Episode 43 – Rick Doblin Ph.D

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calm what’s up folks it is so good to be back we took a few weeks off and everyone needed some time off and by everyone I mean it’s great to be back and we have an amazing episode for you guys in this episode we spoke to dr. Rick Doblin the very tenacious Rick Doblin the founder of the multidisciplinary Association for psychedelic studies in this episode we cover a vast range of topics from Rick’s personal journey to the political

atmosphere of prohibition and the medical use of these compounds to treat PTSD and other ailments in mrs. so the conversation is pretty far-reaching and you should stick through it there is something about Rick’s personality his persona that just makes you believe that this is possible this will happen and it’s it’s really amazing the experience and wisdom that that comes through in this conversation also in this conversation my friend

Damiano are helped me co-host and you’re going to be hearing more from him it was it was good because I noticed damiana is war in the psychedelic field and I really respect what he’s doing for the community so he did great very proud of him for his first co-host otherwise there are some major changes coming Podcast and some overhauls that were we’re doing but they’re all good things and necessary I think you guys will enjoy them the DMT molecule spirit

molecule contest will go up I’m still manicuring that and finishing touches on that I’m actually setting up a membership section for you guys where you will have access to a whole other level of content so that’s what I’ve been working on we also picked up a sponsor for this episode very happy about that this is a company that I personally vetted and I would never put anything in front of you my listeners that I didn’t feel comfortable using

myself these companies that that may sponsor us are going to be companies that we personally that you can rely on that level of consistency from us and we’re never gonna put something out there that is questionable so thank you guys so much for all the support the Facebook messages telling us how amazing the podcast is I love those send more of them they definitely helped the ego boost it helps but all joking aside and without much further ado here’s our

episode with mr. Rick Doblin thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is in session my guest tonight is mr. Rick Doblin damiano our is going to be helping us co-host for this conversation Rick my good sir welcome to hxp yeah thank you for inviting me I’m really glad so Rick I mean you have founded this institution can you tell up we can you please tell the audience who you are and what you do please okay well dr. Rick Doblin you could say I got a

PhD from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics in marijuana so that was my dissertation the PhD is in public policy so I have a simultaneous training in working as a therapist I’ve been trained with Stan Grof and the holotropic breathwork the hyperventilation for producing experiences similar to LSD and another of the classic psychedelics and then my public policy training is about

helping our culture it’s had a bad trip with psychedelics get over that so I started maps in 1986 and the DEA had previously criminalized MDMA in 1985 and before that I’ve had another nonprofit in 1984 that we used with the psychedelic therapy community to sue the DEA to try to keep preserving the therapeutic use of MDMA around half a million doses had been used in therapeutic settings personal growth settings quietly under the name Adam and

so this was at the time of Nancy Reagan and the just say no program and the escalation of the drug war and the culture wars and it felt like at the time but the only way that there would be possible to bring the therapeutic use of MDMA and other psychedelics back was through the FDA used science and medicine for healing purposes and particularly trying to do it for healing purposes of people that the mainstream had sympathy for and and so it’s now

been almost 30 years next year is the 30th year of maps and we’re we’re close actually a lot closer than we’ve ever been there’s to moving through the FDA system we’re about to complete an international series of Phase two pilot studies with mdma-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder we started these in 2000 the first one was in Spain for two years and then it got shut down by the Madrid anti-drug Authority after there were some really

positive media and then we were able to start our first study in the u.s. in 2004 and so we’re now anticipate that we can make MDMA into a prescription medicine by 2021 that’s our your attitude towards this is pretty remarkable considering the sort of opposition that you are facing with the American government and legislation that you have to go through to get this type of research regulated and done I mean how did you find yourself in a position

to do this and how do you maintain this great question well I first decided what I wanted to do when I was 18 years old in 1972 I didn’t know how but I knew what what and over the last decades you know now 61 I figured out a lot more about how but what led me to that decision when I was 18 part of it is that I had decided to become a draft resister to Vietnam and anticipated going to prison for that and when I shared this discussion they had a

discussion about this with my parents their attitude was that you know I’d never be able to get a normal job and they weren’t opposed to what I was saying they just pointed out that you know with a criminal record you know I couldn’t be a doctor or a lawyer or things like that and so I thought well if the price of having a normal mainstream job is being willing to go off to Vietnam and either kill people or get killed it wasn’t worth it so I felt

