How Psychedelic Therapy Is Transforming Trauma and Mental Health Treatment | Rick Doblin | E60

Summary

FOR GOOD Podcast with JoJo Simmons:
Episode 60 – “How Psychedelic Therapy Is Transforming Trauma and Mental Health Treatment”
Guest: Rick Doblin (Founder, MAPS)
Date: August 11, 2026

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EPISODE OVERVIEW

This episode explores the revolutionary role of psychedelic-assisted therapy, particularly MDMA, in treating trauma and mental health conditions. Host JoJo Simmons and co-host Vanessa Simmons sit down with Dr. Rick Doblin, a pioneering force behind the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), to discuss the science, history, stigma, ethics, and future of psychedelics as medicine. In a candid, eye-opening conversation, the trio addresses the misconceptions around “party drugs,” the cultural and systemic barriers to mental health access (especially among Black Americans and historically over-policed communities), and what lasting change in the mental health field might look like.

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KEY TOPICS & DISCUSSION POINTS

1. From Stigma to Science: The History of MDMA

• MDMA’s Background: Originally synthesized in 1912 by Merck, MDMA didn’t surface as a therapeutic tool until the 1970s, thanks to chemists and underground therapists (04:00–08:02).
  • “Most people don’t realize that MDMA was a therapy drug before it was a party drug.” – Rick Doblin (13:45)
• Therapy vs. Party Use: Initially called “Adam,” MDMA was adopted quietly in therapeutic circles before gaining notoriety as “Ecstasy” in club scenes, leading to its criminalization (06:49–08:02).
• The Drug War’s True Targets: Doblin emphasizes how drug policy was weaponized to persecute minorities and social movements, not just address drug abuse (00:13–01:00, 59:57–62:33).
  • “The drug war has never been about drug abuse. It’s always been about persecuting minorities.” – Rick Doblin (59:57)

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2. What Makes MDMA Therapy Different?

• The Healing Mechanism:
  • MDMA reduces fear response in the amygdala, increases connectivity in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus (enables reprocessing traumatic memories), and promotes self-compassion via oxytocin (08:02–13:35).
  • “It’s more of a heart opener... makes you feel love and connection.” – Rick Doblin (08:02)
• How It Compares to Traditional Therapy:
  • Traditional methods often just control symptoms (SSRI meds), while MDMA-assisted therapy enables patients to work through trauma more directly and durably (28:04–32:02, 36:49–39:57).
  • “MDMA... is like anesthesia so that you can do the deeper, more painful work... you’re filled with a sense of love, of connection, of self-compassion.” – Rick Doblin (36:57)
• The Role of Integration:
  • Healing happens not just during the trip, but in the preparation and integration afterwards (65:37–68:22).

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3. Myths, Misuse, Safety and Ethics

• Misconceptions about Harm:
  • Outdated scare tactics around MDMA neurotoxicity mentioned as disproven (14:15–15:48).
  • “Right now, if you’re caught with a pile of cocaine in one hand and a pile of MDMA in the other... you’ll go to jail more for the MDMA than for the cocaine. It’s just ridiculous.” – Rick Doblin (15:14)
• Why Safe, Guided Use Matters:
  • Clinical protocols include preparation, in-session support (always with therapists), and extensive integration (32:02–36:49).
  • Therapy focuses on patient empowerment, not therapy “guru” dynamics:
    • “We don’t even use the word Guide—we’re helping people heal themselves.” – Rick Doblin (34:17)
• Safeguards, Accessibility & Social Justice:
  • Discussions around how to avoid commercialization harms, make therapy affordable, and ensure those historically criminalized by the drug war are not left behind (46:07–52:52).
  • “If we just rely on pharmaceutical companies, it will be accessible at high prices to people that have insurance, but not otherwise.” – Rick Doblin (47:00)
  • Doblin proposes a “driver’s license” model for safe, legal use (50:59–52:50).

