Rick Doblin Speaks on the Future of MAPS
Globalizing MDMA, couples therapy, and net zero trauma.
Rick Doblin has been under intense scrutiny the past few years, with many wondering what exactly he will do next. He is the founder of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies.
Created in 1986, MAPS spent decades pushing to get people legal access to MDMA.
Initially a non-profit running on many millions of dollars in donations to conduct research and clinical trials, MAPS then pivoted to Lykos Therapeutics, a for-profit company that would take MDMA across the finish line with the FDA.
As many of you know, the FDA denied Lykos' attempt to get MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on who you talk to.
The FDA’s denial is a victory for activists, watchdogs, and those who allege sexual misconduct, unreported adverse events, and a variety of other problems with MAPS therapeutic and research approach. Other camps of psychedelic commentators, researchers, stakeholders, and patients were disappointed and even outraged at the FDA decision.
Controversy and debate marks pretty much any big news in the world of psychedelics, and these days, MAPS, Lykos, and Doblin have become divisive topics. But Doblin has been advocating for psychedelics for a long time and — true to form — is continuing on his mission. He has since left his seat on the Lykos board and is returning to the nonprofit MAPS with some big new goals.
In Doblin’s recent talk with Marc Caron and Stephen Gray, the organizers of Plant Spirit Medicine, a conference happening online and in-person in Vancouver this weekend, Doblin outlined what his priorities are moving forward.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Rick Doblin’s Statement
“I believe that in the current negotiations between Lykos and the FDA, they will arrive at something, and Lykos will then raise the money to do it. I think in three years or so, MDMA-assisted therapy should be approved for PTSD by the FDA. That's my current assumption.
What Maps is doing as a nonprofit is to recognize that the for-profit is basically going to go to where the suffering is but where there is money to be made, and the nonprofit wants to go where the suffering is but where there's not that much money or no money to be made. Where it's, you know, high trauma low resource countries.
So, what Maps is trying to do is to globalize access. The sort of vision has been, and the original vision that got me into MAPS and got me into psychedelics 52 years ago, was this idea of consciousness change that humanity as a whole is in danger you know, in real, real danger.
And so EO Wilson has said something that I thought was really profound. He said that the problem with humanity is that we have Paleolithic emotions with medieval institutions with godlike-technologies. What that means is we have advanced in our brains.
It’s so incredible that we can have this discussion in real time that people can see from all over the world on this internet. It's a miracle what we're doing, it's science, it’s not a real miracle, but it's godlike technologies.
We have incredible weaponry, we have incredible abilities to produce energy, but we're destabilizing the planet, destabilizing the climate. We don't have the emotional and spiritual maturity to handle the technologies that we have.”
Mass Mental Health
"I think that, for MAPS, it's been about mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity. What I mean by that simply is that when Galileo and Copernicus started saying that the Earth was not the center of the universe, that kind of challenged some of the religious traditions.
So, for me, what spiritualized humanity means is more metaphorical than literal. It's more about what a lot of the astronauts say when they look back at the Earth from space: ‘we're all in this together.’ it's one thing you know: it’s this planet, it's this life.
If you have that primary identification, the sort of spiritual identification as being part of life on Earth connected with nature, connected with animals, connected with other people. That kind of experience can be the ground for appreciation of differences rather than fear of differences.
That's the goal: this mass mental health spiritualized humanity, helping people see through their traumas, as well as drug policy reform, helping people have personal growth experiences. The global consciousness has always been a key part of what MAPS says.
The globalization is to now go to places where there are large amounts of trauma but where we can train people with MDMA.
For example, one of the projects that we're working on is in Bosnia, with survivors of roughly 30 years ago the Civil Rights, the Srebrenica massacre. We're trying to do work also in places in Africa. We're trying to do work in Ukraine.
We're trying to really move to where we can really make a contribution and to try to identify how these substances can be used in different cultural contexts. Many of these countries don't have hardly any therapists or psychiatrists, so it's a question of who are the local healers, how we help them, and what are their local traditions. So, that’s a big part of it."
Related: The False Promise of Psychedelic Drugs | Healing Hypocrisy: A Closer Look at Mail-Order Ketamine Therapy
Couples Therapy & Education
“I would also say, in addition to the global things, there's another kind of research that's not easily monetizable. MAPS is looking at couples therapy, so we're trying to start research in couples therapy. It's not a clinical condition.