like what am I going to do but what really did it was the sense that in the war in Vietnam that that there was a lot of emotional calls to action by politicians but that it was fundamentally you know a terrible mistake and previously growing up my earliest influences in a political sense about the wide world was when I was pretty young you know 10 12 years old and really learning about the Holocaust and I’ve got distant relatives

that are killed in the Holocaust I’m I’m Jewish I have Israeli relatives and they were some of them involved in the the war of 1948 and so I just was starting to grapple with this idea of cultures being basically insane and and you know projecting out their shadows onto others and trying to destroy and that those that there were psychological factors that were really crucial to survival and so I grew up at a time where in America

was unquestionably the most powerful country in the world you know my dad was a doctor so we had more than enough to eat and to travel and so the survival needs were taken care of but I was shaken by the possibility that you know crazy cultures might want to come and kill me and you know when you learn about Jewish history it’s like over and over and over different kind of people want to kill the Jews then what radicalized me even more or not even

more but especially was the Cuban Missile Crisis and this concept of the terrible terrible power of nuclear weapons and how we were facing this incredible escalation arms race with the Soviet Union and we possessed weaponry that could you know destroy everybody on earth not just Jewish people but everybody and that again that there was this projecting the shadow outward not to say that I would have preferred to live in Russia which was you know

totalitarian state but that we ended up I just felt like the the survival of the human race is really unclear and it’s based more on psychological factors than on resource questions I mean astonishing if you look at it that you know seven eight billion people and we have enough you know if we were equitably distributing them we have enough food and water we are destroying the environmental different ways which is another aspect

of people being blind to certain externalities so it just felt like first off the Holocaust secondly of the arms race and then thirdly the Vietnam War that that I got very interested in psychological factors and then also I started thinking about certain kind of spiritual questions like you know are we fundamentally different than people that have a different color skin or a different religion or a different country you know the different ways that

we identify ourselves are usually ways that we both have our own individual identity but they also separate us from other people and so I started thinking about if we really could understand our commonality that that would have political implications and I was sort of hearing that in the cultural around me growing up in the late 60s and you kind of hear about you know the Beatles and Saoirse peppers lonely heart band and the influence of LSD and all these

things but I was raised to believe that LSD made you permanently crazy that if you took it you know you were basically gonna have a very difficult time as an adult making your way in the world because you’d be off-balance from LSD and I was you know raised to be scared of these substances until I read one floor of the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey and the book was fantastic and a friend of mine said that some of that book was written while he was under the influence

of LSD so I really you know couldn’t believe that and that made me start questioning what I’d been told and then as a college freshman in 1971 and then early in 72 starting to take LSD for the first time and seeing that what I’d been taught was bunches of propaganda and that there was this possibility of feeling more connected and not just fee thinking about it but feeling it in a very deep and profound way I sort of woke up to the value of

psychedelics as the backlash was coming down backlash against the 60s and drugs were criminalized and research was shut down and I felt like here’s this tool that does seem to help people have the sense of connection and then it has implications for everything you know for the environmental movement for civil rights movement for religious tolerance for women’s rights it just felt like if you can focus on consciousness change towards opening towards spirituality I

mean even what you’re talking about the human experience if we can understand that the human experience is really of life and death and growth and love and children that the deaths transcends all these other ways that we try to divide ourselves and then you know the other part was growing up at a time of going to the moon and then eventually seeing the Earth from moon those you know the pictures of the whole earth it just felt

like there was something fundamentally healing both individually and culturally and on a planetary basis of that kind of unit of experience and for me it didn’t really come from my Burma spa it really felt like the psychedelics were the way for me and also for many people and so I felt alright I’m probably gonna go to jail for being a draft resister I can’t have a normal job but these tools have been demonized like you were right you

were ready you’re ready to go to jail over the Maps Institute and you you were ready to do what you had to do to I mean is that is that an accurate yeah yeah I mean this is even when I was 18 I mean I didn’t start maps you know for another 14 years but the the idea was that through my family I felt like I could get survival support and that I was a counterculture drug use criminal that’s how at age 18 I identified myself and I was willing to

go to jail and I thought that was happening but you know sometimes you project omnipotence on the system when the system is just enormous ly complex and incompetent and you know it turned out 60,000 people never registered for the draft and you know people would shoot themselves in the foot or hurt themselves in any number of different ways or run away to Canada or do all sorts of things to get out of going to Vietnam and the most simple thing if you