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4. Real Stories, Real Impact

• Transformative Case Studies:
  • Veterans and trauma survivors report profound healing, often completing therapy after only a few sessions (40:12–43:26).
    • “He cured himself from PTSD right then.” – Rick Doblin on a veteran’s experience (42:17)
  • Use in relationships: potential for couples to deepen connection and healing (57:26–58:50)

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5. Structural & Cultural Change

• Drug Policy Reform:
  • Strong critique of the ongoing drug war, its racialized history, and advocacy for sensible, humane reform (59:57–65:32).
  • “The drug war has been really used as a tool to discriminate and change who votes.” – Rick Doblin (61:00)
• Mainstreaming & The Future:
  • Predicts rapid growth of psychedelic clinics across America in the coming decade (69:30–73:06).
  • Cultural shifts expected as medical evidence accumulates and stories of healing spread.

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NOTABLE QUOTES & MOMENTS

• Key Definitions:
  • “Therapeutic use... you go for the experience, but more importantly, what do you bring back?” – Rick Doblin (20:37)
• Revolution or Evolution?:
  • “I'd go more for revolution... traditional pharma companies have reached a dead end... psychedelics came out of what humans have been doing for thousands of years.” (44:02)
• Systemic Racism and Healing:
  • “For communities that have been over policed, you need to make a special effort if you’re going to do psychedelics, to do it in a way where you feel safe.” – Rick Doblin (64:30)
• On Purpose & Meaning:
  • “It’s meaning and purpose that give people a sense [of wellbeing]. I’m fortunate to at a young age find my purpose.” – Rick Doblin (76:42)

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TIMESTAMPS – ESSENTIAL SECTIONS

• MDMA’s History & War on Drugs: 00:00–08:02
• Therapy vs. Party Use: 04:00–13:45
• How MDMA Works: 08:02–13:35
• Why PTSD is Hard to Treat: 27:57–32:02
• Clinical Safeguards & Ethics: 32:02–36:49
• Processing Trauma & Case Examples: 36:49–43:53
• Reform, Accessibility, and Justice: 46:07–54:00, 59:57–65:32
• Cultural Future & 10-Year Vision: 68:22–75:32

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HIGHLIGHTED SEGMENTS & MEMORABLE MOMENTS

• Opening Challenge to Stigma:
  • [00:10] JoJo: “A lot of us hear MDMA, we automatically think ‘bad drug’...”
• Vanessa’s Perspective Shift:
  • [13:52] Vanessa: “I really appreciate you sharing that history, because a lot of that I had no idea. It just opened my mind...”
• Case Stories of Personal Transformation:
  • [39:57] Rick: “…He realized the reason he wasn’t bonding with his baby was the trauma of seeing dead babies as a soldier… Once he processed that, he could now fall in love with his own child.”
  • [42:17] Rick: “He cured himself from PTSD right then.”
• Systemic Racism in Drug Policy:
  • [59:57] Rick: “The drug war has never been about drug abuse. It's always been about persecuting minorities.”
• Future Vision:
  • [73:06] Rick: “Net zero trauma by 2070...so that we’re not adding to the burden of trauma by the 8 billion humans we have now.”

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CLOSING REMARKS & RESOURCES

• Rick Doblin/ MAPS: maps.org
• Major Psychedelic Conference: May 2027 in Denver (77:36)
• Good Friday Experiment Tapes: Available on maps.org (78:00)

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TONE AND TAKEAWAYS

The episode is candid, warm, and visionary, blending scientific rigor with personal vulnerability, and always considering the bigger picture of justice, equity, and healing. Rick Doblin demystifies MDMA and psychedelic therapy, explaining their function, history, and promise, while JoJo and Vanessa bring honest curiosity, skepticism, and reflections informed by their own backgrounds.

For new listeners, this episode gives a comprehensive, humanizing window into the promise and complicated past/future of psychedelic therapy, the failures of the drug war, and emerging hope for healing at both the personal and societal level.

Transcript

[Rick Doblin]

Right now, if you're caught with a pile of cocaine in one hand and a pile of MDMA in the other hand, and they weigh the same, you'll go to jail more for the MDMA than for the cocaine.

[JoJo Simmons]

A lot of us here, mdma, we automatically think bad drug.

