic context.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so people have heard, OK, now I need to drink fluids in order to not overheat. And there have been cases of people that have died from drinking too much water.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You're reminding me of something funny. David Nutt was the drug policy advisor for the British government, and he did a ranking of the dangers of all these different drugs. And what he found was that the psychedelics were at the very low end of the dangers. And so he talked about how horseback riding – was more dangerous than ecstasy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. And so he got fired for that because he was telling the truth. He was making people love horseback riding in England. Oh, that's crazy. So what MAPS did is that we- He got fired for telling the truth. Well, he was the drug policy advisor saying things that people did not want to hear.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. So we did something similar. We looked at cheerleading.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And we looked at the emergency room visits on a per person visit for the percentage of people that do cheerleading that go to the emergency room versus the percentage of people that do ecstasy. And cheerleading is more dangerous. Oh, yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. So we had a poster that we made. It said, give me an E. Oh, God, that's so silly. But here's the thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Well, I think that in those circumstances, people believe that there's benefits that outweigh the risks. Amusement parks? Yes. Well, people enjoy them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. But I think that's the critical issue is that people have got, as you started out by saying, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits. You're hallucinating. You're running away from reality. You're not paying attention to what's really going on. You're making yourself more vulnerable. You're going to fly out a window and think you can fly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, I think this idea that, for me, how do we break through the wall of propaganda? And for me, the idea has been we go to where the suffering is, we go to where the science is, and we try to make things first into medicines. And I think that's where people are willing to listen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that overwhelms your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look. And that's where you go to where the suffering is. And that's where with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I think one of the things that we've been able to do remarkably is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days. There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research. And it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was, sympathetic patients. Most of the people in our studies are women survivors of sexual abuse.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Most of the people with PTSD are women. But most of the media attention goes to the veterans, and people put veterans on a pedestal. And if so many of them – there's different estimates, but it's 18, 22 or more per day commit suicide, and you can end up –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. One of the speakers at the Psychedelic Science Conference is Sharif Elnahal, who was the undersecretary of the VA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And he's become very passionate about what he's seen from those people that have done, the veterans that have done MDMA-assisted therapy inside the Veterans Administration. But it took MAPS 25 years. Starting in 1995, we were offering money to the VA to do MDMA research until 2021 when the first veteran received MDMA inside the VA from VA therapists.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So talk about frustration. Think about the number of people that have committed suicide from when we started offering to the VA to do it. But it was the propaganda. It was the stigma that made it so that they were not willing to do it. What's most amazing today is that Congress gave $10 million to to the Department of Defense for MDMA-assisted therapy research in active-duty soldiers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So there's a $4.9 million grant that went to Dr. Aaron Wolfgang at Walter Reed, and it's going to be giving MDMA-assisted therapy. There's another $4.9 million grant that went to a group called StrongStar that's in San Antonio here in Texas, elsewhere, and they're connected with Emory University.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so they're going to combine MDMA with a therapy called prolonged exposure where you talk about the trauma over and over. But that's very re-traumatizing. There was a study that the Veterans Administration did that took them about six years. It was 916 veterans and it compared two therapies that they use, both non-drug therapies for treating PTSD. One was called prolonged exposure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The other was cognitive processing therapy. And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study drop out because the therapy itself is re-traumatizing. Because you're just forced to go over the trauma, over the trauma, over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you. And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it re-traumatizes so many people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
we've shown is working with the MDMA with veterans, is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of our brain, that you can, once you can approach these things that have felt like will tear you apart, that they'll be overwhelming, you can't really go away from them, but they never
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
really leave either, then you can process it. So this study that will be done here in Texas with active duty soldiers, again, is going to be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure. The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It had been legal, but it was sort of quietly used in therapy circles from around 1976 to the early 80s. And then it started leaking out of these therapy circles and started being used as a party drug ecstasy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, yeah. And I think that MAPS has started funding studies combining MDMA with cognitive processing therapy as well. But the one that I think is the most, potentially the most valuable is called cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy. Conjoint means couples or diets. And so what happens is the designated patient, the veteran with PTSD, is where the attention is focused.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But when they have PTSD, it affects their families. It affects their partners. And so cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy was developed by this woman, Candice Monson, at the Boston VA University. And that's where they bring in the partner as well as the veteran, and they both get therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so back in 2014, when finally I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and they finally convinced the FDA, I mean the VA, to be willing to let MAPS support research with MDMA. They said that they would not let it – they wouldn't refer veterans. They couldn't do it inside the VA. We had to pay for it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But that the first thing they wanted us to do was combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy where both people now get MDMA. And the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD but also in strength of the relationship.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The answer is no. People do use 5-HTP and it can be helpful. Can you explain what that does? Yeah. So 5-HTP is your precursor for serotonin. So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992, the very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992. And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about a serotonin depletion. And so when you take 5-HTP, that can be helpful. But when we started with the FDA, they said, all this information that you've got from before from underground use or from before when it was still legal doesn't matter to us.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Really, everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA proof studies. And they said, don't assume that you're going to have problems and you're going to use MDMA plus 5-HTP or something. Just start with the MDMA, see what problems you get, and then you can start. So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one-day thing, it's a two-day.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yes, a lot of it was at the Stark Club in Dallas. Yeah, that is really where MDMA became ecstasy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