just didn’t send in your postcard at the very beginning to say hey I register for the draft nothing happened it’s like you know the emperor has no clothes in that way and so that was a relief for me and you know President Carter the first day in office pardoned all the draft resisters so I feel like the arc of my life is trying to move from counterculture drug using criminal to being a mainstream drug using legal law abiding citizen and so so dr. dr. dull

and it seems like if you’ve touched on a lot on what psychedelics can offer the society and you’re definitely an expert and you have changed the face of psychedelic research throughout your career and given the current trajectory of the research where would you see psychedelic assisted psychotherapy in five years or 10 years or 20 years down the line what’s the future for this for this type of research okay thank you for that question – so we feel like right

now 20:21 is when we’ll have mdma-assisted psychotherapy approved by FDA of course we have to you know raise many many millions of dollars and we have to train more therapists and the results of our studies have to turn out as we anticipate but in around five years we think that well six years we think that we’ll have MDMA approved as a prescription medicine and also the heffter Research Institute will have solace I’ve been approved for people with

anxiety related to cancer so once you get some medical permission for use of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy it’s not going to be like a normal medicine it’s going to be only people with certain training are gonna be able to prescribe it and then it may also be limited at least initially to only certain kind of clinics so like methadone initially you had to go to clinics to get it or kidney dialysis centers because what we’re saying into

the FDA is that it’s not the drugs that are the healing it’s the drug assisted psychotherapy combination so we’re gonna have to create contexts that are like the research context that combine pharmacology the drugs and the psychotherapy so then I think starting in 2021 we’re gonna be establishing a network of psychedelic clinics and I think other people will be able to start their own clinics it’s not like we’re gonna have a monopoly on these clinics

and they’ll eventually these clinics will be not just an MDM a clinic or a psilocybin clinic they’ll be people that are cross trained in how to administer MDMA or administer psilocybin and these clinics the best model for that so far in history for me is the hospice centers so in 1974 was the first hospice where people could have a different approach towards dying outside of a hospital where their pain is taken care of but they’re now no longer being medicalized

trying to just extend their life one more day they’re just being permitted to die in a more graceful way so by 2024 but by excuse me 2004 30 years later there was 3,500 hospice centers so I think once we get psychedelics approved as prescription medicines in 2021 then there’ll be a period of 10 20 years of the clinics spreading throughout America and Europe and elsewhere in the world and then I think we’re gonna have a population that’s

really educated properly that understands the risks and benefits and then will start moving towards really fully ending prohibition and ending this whole concept that the government should step in between you and whether you take a certain so yeah I love this vision I love what you’re talking about I agree with it and there does seem to be the sort of ayahuasca movement that I see happening with psychedelics people who are waking up to that but just to bounce

around cuz I I kind of want to explore your journey and the battles and internal things for you what do you think in European was the hardest thing that you had to overcome in this journey that you’re on well in a way the hardest is that I identified being a counterculture drug using criminal and so trying to think of myself as not somebody on the outside you know raising this issue that everything would be better if psychedelics were just legal

and available to people but starting to think of myself as part of the mainstream because I care and that I see that a lot now too as circumstances are changing you know ayahuasca has spread throughout the society a lot of its uses technically not religious so it’s technically not legal but still it’s being used by people throughout the culture and people’s attitudes are changing dramatically and trying to think about what is the goal I mean I

think part of the 60s was Timothy Leary the whole counterculture that you know that there was something essentially radical about psychedelics and psychedelic users challenging the status quo and it could never really be incorporated into society and so I bought into that initially you know I was gonna be an underground psychedelic therapist and try to bring it back but I didn’t know that that would be possible so I think sort of letting go of that

romance rebellious idea that I’m the one on the outside that knows the right thing to do that’s been really difficult the the other part for me that’s been difficult is learning how to be patient that there’s just so much resistance and and has been for so long to sustain the focus I’ve had to really do a fundamental sort of mental trick I guess to say which is that instead of I first get really frustrated about things I would do and I’d be shut down and you

know efforts I would try that would be blocked and then I had to redefine success and so success for me became trying what I thought was most important and trying my best and whether it worked or not it’s beyond me it’s it’s a big cultural issue and it’s dependent upon so many other factors out of my control but if my success was dependent upon actually achieving what I was trying for I would have been frustrated and burned out a long time ago so figuring that out