[Rick Doblin]

Most people don't realize that MDMA was a therapy drug before it was a party drug. The drug war has never been about drug abuse. It's always been about persecuting minorities for

[Vanessa Simmons]

communities that have been historically over policed for drug use.

[Rick Doblin]

Yes.

[Vanessa Simmons]

How do we ethically navigate this new chapter?

[Rick Doblin]

I think we really need to take away a lot of the support from the drug war. The Nixon White House had two main enemies. One were the hippies against the Vietnam War, and the other was the civil rights movement. He said, we couldn't stop them from protesting, but we could criminalize the drugs they were using and we could use that to arrest them, to bust up their meetings, to arrest their leaders, to put them in jail. And he said, did we know we are exaggerating the risks of drugs? Yes, of course we do.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow. What's good, everybody? It's your guy, JoJo Simmons.

[Vanessa Simmons]

And it's Vanessa Simmons.

[JoJo Simmons]

And welcome back to the For Good podcast, where we focus on the good, never the bad. And we're measured by what we do, not what we have. Today, we're talking about healing, but not in the way most people expect. We're diving into trauma, mental health, fear, in the future of therapy, and how some of the most controversial substances in modern history are now being studied as some of the most promising tools for healing.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yes, and because for decades, psychedelics were dismissed, criminalized, and misunderstood, but now science is revisiting the conversation, especially around ptsd, trauma recovery and treatment, resistant mental health conditions, and. And it's forcing us to ask bigger questions about healing, stigma, and what transformation actually looks like.

[JoJo Simmons]

We're joined today by Rick Doblin, a founder of the multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies, also known as maps. For nearly four decades, he's been leading research in MDMA assisted therapy and advocating for the responsible, regulated medical use of psychedelics. His work has helped move these conversations from the underground into clinical trials and mainstream science.

[Vanessa Simmons]

And look, this isn't about hype. It's about data regulation, safety, and whether new tools can help people who felt stuck in pain for years. Today, we're exploring trauma risk, responsibility, cultural resistance, and what the future of mental health treatment could look like.

[JoJo Simmons]

Welcome to the For Good podcast, Rick.

[Rick Doblin]

We appreciate you coming on oh, it's my pleasure. And I've got a lot of good things to say.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah, I'm excited. You know, I started off like this. You know, I'm excited about this conversation. Very different from what Vanessa and I have been talking about. To be candid, Vanessa's just joined as my co host. She's my oldest sister, and I've been having a lot of these talks. And, you know, when we started this company, this podcast, you know, we wanted to talk all things worldly. And the reality is, whether it's cannabis or psychedelics, these are things that people are using. These are things that people have been using and that there are benefits to some of them. And I went on some of those journeys. I've been to some events where I got to speak about psychedelics. And I know this would be a very interesting conversation for my sister, Vanessa, because she doesn't really dabble in any of that world. You know, I'm gonna. Let me. Let's just. Let's just keep it real here. But I think she can learn a lot from this conversation. I will learn a lot. I'm not saying I dabble in the world much, but I understand a little bit more of it. I've been around a lot of friends and people that do do things, you know what I mean? In the world of, I guess, drugs, you would say. So it's gonna be a great conversation. So let's, you know, let's jump right into it. So for people who are new to this conversation, like I was saying my sister, what exactly is MDMA assisted therapy, and how is it different from recreational use?

[Rick Doblin]