in the sense that the second day is for rest. It's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapists come back and do more integrative therapy the next day. And also, we do the therapy during the day. It starts at 10 in the morning. It's an eight-hour session, so often people can get sleep that night.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And we don't see more low mood or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA. So we were never felt that the need to introduce 5-HTP. We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this. But I think it's because we talk about it as a two-day experience.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or parties and things like that, often they're drinking. They do it at night. They don't get full sleep. The next day, they don't just take the day off. Often they go into – Right, and they're exhausted. And they're exhausted. Yeah, makes sense.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so I think that this concept that we've developed is this really thinking about it as a two-day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive. in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience or the PTSD or depression or whatever it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Now, there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland. And they've worked with cancer patients who are anxious about dying. And they have brought in their partners to the therapy, and both of them get MDMA as well. So these are all under FDA-approved studies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they found that that was tremendously effective as well because when your partner has got a life-threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them. It affects you as well. And often the therapy is focused, again, on the designated patient. So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is that is going to be treated and bringing in people's partners, I think, is going to be very important.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Yeah. There's a fellow named Michael Caine is working on a movie about the Star Club. Oh, wow. There's an incredible story because Larry Hagman, who is the star of Dallas, frequented this nightclub with a bunch of the people from the cast. And the police had decided to bust it because they knew that there was all these experiences. They busted J.R. Ewing? No, no.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
One of the works, Marcus and Amber Capone, who've done work with vets, they've brought probably by now about a thousand veterans down to Mexico for Ibogaine. And they have also started bringing their partners as well. They realize that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat the entire family context. This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So the scale of the trauma, in America, there's 13 million PTSD patients. This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration. You know, in Ukraine, we've got an entire country. When I was there, practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed. And so you've got massive population-based trauma.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And to think about treating people as individuals is really important, but it's going to be hard to scale because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that. So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, 5-MAO-DMT, to start on an individual basis. But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA, and it was four therapists for six veterans. And it started out where each one got an individual session first, and then they got a group session.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
and there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military one is war related or accident training related and the other is what they call military sexual trauma there's a lot of sexual abuse by veterans or by military active duty people of other people in the in the military and they call that military sexual trauma
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy, because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military, that you might not feel safe if you're in a context of group therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So they've done separate the groups, but they found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process. And so what they've done is they've realized, though, that the design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session, and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate. And so they're going to be doing group therapy there. And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel. That's for people traumatized on October 7th. And there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application. It's funded by charitable donations. The MDMA is coming from Canada. But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy. So everybody is ready to have one or the other.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You get randomized to either individual or group, and it will be a direct comparison. And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy because you have more focus, you're not thinking about other people, you can go deeper, but when you're in a group setting, you can kind of bond with the other people, you can kind of hear their other stories, but then you can support each other in this integration process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I think at the end of it, it could be that the groups do just as well as the individuals. And then that will dramatically reduce the cost of the treatment and help it scale. So that's where we're at this initial thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances, that are bonded in groups, that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice. But I think the way the FDA is going to be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first. That will have to be gone through the system and approved.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
They were all prepared to bust the star club that night. And unexpectedly, J.R. Ewing, Larry Hagman showed up. And they canceled the bus because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him, and they busted it another time.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then there will be this additional research with groups.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, it's going to be about three years for the project in Israel. I mean, it's going to be about 160 people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The project at the Portland, Oregon VA is going to be done pretty soon, but it's really just been four or five cohorts. It's very small numbers of people, and so there will need to be more. I think that there's been some efforts to do what people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group, is that
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they've done some of this at Sunstone also, where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time, but each in a separate room, each with one therapist. But then near the end of the session, they bring them together, and then they talk about what happened, and then they also have the group integration. So it's kind of a modified process.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I think in terms of timeframe, it's probably four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy, maybe longer. The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee and before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. And the advisory committee recommended against it, and the FDA voted against it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
This was August of last year. And so that was heartbreaking because I thought that the data really did justify approval and it did demonstrate safety and efficacy. But there was enough doubts that were raised. One of the big problems to do research with psychedelics is how do you do a double-blind study? When you take a powerful drug, you know you've taken it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And if you give an inactive placebo, people can tell the difference. A lot of my dissertation, which I did in 2001, was how to do a double-blind study with psychedelics, particularly with MDMA. And my solution, which made sense, was to do therapy with low-dose MDMA versus therapy with full-dose MDMA. So everybody knows they're getting MDMA. They all have the same expectations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they might not be aware, though, which dose. You know, is it a full dose? Is it a lower dose? So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion, but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell a difference between the groups.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So for 16 years, from 2000 to 2016, MAPS did a series of what are called Phase II studies to try to figure out how to do Phase III. And we looked at therapy with no MDMA, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150. So sort of like a dose response. We did all these different doses. And what we discovered...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Did you ever see that? I did, yeah. You were like, what? Well, he did LSD therapy in the 60s. The reason that I even knew that is my mother-in-law read his autobiography. And he talks about doing LSD therapy in the 60s. And so my mother-in-law said, you might want to try to contact this guy because maybe he's got overlapping interests and he'll help out.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