that that just trying hard and trying as best I could and not so much being attached to the outcomes and just thinking at least in my own little life this is what I’m trying this is what I value and that’s all I can do and at the end of the day if I was happy of what I did that day then whether the work was on something that was being blocked or not that it was still a successful day that there was one time about 15 years ago where I was so frustrated that I

just had to stop work for a week and paint my house and I was just so glad that I could do something that you know I could see that I was actually making a difference and you know I’d go to bed at night I’d say yeah okay I painted this wall or I did so after that week of painting the house I kind of recovered my mood and was able to go back and start trying to get permission again for psychedelic research dr. Delman around the same around the same lines of what

you just talking about about wanting to be an underground psychedelic therapist when you were younger I’m sure there are a lot of people in their 20s now that are also going through that phase with this resurgence of psychedelic research but it seems like now you have created kind of a framework for those people to be able to actually get careers in those in the psychedelic research field so what would you what would you like to

tell the the generation the next generation of people that want to become psychedelic researchers and what they what they would have to do in a way to to get into that that specific career path that’s a yes well I think first time n you realize this but that maybe a lot of people don’t realize that there’s been roughly 50 years of work since say 1965 to make it so that the young generation you’re now the first generation in 50 years that if you want

to have an aboveground career in psychedelic research psychedelic psychotherapy that you have that possibility it’s incredible how long it’s taken but that you are a generation that really can imagine an aboveground career in this field so then the second thing to say is that in order to make psychedelics into medicines it’s a very narrow pathway and the FDA basically is saying you need to prove safety and efficacy but you don’t need to know how

it works you don’t need mechanism of actions to make a drug into a medicine so we’re focusing mostly on studies in patients and other groups as well but there is a whole area of neuroscience and how these drugs actually work and how consciousness is structured so that there’s many many different ways that people could become involved if they wanted to and one of the most important I think is therapeutic because we have so many billions of people that are

traumatized at just life itself the even people that are you know born into healthy loving families you know my aunt died of cancer when I was four years old you know everybody is exposed to certain kind of traumas and and then we all need therapy in different ways so I think trying to become a psychedelic therapist is the kind of training you should get is just learning how to do regular psychotherapy and particularly psycho therapies that involve emotional

expression rather than emotional suppression and also so there’s a lot of value in cognitive behavioral therapy but and and parts of that are used in psychedelic psychotherapy but it goes beyond just changing your ideas so I think that people who want careers in psychedelic psychotherapy could look at the holotropic breathwork hyperventilation a technique developed by stan grof Gestalt therapy there’s there’s a whole range of ways for people

learn about psychotherapy but then there’s the neuroscience so if people want to really start piecing apart what is consciousness and how does psychedelics help us understand that that’s a whole area of research there’s an incredible study ring being done right now in Switzerland that’s combining science nurse psychotherapy and Zen meditation so for people that are interested in meditation techniques there’s this research is being done now

where lifelong meditators are being given brain scans at the University of Zurich before and after receiving participating in about a eight-day Zen meditation retreat during which time they’ll get psilocybin and then they’ll be evaluated for compassion altruism how it affects their meditation practice and what it does to their brains so there’s this enormous potential of science and religion coming together science religion meditation spirituality so

people who want to even like pastoral counseling or want to focus on meditation there’s opportunities to do that you know or even from a business point of view how do you run these psychedelic clinics you know it’s not the same as a bed-and-breakfast but we kind of joke that our research is like psychedelic bed-and-breakfast because you know we have a tower psychedelics therapy sessions with a male-female Kythera pused team and then we require the

patients to spend the night in the treatment facility and then that’s for them to have time out to reflect to integrate and then the next day we serve them breakfast and but then there’s more hours with the psychotherapist so try to which should be done so yeah that’s ideal that’s the way to get the most out of it and and even if you people are doing it in recreational contexts if you can give yourself the next day to rest and reflect and think it over it’s like

an enormous gift to yourself to focus not just on the experience but on the integration of the experience so there’s going to be thousands eventually of these psychedelic clinics and they’ll be all sorts of opportunities for different careers and and part of this understanding that psychedelics is bringing to us is about the mind-body connection that it’s really not so separate and that before MDMA was illegal in the late 70s early 80s there