Maps is also doing lots of work on drug policy reform and public education. I think Maps is going to be fully busy, for decades and decades and decades to come.
Can we reach this point of Net Zero trauma by 2070, That's kind of what we hope. To clarify that, there are basically two kinds of trauma. The first kind is um traumas that you experience during your life, but the other is multigenerational trauma through epigenetic mechanisms by which trauma is passed down from parents to children.
And when we think about what we just had heard, we, you know, right before we went on, you were talking about Asheville and the floods that have just gone in Asheville. There's a project I'm going to Hawaii on where there are people that have PTSD from the fires. There's an estimate that by 2050, there could be over a billion climate refugees, which is going to totally destabilize the world.
Hopefully, that's an overestimate. But what I think is going to happen is that humanity is going to be under stress, which is going to increase in part. People are really good at pushing stuff away at denial and repression.
It’s interesting that just really recently, you stopped hearing people saying the climate is not changing or that people didn't do it. It's not influenced by humans, but climate denial is sort of diminishing.
But I think that it's really essential to think about humanity as a whole and do what we can to reduce traumas and to reduce multigenerational transmission of trauma and to really work on drug policy reform and public education, so MAPS is doing all of those things as we go forward."
Related: Tripping Together: How Psychedelics Are Helping Couples Heal Together
You can watch the full interview here. 🎙️🌱
Check out Plant Spirit Medicine online or in person in Vancouver if you're interested in more conversations about psychedelics from leading voices like Rick Doblin, Sandor Iron Rope, Acacea Lewis, Jamie Wheal, and many others.
Further Reading
Tripping Together: How Psychedelics Are Helping Couples Heal Together
Psychedelic Pioneer is Unfazed About MDMA’s Prospects, Despite FDA Setback (Washington Post)
Don’t Journey Alone! Tripsitter was built by a community of psychedelic advocates — but it’s people like you that enable us to thrive.
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The idea that there will be zero net trauma by 2070 is a pretty grandiose statement by Rick Doblin. Then again, most things Rick Doblin says come across as rather grandiose. And, you know, we need our leaders, our presidents, our CEOs, our experts to guide us through the uncertain present. We seek explanations, reassurance, ‘plausible enough’ stories about how we’re going to dig ourselves out of the hole. These stories of brighter days ahead might make us better able to sleep at night knowing there’s a way out. The storytelling might also cause healers to become more aligned with the MAPS mission, and consequently, further emboldened in their confidence that they know that MDMA is the ‘way ‘ if they are convinced that 2070 is a possibility. There’s a reason that conservatives have pushed 2025 as it speaks to people that are aligned with a vision of a world which they believe is a possibility. 2070 is no different in this sense.
I think Rachael Varga @inkingoutloud stated it perfectly in August 2023 on the Microdose Substack
https://themicrodose.substack.com/p/net-zero-trauma-by-2070-5-questions/comments
“The concept that trauma is something that can be reduced to near zero is a lofty goal, but unrealistic to the realities of human nature, failings, and mortality. We will all suffer, whether it is the drudgery of difficult work, or more realistically, the suffering, decay, and death of those around us, and ultimately ourselves, as we grow through the natural aging process. Suffering, trauma, and death are inescapable, and it feeds a false sense of security that these discomforts can be escaped or done away with. Inner peace is found by wrestling with your demons and feelings about the situations you encounter, and the encouragement of the easy pill/drug significantly increases the difficulty of helping clients in my profession accept that even with something like MDMA, there will be additional stressors that challenge them throughout life. The problem is they look at this as a magic pill that fixes it all, and that simply will never be the case for treatments like this. It doesn't teach them distress tolerance.”
We don’t teach people distress tolerance (or tolerance or compassion or understanding as human virtues for that matter) by simply giving people pills.
Robert Forte @alteredstatesofamerica responded to someone in the comment field from the Microdose Substack article who favored Rick Doblin’s 2070 vision by stating: “Don’t be naive. read this. especially on Chemical persuasion.”
https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/
Maybe Robert Forte has a point. I think it’s time to read “A Brave New World”.
I also like “A Whole New World” by Disney https://vimeo.com/489015404