fortunately after I got my PhD, was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong. That, you know, a microdose of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell. So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses, 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams, did indeed cause a certain amount of confusion in
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable. So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA. They still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning and then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing. So it's kind of like that with MDMA. But the part that we discovered that was very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams, and one group got 125 milligrams. And in that particular study, when you—it was about 26 people— when you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal. It just means it's random. So the people that had 125 milligrams with PTSD had more depression than the people that had 75 milligrams.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the 75 milligram dose group did better than the 125. Interesting. Just slightly better. So what it meant was that the dose that's therapeutically effective was lower than we thought. Can
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, we evaluate everybody's PTSD symptoms and their depression symptoms. And so just by the randomization, it turned out that those people that were higher on depression ended up more of them in the 125. Just randomly?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, because when you randomize again, it doesn't mean that you're making things equal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So it was just a chance. Just turned out that way. Turned out that way. How many people were in this group? 26 people were in the entire study. Okay.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated. So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA, or it It tipped over into being very effective.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So when in November 29th, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of phase two meeting, after we got approved to go to phase three, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy. I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this, we shouldn't go directly to phase three. The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take called special protocol assessment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And you negotiate every aspect of the phase three design with FDA. And it can take, for us it took eight months. And so pharma companies are thinking there's nothing unusual what I'm doing, my patent life is expiring. But I knew we needed to do that to discuss how to deal with the double blind. And so we presented this information to the FDA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
We said, we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's going to make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses because it's going to compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all. And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me. And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experimenter bias because the whole purpose of the double blind is to sort of reduce bias that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same. They said the first is this random assignment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it took me a couple of years to get to him, but eventually I did. One funny story is that I got to know him pretty well and I would stay over at his house a bunch of times in Santa Monica. But he was also in I Dream of Jeannie.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
What that means is everybody's similarly motivated, and they will work, and the therapists don't know necessarily. So you do this random assignment. But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapists or the patients rate themselves on how well they've done compared to baseline. You need independent raters. that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So the raters don't know, did this person get the placebo? Did this person get the MDMA?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, this is afterwards. And it's done on telemedicine. It's done on Zoom. And it's an hour-long interview. And it's with what's called the CAPS, the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Yeah. It's like an hour long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened. You pick this. This is my index trauma. And how do you respond? So we had these independent raters and then we had this random assignment. And that's what the FDA said is how we should do the phase three studies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 then left the FDA. And then new, more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry. And they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA when they reviewed whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy or not. And so the pharma company, Lycos, did not really proactively explain to the advisory committee how this design was developed, why FDA chose this. design.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so the people in the advisory committee are often more academics, and they're more focused on this double-blind issue, but they're not practical in a sense. So that the FDA realizes that the double-blind fails in practice a lot. It's a theory of how you want to do things. It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Even with SSRIs, you think that Prozac or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double-blind. But they're not because when people have sexual side effects, they have other side effects, and they report to their therapist what's going on, then they can tell from the side effect profile. So the double blind fails in practice a lot.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the FDA is saying we can't just only approve drugs where the double blind is perfect. We have to weigh these different things. So that was one of the big issues that the FDA Advisory Committee objected to, was this functional unblinding. So when you asked about the timeframe, there was other issues, but where we're at right now,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I Dream of Jeannie is about this genie that comes out of this bottle. He's an astronaut. And a friend of his had made a bong out of the genie bottle. And they wanted to market it. And Larry said, no way. So there was only two versions of this genie bong. And I had one of my more humorous moments was smoking pot with Larry Hagman out
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA. With the new FDA, with the new people at HHS, and there's two, the proverbial fork in the road, there's either the FDA will say, Believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another phase three study.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
They might require what's called a phase four study, which is after approval, you gather information about safety, about durability, different things. And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months, the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. If the FDA says we want another phase three study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And that's just on an individual basis. So talk about frustration. I mean, we had incredible outcomes. So the two phase three studies that were done, The first one was severe PTSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And what we showed is that two-thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions one month apart, 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions. Two-thirds no longer had PTSD that got therapy plus MDMA. And those people that got therapy Without MDMA, with the inactive placebo, roughly one-third no longer had PTSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then another roughly 20% had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms, means that their life has changed, their symptoms are not as burdensome, but they still have PTSD. So they're called responders. So we had 88% responders, only 12% non-responders. Wow. It's the best treatment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