were people that were doing MDMA massage and focusing on emotional expression so they there’s these like syncretic careers you could imagine of people that learn about massage and a lot of times during massage sessions you know they’ll be tensions in the body that that when you release them there’s kind of an emotional aspect to it and when you do a massage when people are under the influence of MDMA or you know medium dose LSD or things like that

people are sort of supported and nurtured to get deep down into their psyche and then let out these kind of feelings so they’ll be that kind of combination you know mind-body work that I think there’s opportunities for people to to get involved in doing that and even you know people just in terms of rituals to try to create when people are under the influence and we’ve got a lot of thousands of years right where we are jumping around here and you you’re

you’re kind of a segue artist you kind of move through with the conversation this is good but who would you say in your opinion and we’re approaching the end so who would you say in your opinion is the most influential person for you in your life well I would have to say my parents and Stan Grof and why well my parent well okay I’ll say why first and Roffe so when I was standoff for those who are not familiar with his work stanislav grof is 84 years old now

he’s still alive he was a born in the czechoslovakia now the Czech Republic and he wanted to become a psychiatrist and in the 50s he was working as a psychiatric resident in a clinic where Sandoz pharmaceuticals from Switzerland sent a bunch of LSD and said hey this is incredible stuff it could be useful in the training of therapists because they’ll get a temporary sense of what it’s like to be insane that’s how they saw LSD or it could

possibly have therapeutic applications and so Stan ended up becoming the world’s expert on the use of LSD assisted psychotherapy and he helps found transpersonal psychology which is a field that’s an outgrowth of humanistic psychology humanistic psychology being about the human potential and self-actualization and then transpersonal psychology being about self transcendence and the more spiritual aspects and so when I was 17 years old at college and started trying

to do LSD and then I turned 18 and I really didn’t have the emotional capability to handle it properly I wasn’t able to let my emotions flow I had a lot of scary experiences I had an intimation that this was really helpful and useful and it was healing a split that our society was way over developed intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually and so was I and so LSD was kind of this tool of healing and but I went to the guidance counselor at my

college and said I’m really having a very difficult time with these trips and I’m not sure if I want to stay in college and he said here’s a book by Stan Grof that I suggest you read and it was a manuscript copy before it even been published of a book called realms of the human unconscious and when I read that it all came together for me because this was science this was healing this was spirituality and it had the reality testing of therapy our people actually

getting better and so I thought I would reach out and I actually wrote a letter to stand in 1972 and here even replied back to me and that’s kind of inspires me to try to answer all my mail as well because Stan said that there were no opportunities the research was shut down I took a workshop with stand in the summer of 72 a five-day workshop and just got really inspired and then later in the 80s Stan after the crackdown on LSD happened he

and his wife Christina were able to develop a non drug technique through hyperventilation to keep the work going and to keep explaining about the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness and you know I just was with Stan I took him to Israel for the first time in his life they had a three-week tour through Israel where he’s doing breath work workshops and lectures and he’s just been through China and through South America so stan has been my sort of

intellectual spiritual mentor throughout my life ever since I was 18 and I’d say my parents because when you know I’m the oldest of four kids that was the first one obviously to go to college and then in my middle of my first year I was like I want to drop out and study LSD and I asked them to pay for it and my dad was particularly impressive because he said I think making a mistake but I think if I don’t help you you’re gonna stick with it

longer than you should just to prove to me that it’s not a mistake and so if I help you to do this you’re gonna realize it’s a mistake sooner and then he said you know and maybe just a shred of doubt I have maybe you know what’s best for you and so I found that I had this kind of unconditional love from my parents that even though I was going in a complete different direction that they didn’t want me to go in they still helped me and so I feel like you know

both my father and Stan and my mother you know really helped me forge this whole direction of my life so it seems like you’ve really given your life to a psychedelic research now going back to the data itself regarding the the success rate of this type of therapy in comparison to conventional therapy for post-traumatic stress or or something like that would you be able to tell us what the data tells us about that success rate yeah I’m psychedelic yeah

well the first thing to say is that we only because for political and scientific reasons the only people that we have studied in our various research projects around the world for mdma-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD the only people we’ve studied are those people that have already failed to achieve relief with currently legal available options so they’re called chronic treatment-resistant PTSD patients we start with the hardest cases