Well, let's first off say, what is mdma? All right, so MDMA is a synthetic compound. You get precursor materials from sassafras, even from safrole oil, things like that. And it was invented by Merck Pharmaceutical Company in 1912, but they had no idea what they had, and they just studied it in animals, and they found nothing interesting. And then it was sort of rediscovered by Sasha Shulgin, a chemist who worked in the 1960s. He was one of the premier psychedelic chemists that have ever lived. And he had developed a biodegradable insecticide for dow, and they told him this is now the middle of the 60s, that he could do then whatever he wanted, and he wanted to do psychedelics. And that lasted a couple years, and then they kicked him out of dow, and then he set up his own private lab. And there was a drug in the 60s called MDA, methylene dioxymphetamine. Some people called it miracle drug of America. And it was criminalized in 1970, and it was kind of like an LSD MDMA combination. And so Sash Shulgin looked at hundreds of different compounds that he created, because at the time, in 1970, you had to make specific drugs illegal. So if you modify the chemistry a little bit, now you've got something new that's not illegal. And so Sasha sort of redeveloped MDMA and felt that it had this incredible therapeutic potential. And he turned it over to this fellow, Leo Zeph, who was the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement. We called him the Secret Chief. He was in his 70s. He was getting ready to retire. And Sasha said, here, try this mdma. And he tried it, and he thought, this is incredible, this drug, and I am not going to retire. And he then taught hundreds of psychiatrists and therapists from around 1976 to. And it became widely used in the quiet therapeutic community. Even though it was still legal, it was kept quiet for fear that it would be made illegal once people learned about it. But what ended up happening is some of the people that had tried it in this therapy setting and around half a million doses had been used said, oh, this is a great drug. We can make it more public, and we can sell it. We can make a lot of money. It's, you know, safer than cocaine in different ways. And so it turned into ecstasy. So most people have probably heard about ecstasy, but ecstasy began as a therapy drug under the code name Adam.

[Vanessa Simmons]

And that.

[Rick Doblin]

And then it's kind of scramble of the names, the letters for mdma. And then the sad part is, once it started being used in public settings at bars, particularly a bar in Dallas, Texas, called the Stark Club, it attracted the attention of the police. And I learned about MDMA in 1982 before the backlash. But it was during the Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan escalation of the war on drugs. This is your brain on drugs with the egg in the frying pan and all these kind of things that were very fearful. And so it was clear that once this was now being used in a public setting under the name ecstasy, it would eventually be illegal. So therapists and researchers and scientists and myself and a few others started a Nonprofit organization in 1984 to protect the therapeutic use of MDMA and the DEA. The Drug Enforcement Administration moved to criminalize MDMA in 1984. But we were ready for them. And so we had Harvard Medical School psychiatrists, Lester Grinspoon. We had Roman Catholic monks who used small amounts of MDMA in the monastery to Help them meditate.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Wow.

[Rick Doblin]