In the second phase three study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD. Three quarters of the people did have severe PTSD, and one quarter had moderate PTSD. And it was 72.6% no longer had PTSD, almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two-month follow-up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And what was even more remarkable, and this relates, I think, to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional unblinding, is that 46% of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having a PTSD diagnosis. That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so what that demonstrated is that the therapists, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people, whether they got the MDMA or not. And we got extraordinary results in the control group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I think one of the things that is the explanation is that when you have an eight-hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings and the other half they're talking to the therapist in no particular order. you're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
That's what I said was re-traumatizing in the studies that the VA did. Roughly half the people dropped out. We had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just – we support whatever's emerging. That's the essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people – when they're going through MDMA therapy.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it's very similar to what can be done with psilocybin or LSD or even Ibogaine, that you just support whatever's emerging. You have this sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious. We all know that our body has a certain wisdom in that it moves towards wholeness. We get cuts, it heals. It's below our level of awareness. So there's some kind of wisdom to what's emerging.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You could think about it as this barrier, this permeable barrier, semi-permeable barrier between the conscious and the unconscious. And it all happens, we all know, at dreams, that material rises to our awareness at dreams. And it's like that with psychedelics. And so we just support whatever's emerging and people can go to some happy memories or to layers of trauma, whatever.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
They're not forced to just focus on the trauma. So we have very low dropout rates. But the people that got the therapy without MDMA were able to make incredible progress. We also have what are called fidelity ratings, which is we videotape all the sessions and And then we have raters who are called adherence raters, and they look at, are people adhering to the therapeutic method?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then that's called fidelity. We had over 90% fidelity, meaning that the therapists really were doing the same, whether it was placebo or not. So the results were outstanding in that way, and the side effects were very low. We had nobody commit suicide that received MDMA. That was one of the concerns. We had one woman tried to kill herself twice, but she was in the placebo group.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And we had another woman, such severe suicidal ideation, she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself. She was also in the placebo group. Because when you help people with terrible trauma, it's difficult for them. And they're not able to really process. That's why they had long-term PTSD. So we demonstrated remarkable results. And yet the FDA said, we need more data. We need more data.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Ooh, what are we doing over there? Training therapists and psychiatrists. Wow. So Ukraine has enormous amounts of trauma. And so what I'm trying to do is to go to high trauma areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how that could be helpful.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It has been. And I think one of the things that has kept me going was a dream. We've talked about dreams a little bit. It was a dream that I had when I was in my early 20s. So when I was 18, I had decided to focus my life on psychedelics. This was after I realized, oh, LSD is what my bar mitzvah should have been. And I was able to...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
see these tools as really hopeful and there was two parts one part is sort of this working through trauma depression the other part is our interconnectedness I think this the sort of the essence of what people talk about the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things you feel that we're not just isolated individuals we're all connected with all of life
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so at 18, I said, it's a crazy world. I was a Vietnam War draft resistor. I was planning to go to jail. I'd studied Tolstoy and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance. So my contribution to my country was going to be to not register for the draft and go to jail as a protest for Vietnam. And then I thought, you know, my dad was and my mom was saying, you're going to have a criminal record.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You're never going to have a real job. You're not going to be able to be a doctor or lawyer. You'll be a felon. And I thought, OK, well, I'm not willing to to go to war because of that. But I can be an underground psychedelic therapist and you don't need a license for that. So that was my plan. So then this dream happened in my early 20s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Oh, right. No, he was very much pro-psychedelic and had multiple experiences during the 60s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I should mention that I was so – I had the real wrong idea at 18. The idea I had was the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve. I mean, again, I was a stupid 18-year-old. So I did a good job of it. And I just got more disoriented and very much ungrounded.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
That's a great way to say it. Yeah, I was very ungrounded. And I went to the guidance counselor at college. And this was a new college in Sarasota, Florida. And it was a private school at the time. And the guidance counselor, I said, I need help with my tripping. And it's become more important to me than my studies. And he said, well, you know, I understand what you're doing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
That's really makes sense to me in some ways. We're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. And he gave me this book to read, and I loved it. And it was by Stanislav Grof, the world's expert LSD researcher. And he was MD-PhD at Johns Hopkins. This is now 1972. And the research was being shut down. You talked about the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And my guidance counselor had got this book directly from Stan, and I said, could I write a letter to Stan? I want to become an LSD therapist. And he said, sure. So I wrote this letter, and Stan was just leaving Hopkins, and I'm this confused 18-year-old. And to my shock, Stan wrote me back. Stan is now, by the way— almost 94 years old. And he is still going around the world to educate people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But this book was a pivot point in my life, reading this. I said, I really want to study psychedelics. So the dream was a few years later, Um, if, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, um, near the end of it, there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all white room and he's on his deathbed.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so the dream was I'm in this all white room on this, and there's a person on his deathbed and he's, um, looking at me, and he said, earlier in my life I was almost killed, but I was saved, and I knew I was saved for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was. He said, let me show you what happened to me. So this is all in the dream.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So we go, and it's in World War II, and he was a Jewish guy, and it was outside of a village, and there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave machine guns by the Nazis. Before the crematoriums and the concentration camps, they called it the Holocaust of Bullets. So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days. Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes. And then he wakes up and he's not dead. He climbs his way through the bodies and nobody's there. It's the edge of town. He runs into the...