because if you can show that you’re helping the hardest cases that makes an even stronger argument right so our first study was 21 people mostly women survivors of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape and assault and they had had PTSD for an average of over 19 and a half years and they had failed on both psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy and at the end of our study over 80% of them no longer had PTSD it was just remarkable and people were astonished at

the results our current study now another part is that the currently available well we did a three and a half year follow-up study after so the question is do people just take psychedelics the MDMA in particular they have this beautiful experience and then for a certain kind of time there’s an afterglow and you know when that fades and their problems come back or does something fundamental happen while they’re under the influence of MDMA that

really changes their brains and changes their attitudes and the only way you can really tell that is through a long term follow-up so once we completed the study we did a long-term follow-up and it was an average of three and a half years after the last MDMA session and only one of these people had gone on to do MDMA on their own and said to us that she would never do that again because it was not the safe supportive contact she had

experienced during the therapy and what we found is that after three half years on average the PTSD symptoms had even declined a tiny bit more now some of those people had relapsed meaning a few of them had had trauma in their life that caused them to re-establish these unhealthy patterns of PTSD which meant that the rest of the group got even better and so we’ve gone back to the FDA and we said could you give us permission to give an extra MDMA session of these

people that were traumatized and they said yes and 200 OHS three got better again without having PTSD so that’s the results from our first study and the normal treatments for PTSD but the non drug therapies cognitive behavioral therapy prolonged exposure cognitive reprocessing therapy there’s there’s a series of non drug psychotherapies and they have a pretty good success rate of 40 50 percent or so but they have very high dropout rate to a large number of

people again somewhere in the neighborhood of 44 50 percent can’t do the therapy because when you start talking about the trauma it’s just reach it’s too painful so we’ve now just finished a new study the first study as I mentioned mostly in women this study now mostly in men it’s 24 subjects and it’s veterans firefighters and police officers with chronic treatment-resistant PTSD we didn’t think that we would actually get any firefighters or police officers we knew

he could get veterans because there were so many veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD but for political reasons we said okay we’re gonna say it’s also for first responders firefighters and police officers in the end we did get 20 veterans three firefighters including one who was from New York who was involved in 9/11 and one police officer and we only had two people drop out of the study and so that’s a much much lower dropout rate

but the reason that one of them dropped out is that after one session and this was even 75 milligrams they felt so much better they didn’t need to be in the rest of the study so they dropped that because they were cured and then the other person that dropped out was somebody who got the low dose so we’re comparing high dose medium dose and low dose and this person got the low dose and what we found is 25 or 30 milligrams has an anti therapeutic effect you kind

of get activated a little bit but your fear of difficult emotions is not reduced so we have a tremendously low dropout rate and more and more what people are using scientists and statisticians are using a measure called effect size and so that’s the because if you have a very small effect but a very large number of subjects you can get statistically significant results so statistical significance has been the measure that has been mostly used and a

lot of people know about oh this was statistically significant or not but that doesn’t tell you the the depth of the experience of the therapeutic benefits when effect size is a new measure so we’ve looked at all of our studies and now we we’ve come studies in Switzerland – in the US we’ve got two more going in or one more going in the US and Canada and Israel and our effect size is over one which means it’s a very large effect size so the

statistics are great and we’re we’re about to in early 2016 go to FDA and say we would like you to consider this a breakthrough therapy and breakthrough therapies are for serious or life-threatening diseases for which there’s a patient population that other available techniques have not helped so that’ll be both science and politics whether we’ll get breakthrough therapy but the the the clinical results that we’re getting justify in our view

breakthrough therapy and the effect sizes are large and the safety profile is great so I should add that you know we hear stories about people overheating at raves they take MDMA they overheat and they die and sadly that does happen and it’s fundamentally different though the risk profile in a clinical setting so doctor Dublin around those lines you know there are people that you know hearing about this research will go out and try to engage with these experiences

in a non clinical setting what would you say is the best way to equip those people to better engage with those experiences using psychedelics in a non clinical setting well we have what’s called the treatment manual that describes our therapeutic approach and tries to standardize it and that’s posted for free on the maps website so I think if people can understand how these drugs are used in therapy that will be really effective the other thing sadly

to say is that our our government approach our system of prohibition which is falling apart but it’s still in existence is a harm maximization system the design the the purpose of these war on drugs is to make life worse for the drug users so people won’t want to do it and one of the main ways is that people no longer can have any that if something is sold as MDMA or ecstasy or Molly it may have no MDMA in it at all and so I think that people

