Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit established in 1986 to advance evidence-based psychedelic therapy and end prohibition. MAPS incubated Lykos Therapeutics (formerly MAPS Public Benefit Corporation) which is leading drug development of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. Learn more about Psychedelic Science 2025, June 16–20 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, at www.psychedelicscience.org, and visit www.maps.org for information on MAPS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How did Rick Doblin end up on the Joe Rogan Experience?
Quick talk. What a turn of events. This is absolutely incredible, Joe. Absolutely. A series of unexpected things have led to this day.
So you were supposed to do Duncan's podcast, and then Duncan and I got on the phone, and he was saying, you know, trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event. Yeah. And then Duncan said, you know, hey, man, you can have him on your show. And I said, well, why don't you come on, too? It would be really fun. Then this morning, Duncan has a root canal, like an unexpected emergency root canal.
So it was just a crazy turn of events, and fortunately, you're here.
Yeah, I just came in from Ukraine, actually.
Chapter 2: What is the current status of psychedelic therapy in Ukraine?
Oh, wow.
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.
What is the legality of it over there?
Wow.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: Why is MDMA therapy still not widely accepted?
You know, it's like, but that was the one time that a positive drug story from like a beloved star of a beloved show.
Yeah, it was the most popular TV show in the world at some points.
Yeah.
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.
It was the height of Nancy Reagan and Just Say No and the escalation of the drug war.
The worst times.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What is the history of MDMA's legal challenges?
But why do they not want it? They don't want it because of propaganda. They don't want it because someone, there's the stories of like Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd, you know what I mean? The stories of people losing their mind. That's what people are terrified of. I think with some people, honestly, that's a valid point now that you're saying that.
There's a bunch of people that are very psychologically vulnerable and maybe a profound psychedelic experience wouldn't be... It wouldn't be... It wouldn't be tenable. They wouldn't be able to handle it. That's possible. There's a bunch of people that are in a bad state. Maybe they're on a ton of medication just keeping them stable. They can't do psychedelics.
Maybe them, a non-psychedelic version of that rewired their brain would be beneficial now that I think about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They ruined it for everybody.
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.
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Chapter 5: How can psychedelics aid in trauma recovery?
right after alcohol prohibition, so they were looking to put these agents back out into the field. All that needs to be comprehensively explained to the American public to re-inform people, because I think people, they have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things.
You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda, and they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data. And also the problem with that, too, is there's real side effects of some of these things. Those need to be understood. How do you understand them? Well, you have to make them legal and do tests and studies.
And maybe people have gene expressions that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing, but they can do that thing, you know?
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.
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.
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.
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 –
Avoiding a lot of that by helping them process the traumas that they experience and again, it's like we're talking about boards the bridge Yeah, that's the real bridge the bridges these you know hard-nosed right-wing guys who have these experiences Become better parents become better friends just like reintegrate into society make peace with the past It's it's totally possible and that these tools are being so underutilized to so many vulnerable and needy people so many people just fucking need some help and
Yeah. One of the speakers at the Psychedelic Science Conference is Sharif Elnahal, who was the undersecretary of the VA.
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Chapter 6: What is Rick Doblin's perspective on the future of psychedelic therapy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Chapter 7: How do cultural perceptions affect drug policy?
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.
Yeah, makes sense. I've always been puzzled by that one because it does appear in so many shamanic rituals. It appears in the old depictions of Christmas and Santa Claus and all the Christmas used to have little elves and the amanita. I always wonder, was the amanita different back then? What was going on? What happened?
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.
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, the ergot thing is very interesting, right, because ergot has similar effects to LSD.
Yeah.
And so the Eleusinian Mysteries, I think it's only right now it's been confirmed from I think it was just one or two vessels, these pottery vessels that they found traces of ergot. Yeah.
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.
Crazy, yeah. Well, at least it lets you know, okay, now it makes sense that that's how they figured out democracy.
Well, the Greeks are the home of democracy.
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