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
woods he survives the war with the partisans and then i see all this and then we're back in the room and he's on his deathbed and he's looking at me and he says now i know why i was saved i'm like oh tell me why were you saved he said it's to tell you to study psychedelics
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
that I want you to bring back psychedelics, that if we can all feel our interconnectedness, it will be harder to dehumanize others. It'll be harder to do this mass murder that we need to understand how we're all more similar than different. And I said, in my mind again, in the dream, I said, I've already decided to do this. This is sort of reinforcing it. I will say yes, and you can die in peace.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You will have carried this message. And then he dies in front of my arms, in front of my eyes. And then after he's dead, and then I'm thinking, what do I do next? And I walk out the room. And now I'm somehow or other on a stream. I'm sitting down watching the water go by. And then I noticed that there's this young boy sitting next to me. And I look at him and I realize I know him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
In real life at the time, I had a big LSD stash and I was worried about getting busted. And so his father was a friend of mine and he stored my LSD stash at his house. And when I connected this guy with this little kid with LSD, then I woke up. Wow. So that's what's been a big motivator for me my entire life and made it so that I don't feel that I've been able to just give up.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It's like this sort of message from what humanity can do to each other if we don't really evolve in our consciousness. Right. And so that's what's helped me to continue. I feel this enormous good fortune in that I was born in this generational, I won the generational lottery is a way to say it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
My great-grandparents on my mother's side were refugees from Russia, came to America in 1880, fleeing anti-Semitism. My father's father, my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather flew, fleed from Poland in 1920, also from anti-Semitism. They arrive at America, and it's the American dream. And it actually, on my mother's side, it was the classic rags to riches because they had a rags business.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
They turned it into a paper company. And so I was born in 1953 after the Holocaust, after World War II. And my parents were just so supportive. And my dad was a doctor. And I was told, we want to help you do whatever you want to do. And I felt like I was born at the height of American power, American exceptionalism. I was white. I was Male, my family was well off.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I was the chosen people, Jewish, American exceptionalism. The only thing I wasn't was tall. but I got every other sort of lottery thing. And I just was raised that I could make a difference. And so I had this sort of luxury. There's actually a Holocaust writer named Primo Levi, who was one of my father's heroes in a way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, it was the most popular TV show in the world at some points.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And he wrote something very interesting that I think has relevance to where we're at today in America. And he talked about how we tend to think of that the revolutions start with the oppressed and that the oppressed throw off their chains and they end up amassing all these people and they try to work for a better world. He said, but that's not actually what happens.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But about your question about frustration. Yes, the answer is yes. But it's important not to be overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration is just to continue plodding along. We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th. I had, 1986 is when I started MAPS. And when I started MAPS, I didn't really know that it would ever succeed, that we would ever make MDMA into medicine.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The revolutions don't begin with the oppressed because often that's the purpose of oppression is to make it so they can't do that. They're so focused on survival. He said the revolutions usually begin with the privileged. who for one reason or another use their freedom, use their privilege to argue, to work towards a better life.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege, you have the opportunity. obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do. It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs. Many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the bottom one is survival, that you have to work on core survival. If
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
We've had these surveys that say a vast proportion of America cannot afford a $500 or $1,000 unexpected expense. So you're living at this edge of anxiety, economic anxiety. You can't really think about many other ways to protest because you're focused on survival. Right. So I felt that I was born into this privileged place and it took multiple generations from refugees from the American dream.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And so I felt I've had this mission of this use the privilege for making it a better world. So I've not been focused on making money. I've not been focused on I've been focused on. bringing these healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics back to the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And one of the things that was so reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this, is that once FDA said no to MDMA-assisted therapy, that they weren't ready to approve it, that they wanted to see more data. I was incredibly depressed and frustrated and all that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But it took me a couple months to realize that this psychedelic renaissance, that MAPS, Lycos could disappear, but that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics. That the field was moving forward regardless. That something had been accomplished. That this psychedelic renaissance was really moving forward.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And that that was this wave that I think is unstoppable. That we're seeing the healing potentials in so many different ways with so many different drugs. So that gave me this realization. It was kind of reassuring, yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't ready, things are moving forward in a great way.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It was the height of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No and the escalation of the drug war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think this – I'm smiling because you probably know this quote from John Ehrlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor. And this came out at the end of the 1970s. He did an interview. And he said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were the civil rights movement and the hippies, the anti-war movement.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And he said we couldn't stop them from protesting, but we could criminalize the drugs that they were using and use that to bust up their meetings, arrest their leaders. And he said, did we know that we were exaggerating the risks of these drugs? Of course we did.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It is. And when you talk about Brian Miorescu and The Immortality Key, which, by the way, is being made into a documentary. Phenomenal book. But the Eleusinian Mysteries is the longest-running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world, roughly 2,000 years. It involved a psychedelic potion called Kikion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I realized that it was worth doing, working towards bringing psychedelics forward, whether it worked or not. And that's what really gave me the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the frustration, by how many obstacles there's been. Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing. We need this access to these experiences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It's not exactly clear what was in it, but it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality. And often religious systems want to be the intermediaries. Exactly, they want to be the gatekeepers. Of course, power. When we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, we talk about what happened in the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Eleusinian mysteries. And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people. And then we have the burning of the witches.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote because they were the center of the communities. Now, these communities were not all, you know, peace and love. They were often warring and killing each other.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So there does need to be a lot more conscious evolution.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, there's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hesse, and it's called The Glass Bead Game. Magister Lutie, The Glass Bead Game. And it helped Herman Hesse win the Nobel Prize for literature, and he wrote it during World War II. And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the book was a post-apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these competitive energies into what they called The Glass Bead Game. which was this, it's a beautiful book, but The Glass Beat Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they would have this different kind of who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive. And this was kind of the antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse. And he's writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract and it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people. It became more of this elite. And the head of it, the Magister Lutti, decides that he has to leave So that there has to be some way that we do compete with each other, but we have to do it in a way to learn nonviolence.