have to be equipped with a healthy degree of skepticism and doubt about what it is that they’re actually getting and what they think they’re getting may be completely different so ecstasy data org is a project run by erowid yarrow wi d org and dan safe Maps help start it so there’s a way to send in pills to be analyzed so I think that’s a big part but the other part to equip people is to really recognize that what your attitude is

makes a big difference so that if you look at these experiences as just a party drug just for fun the same is you know whether it’s MDMA or LSD or anything like that that part of the psyche is working through difficult issues that it’s not like when people have what’s called people sometimes called a bad trip you know and think they just got unlucky it’s inevitable and people that are working with their psyche with psychedelics you will

inevitably have challenging difficult things and that’s actually to be welcome that’s instead of suppressed now it’s coming to the surface but if your attitude is I only want to have a good time I’m only doing this for fun when something difficult comes if you try to suppress it it makes it worse that’s very much the difference between a bad trip and a hard trip right that’s exactly one of the things that we say about our so we have a zendo project

that works at Burning Man and other festivals around the world to try to help people who have difficult experiences with psychedelics and we said one of our principles is difficult is not the same as bad right and so if you go to our website and look at the zendo project of the psychedelic harm reduction there’s a lot of principles there that apply to therapy but also to taking these out of therapeutic settings yeah Rick I think sincerely appreciate

your time sir you are a very cool person where can where can people find more about maps and and find find you well one of the ways is through our website maps org and you know what’s pretty hilarious is around nineteen ninety-four maps was about I think it was like number six six hundred website in the whole world and this this fella called me up and he said that he’d had this tragic situation of his son dying in a motorcycle crash

and the only way he could work through that he found MDMA pretty helpful and he wanted to donate and give back and he wanted to give maps a website and my first response was once a website so so we’ve been accumulating information on our website you know for more than twenty years so we have an enormous wealth of information on maps org and I suggest to people go to that there’s also a list of conferences and events that are taking place we’ve had large

international conferences that we call psychedelic science in 2010 and 2013 we’re gonna have another big one in April of 2017 where we bring psychedelic researchers from all over the world and this will be in Oakland California and you know I make various public talks around the country and around the world and all of that people could learn about on the maps website and we also have a free email newsletter that comes out about once a month that you could sign

up for or our Facebook page and we have an incredibly talented social media team so there’s all sorts of information available on our Facebook page and our Twitter and you know we try to really recognize that while the therapy is crucial and we’re trying to you know make MDMA and other psychedelics in marijuana into prescription medicines the public education part is really the most crucial because the attitude of the public either will produce support for

politicians who want to suppress this or support for politicians and regulators who want to open the door and I think that there’s just as an example though Marie Claire the women’s magazine we’re particularly reaching out to women and Mo and Families because they have a lot of fears about their children and this September issue with Miley Cyrus on the cover it’s just starting to hit newsstands it has a terrific article about our MDMA PTSD reasons amazing yeah

yeah I think you know we’re breaking into these sort of mainstream media outlets and they’re actually saying positive things instead of you know let’s suppress all of this so the culture is changing but I really think it’s in the hands of young people as to whether this is really going to produce a society where we’ve integrated psychedelics and the experiences that they produce because really it’s not about psychedelics it’s about ourselves

and psychedelics are just doorways into ourselves and into our deeper spiritual selves and the world is coming together it’s a time of globalization it’s a time where we need global spirituality we need to replace fundamentalism with mysticism and if and it’s clear that my generation we’ve made some openings but we’re not going to be able to see it all the way through and so that’s where I’m so encouraged that younger generations

will come to appreciate this and maybe some people will also devote their lives to psychedelic psychotherapy and and to these kind of nurturing experiences to help our human race you know find a way to survive on this planet rather than Israel yeah a lot to think about and I think that anyone listening to this program is in the direction of what you’re saying Rick I truly appreciate your time damiana do you want anything to stay here at the end man well just

thank you so much I actually got to meet you in San Francisco at the Stanislav Grof book launch and it was yeah it was a pleasure so it’s great to spend an hour with you thank you so much for for giving us this opportunity oh yeah no I’m so glad that you gave me this opportunity to reach out to all the group this is the human experience my name is Xavier and we will see you guys next week