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive. The nuclear proliferation is taking more. So I ended my TED Talk with this, which was 2019. And interestingly enough, it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage at TED about Ibogaine. So it took six years from my first – that was the only ever TED Talk on psychedelics in 2019.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then Nolan Williams talked about Ibogaine just recently. And he'll also be at the psychedelic conference. But this idea I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it's been tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides, for example, that are happening every year. And if the Drug Enforcement Administration, when they made MDMA illegal, in 1985. They did that on an emergency basis. We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an administrative law judge lawsuit.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. You know, what's going on with Israel and Palestine? I just want to mention something. So there are small groups of Israelis and Palestinians that are doing ayahuasca and MDMA together. so that in a way to emphasize their common humanity, but also to work through their traumas. And one of the most, I think,
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
inspiring and motivating groups in Israel and Palestine is a group called Combatants for Peace. And so these are Israeli soldiers or what would be called Palestinian terrorists or those that had used violence on both sides, and they've given up violence for nonviolence. So it's a group called Combatants for Peace.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the Palestinian has been invited to come speak at Psychedelic Science, and he was denied a visa.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
He cannot come to our conference. We're trying to see if we can work behind the scenes. I don't know if we can to get him a visa. But that this idea that we're just because he's Palestinian. I don't know the exact reasons why. He did have a violent past because that is the whole point of Combatants for Peace. They were combatants. They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So there's an incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Lior Roseman at Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians. And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session. and with different measures of how you see the other. And once you do see this commonality, you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements, Adam Kinzinger, who is the Republican on the January 6th committee in the House to look at what happened on January 6th. He said that he's learned from his investigations that there's something that people are more scared of than death, and that's being kicked out of your tribe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
that we're such social beings, that this idea that we would be isolated and alone, that's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them, because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe and they ostracize you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, and then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions I think this is very true, that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell. But it's all about this combination of us being both interconnected and also extremely individual. I think this other part is that the more you realize... how we're all essentially more similar.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I mean, look at our DNA is very similar to some animal DNA. There's very slight differences. And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more. But once you can kind of understand that, hopefully then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So it's this paradoxical thing where that the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And we were challenging this argument for making it into a Schedule I drug. And we actually won the case. Wow. The judge said it should be Schedule 3, which means it should be available as a medicine, but it should be illegal otherwise for recreational use. But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're working in. They don't compel.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's, again, really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used. So the social context. So, for example, religions often cozy up to the people in power. So there's an ayahuasca church, the Uniao de Vegetal. And they came from Brazil. They actually went to the U.S.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Supreme Court and got approval for practicing ayahuasca in the United States. But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church. So they've become patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical. And some of the leaders of the Uniao de Vegetal aligned with Bolsonaro, who was about destroying the Amazon.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So that it doesn't—the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person. It's the context. So it's the same way in therapy, that you can have these experiences, but it's the context in which you interpret them, and then it's the integration work that you do after that really makes the most sense. So that you can have psychedelic experiences, but if it's not in this—
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
therapeutic context where you're really open to deal with the different issues and things, fears of death, things that come up. So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just, it's a magic pill and it will produce better people.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, what he's basically saying is that... It's a real good chance that early monkeys and stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat and that they would eat mushrooms and that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language. I think it's plausible. I mean, I don't know that we'll know for sure.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
That's what I talked about, this neuroplasticity. Yeah, that Gould-Dullin is talking about, opening these critical periods. Yes.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You have to get out of that into the civil courts. So the judge said Schedule 3, and the Drug Enforcement Administration said, no way, we're not going to do that. And their rationale was so wrong. So we sued them in the appeals court. What they said initially was that only the FDA could make a drug into a medicine, not the DEA.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I think that's plausible. But I think then what does that mean for us today is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing. Einstein had this great quote. He said, the splitting of the atom has changed everything.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
everything except our mode of thinking and hence we are drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe what shall be required if mankind is to survive as a whole new mode of thinking and what is that new mode of thinking is sort of how we're interconnected it's yeah it's what the astronauts have said so I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics the astronauts we've been up in space look back and see the earth as a whole thing
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, you don't see the borders, you don't see the religions, you just see that this is one really unique planet that we've all grown up from and it's produced all this life and we're all interconnected.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. I mean, people say that the stars burn brighter because they're surrounded by darkness.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, there's an incredible quote from Carl Jung, so this Jungian psychology. And what he said was that we need to study more about humanity. We need to study how we operate. He said, because the only real danger that exists is man himself, that we are able to deal with all these things. He said, we know virtually nothing about man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
We must do more study because we are the source of all coming evil.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But the law was clear that it could be the attorney general could do that. So the appeals court, when they review agencies' decisions, they don't tell them what to do. They say, you did something wrong. Now rethink it. So then the DEA said, okay, we're going to rethink it. And then they came up with a new reason why they were against it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
This was in 1959, about three years before he died. And it's chilling. We are the source of all coming evil.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Now let's talk about the shadow. Something else. So in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown. You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see. And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out. And so these people become the enemies. These people become the evil. And we're the all good. It reminds me, actually, I was with Terrence. This was my first DMT experience. So this is about 40 years ago. This was at Esalen at Big Sur.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It was with Ralph Metzner, Terrence McKenna, and a bunch of us were trying to gather together to think how to protect MDMA. And one evening, we all were trying DMT. So not 5-MeO DMT, but DMT. And you smoke it in a pipe. It's like 10 or 15 minutes long. And then you just go out, and then you come back and share what happened, and then you pass the pipe to the next person.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So it's like a three-, four-hour process with this group. And so for me, my first experience with DMT was very – so the first thing I saw was this horizontal line, and then I saw a vertical line, and then it turned red, and then it turned into cubes, and then it turned into like an M.C. Escher painting where the space doesn't seem to make sense anymore, and then I was blasted into this –
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
other universe or not but i was blasted out of myself into the universe and i felt like i was part of everything and everything was part of me and it was this glorious billions of years of evolution and i went through all of this but then after all that finally i had this idea that if i'm part of everything and everything part of me then hitler is part of me too And it was shattering.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But it was true. You can't claim to be part of everything and only take the good parts. Right. And it just was a shocker to me that this logic brought me to this. And it was really, really shocking. And it took me this whole day to start working on that.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then the very next day, and this gets back a little bit to legalization, the next day, and to MAPS's political strategy, the next day we experimented with ketamine. All right. So in my ketamine experience, somehow or other, I was above and behind Hitler because, you know, the Holocaust had been this animating idea for me my whole life. So I'm above and behind Hitler.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Ketamine gives you a bit of remove, like you're not quite there. So I felt that I was safe, but I was watching him give a speech like to these rallies where you have, you know, enormous numbers of Germans. And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody, doesn't want to kill the Jews, doesn't want to have this war? How do I get into his head?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And this was this eight-part standard that was essentially the same as the FDA. So then we sued them again the second time. And we won again in the appeals courts. And so they went back to the DEA and said, you have to come up with another rationale. This one doesn't work either. And then they came up with a five-part standard that was sufficiently different but still had phase three studies.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I felt this panic rising. And it was like bubbles, like I was underwater. And I felt that the bubbles of my fear, if they broke the surface, I wouldn't be able to, I'd have to look away. I couldn't deal with it. And then I realized that one of the beauties of ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration. You can breathe.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not. So I started really breathing. And then I was able to go back and watch. And what I saw was this Heil Hitler salute. And then I saw everybody doing it back to him.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I got this sense, because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger. And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the Heil Hitler salute, and then everybody is pushing it back to him. So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up, like this kind of unity between him and the people. And it just was terrifying. And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head. Like you're saying, the psychopaths that are often politicians, that they're getting so much out of it. But it's the people giving away their power that I thought that's where the solution has to be.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So MAPS is about mass mental health, about a spiritualized humanity. And so that led to this understanding for me that – That safety for humanity is not just giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up. It's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So that led to this idea. We need to medicalize. We need to go, you know, to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks. But at the same time, there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people in a way preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis so that it's this two parallel paths. One is science and medicine. The other is drug policy reform.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then we talked about earlier about educating young people. We need honest drug education. People have died from taking ecstasy contaminated with fentanyl. We need pure drugs. We need pure support, treatment on demand. But I think the drug war is so counterproductive that if we could just turn a switch, it would be worth it.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But we need to really anchor and build kind of a healthier culture and healthier people. But it has to be sort of masses rather than just individuals.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So it's essentially the same as FDA approval. And finally, the courts upheld that. And that's during this process, it was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as a medicine, that we would have to go through the FDA. And that's where MAPS began as a nonprofit psychedelic pharmaceutical company focused entirely on donations.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah. Actually, in Ukraine, they've had some people have developed Amanita and taken out some of the more toxins. And in low doses, they use it for sleep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Amazing. Also, I've just been in touch with some very well politically connected scientists in India, and they don't think that Amanita is actually Soma.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Because of the experiences that they've been able to sort of track the way they describe it and the way people have described it before.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It very well could be. Well, we don't even actually know what was in the Kikian from the Eleusis. We think that it might have something to do with Ergot and LSD-like things.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And the intention was to turn it into a generic drug because MDMA had been invented by Merck. In 1912, it was in the public domain. It was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it. And then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was itself illegal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
What is henbane? Henbane is, actually it was used in the Middle Ages by a lot of the witches.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
No, you don't. And you saw one of those side effects was drowsiness. So that sort of relates to what they've done with low doses of Amanita for sleep.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I don't know how you find that out. I mean, you can probably do some genetic studies to see how long these genes that are in Amanita have persisted. Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, but it's pretty clear that, at least from a lot of these Indian scholars, that Amanita is not Soma, but they don't know what it is.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, I mean, that's unbelievable. Again, this just illustrates how far advanced our science has become, way over our spiritual and emotional development. You're able to look at thousands of year-old vessels and get microscopic traces of what was in them.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
you don't need the intermediaries and we want the taxes. We want to tell you what. And so I think when we, this gets back to one of the earlier points you made about it, do I get frustrated? Which is to realize that this is actually thousands of years plus of the suppression of psychedelics. And also you said something earlier, how quick a hundred years goes by. Yeah.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It turned out that the Congress had given the Attorney General the power to emergency schedule drugs, but the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA. So they didn't have the authority to do that. So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their lawyers figured this out. So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say. Wow.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
What if something takes a couple generations? That's okay. I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small. We need to have like multi-generational goals. I grew up outside of Chicago and there's this Baha'i temple. So the Baha'i religion is emerged out of Islam, but it's more of a universal religion.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries. But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago, this beautiful temple, but it took three generations to build it. And when you're a little kid and thinking about it, I'm like, how could they even plan ahead? How could they even have hope that why would they even start something that they didn't even know would ever be finished?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But that now it's one of the most beautiful temples in the world. And so I think this process of elevating consciousness in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take. So things take longer than I thought, you know.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
I think the hope that we had that FDA would approve. Well, they didn't. So do you just give up? Right. No. You just keep on trucking. Keep on trucking.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, thank you for what you do, man. It's very important. I want to add one thing about the conference. Please. Just to say that it's going to be really, really fun. It's going to be, if people come to it. 500 speakers. 500 speakers, thousands, thousands, thousands of people, all sorts of ways the psychedelic community is going to be coming together. Do you have a website?
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Yeah, psychedelicscience.org or maps.org. There's actually going to be a... Ooh, look at that. That's cool. What is that thing spinning around? A molecule. That's a molecule. What if you put Rogan in when you want to... Register there's a 15% discount to go to the conference. We also have this We have 10 different stages.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
We have all different tracks for different kind of interests we also have this project called music is the bridge and so this is that we have various people are coming up with the music that they would listen to during a psychedelic experience like Icarus and Icaros, very much. So there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And it's also lots of opportunities for networking. Because again, for me, even though MAPS has been focused on MDMA, what it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance. So I don't see the psilocybin or the Ibogaine or anything as competition. It's we want the psychedelic therapists of the future to be cross-trained in all the different drugs.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And then to be able to customize the treatment for each person. And that's what we're hoping to develop.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
It's June 16th to the 20th. It's coming up next month. And it's in Denver. It's at the Colorado Convention Center. We have... That's a big place. Oh, yeah. Last time we did this is 2023. We had 12,400 people. Whoa. It was astonishing. It must have been the nicest people, too. Oh, it was so hopeful, and it was magical.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So I think that this would be, if anybody wants to learn about the psychedelic community, this is where we gather together.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, we want them to come. That's the point is that we want them to come. Well, here's the other point is that we work with police officers. When you think about what job is among the most traumatizing, it's being a police or being a EMT or being a prison guard. And they're trained sort of to suppress their feelings, to not talk about it. Right. And so there's so, yeah, we want the feds to come.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But we're stuck. And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many people's lives would have been saved? How many people would have been able to... benefit from psychedelics. That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference, the 16th to 20th in June in Denver. We have over 500 speakers. We had over 1500 applications.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
The more that they come, the more that they learn. We have trained police officers who are also therapists that have even got permission from their police chiefs to go through our protocol to get MDMA as part of their training.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
So really, it's healing for all. That's why I'm going to Beirut. That's why I just came from Ukraine. We've got a project in Somaliland in Africa. We want to do work in Rwanda. So I think that Lycos is going to succeed, whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever. We will eventually, FDA will eventually approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Then they'll approve psilocybin and other things. And so I'm sort of going around the world in sort of high trauma, low resource areas to try to globalize access. And I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now, and we could use more people dealing with their fears, dealing with their anxiety, withdrawing the projection of the shadows.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You know, immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways. I mean, where did we all come from? I mean, what is the story of your family? Immigrants.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And I know that there's a lot of prejudice against immigrants when they first show up. But now we don't think you're not an American. Right. Exactly. Exactly.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
You're doing God's work. And look how miraculous it was that I'm here today with you.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Incredible. Thank you, Duncan. I'm so sorry you had an emergency root canal.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Not with psilocybin, not with MDMA. You can't even do research. But over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their military, by other people to change that because they're aware that they have so much enormous trauma. So a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation to change the law.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
There's an enormous amount of research taking place with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with Ibogaine, with MDMA, with 5-MeO-DMT, with a whole host. And the healing potential of these are incredible. And yet they've been kept away from people by these prohibitionist laws. And so it's enormously frustrating and tragic.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And yet if we let that overwhelm us, then we're not going to work as hard to make it happen. So I've had to learn how to deal with that frustration.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, it's counterproductive. Yes. It's not even, you know, like stopping a lot of the benefits. It's actually creating more harms. Just as one example, my father was a pediatrician. He's no longer alive, but he worked on the first study with crack babies. He and his partners did the pediatric evaluation. And you remember this in the 80s.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
This idea was that there's going to be this whole generation of super predators and these Women that were pregnant with crack were having babies that were addicted and they were going to be mentally deficient and prone to violence and this whole scenario that Reagan amplified. Right.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
And what my father and his partners found out was that really these kids could recover, that they could do better, that it was mostly malnutrition, poverty. It's not like fetal alcohol syndrome, that it was really not this direct connection between the crack cocaine and the problems with these kids.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But what he found was that the women that were pregnant and were addicted were driven away from— Your fucking phone is dinging again, man.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
But he found that these women were dissuaded from seeking treatment.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Because they were worried that they would have their babies taken away from them because they were worried they were going to go to jail. So the drug war... is counterproductive in that the people that need the help the most are driven away from seeking it because of the stigma and shame and criminality.
The Joe Rogan Experience
#2319 - Rick Doblin
Well, that's the important point, what you just said. People were going there. So what that means is that, and we saw this in Zurich. So there was a place in Zurich multiple decades ago called Needle Park. where they decided to provide access to health care, access to safe injection sites, things like this for heroin addicts and others in Zurich.