We had Jewish rabbis who compared MDMA to the Sabbath. We had incredible scientists. And we all stood up because again, they could say that they had tried this substance when it was still legal. And so we delayed the criminalization for about a year. And we were winning in the courts and winning in the court of public opinion. And the Drug Enforcement Administration freaked out. They had a bad trip, you could say. And in the summer of 1985, they criminalized MDMA under emergency scheduling. And the irony of it was that the first move to criminalize MDMA was itself illegal. That the Congress had given the attorney General the power to emergency schedule drugs, but the attorney General had never given the power to the dea, so the DEA didn't have the authority to criminalize it. So a bunch of people that got arrested in the first year all got let off once their lawyers figured this out. The judge in the case said MDMA should be a medicine schedule three, but the DEA administrator rejected that, put it in schedule one. We sued twice in the appeals courts and won both times. And then finally, the DEA lawyers figured out how to keep it illegal. And that's in 1986, is when I started MAPS. So actually, next month, April 8th, is the 40th anniversary of MAPS, because I realized that the only way to make it back as a tool for therapy and the only way to change drug policy was to go through the FDA and make it into a medicine. So that's the history of mdma. It's not like LSD or psilocybin or peyote or ayahuasca or ibogaine. It's not like the classic psychedelics. It doesn't dissolve your sense of self. It doesn't produce a lot of visuals. Although my wife, when she tries it, she's an artist. And so she sees things in the clouds, sees things in the trees all the time. But it's not like LSD or psilocybin, where your visual perception is really influenced that much. It's more of a heart opener. And it makes you feel love and connection. So oxytocin is the hormone of love connection. Nursing mothers, it releases oxytocin. And in the brain, the part of the brain that really reduces, that processes fear is the amygdala. And so when you have trauma, you remember something that was very fearful, very harmful, and the memories are connected to that fear. And for some people, they can't get over it. And so the trauma is like, always about to happen or always happening. It's never in the past. So what MDMA does is it reduces activity in the amygdala so that the fear reaction we have to the memory is reduced and the oxytocin gives you this self love, self compassion feeling and you're able then in a therapeutic setting to look at some of the most painful things that have ever happened in your life and process it and to recognize that, that it's not happening now. Now you're safe, now you're over it. So when you have ptsd, it increases activity in the amygdala. So we're always triggered by fearful memories or sounds. We don't. The prefrontal cortex, where we think logically, has less activity under ptsd, so that we can't. So you hear a sound, you immediately think, oh, that's a bomb, or that's something dangerous to me. And then the hippocampus, the part of our brain where we put memories into long term storage, is also reduced activity. So that's why these fearful memories stay like they're always about to happen or they're always happening. So MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, and increases activity and connectivity with the hippocampus. So we can take these fearful memories, process them, let it out and put it into the past. And then there's been incredible research in what's called neuroplasticity. And this was done in mice, so that it shows that when you give mice mdma, it releases oxytocin and then that promotes new neural connections in pro social areas of the brain. And there's a researcher, Gould Dolan, who's talked about critical periods. We all know that if you're really young, you can learn languages a lot easier than if you're older. There's all these critical periods for different things. Social reward, feeling safe with people. And a lot of times, if people have had poor attachments or violent childhoods or things where they don't really feel safe, don't really feel attached, that can stay with them the rest of their life. So MDMA can help to enable people to feel connected, to feel that kind of willingness to communicate. And so I think we've got an incredible breakthrough therapy for treating trauma. And the FDA has declared MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD a breakthrough therapy. It's really remarkable. And it can be used with a whole variety of different therapeutic approaches and also other things. One of the examples, there's a study in Rockville, Maryland with cancer patients who are scared of dying and you give them MDMA and they can deal with the fear of death much more easily.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow. You know, a lot of us here, mdma, we automatically think bad drug or a drug that. That isn't good. But the way you broke that down was very, you know, informative. So I appreciate that answer. It was a really great answer.

[Rick Doblin]

Most people don't realize that MDMA was a therapy drug before it was a party drug.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow. I didn't know.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yeah. No, I had no idea. I really appreciate you sharing that history, because a lot of that I had no idea. And it just opened my mind to, you know, what it actually is and what it's been, you know, presented to be.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah.

[Vanessa Simmons]

And you said that it was compounded of saffron oil. Did you mention that in the beginning?

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah, yeah. Saffron. Well, you. You get some molecules in saffron oil.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yeah.

[Rick Doblin]

But it's not actually in there, so it's called a semisynthetic. So you can start with plants and you get some molecules, but then you have to modify them to get to mdma. So MDMA doesn't. Doesn't appear, which explains why it's not a natural plant medicine. Although it comes from beginnings, parts of it come from nature. So where we have, for example, in Oregon, where the Oregon psilocybin initiative has passed, or in Colorado, where the natural plant initiative has passed, so that'll be for psilocybin mushrooms, but also for ibogaine, also for other things, because voters and legislators in general are more sympathetic to plants than to synthetics. There's no place in America or in the world where MDMA is legal outside of a research context. But there are many, many places where psilocybin is legal, mushrooms are illegal, ibogaine is legal, but we don't have that. So the situation is that we have to go through FDA and we have to try to make it into a medicine, and then over time, try to change people's attitudes toward it. Right now, here's the outrageous thing, because when it was made illegal, and then for, like, 15 years afterwards, there was all these scare stories about MDMA causing neurotoxicity. We don't think that anymore. We never thought that. And there's really no evidence to it. But right now, if you're caught with a pile of cocaine in one hand and a pile of MDMA in the other hand, and they weigh the same, you'll go to jail more for the MDMA than for the cocaine.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow.

[Rick Doblin]

It's just ridiculous. So we're trying to work with the U.S. sentencing Commission, because it was 25 years ago that I testified before the Sentencing Commission, as did others. We were completely ignored. And this was during this hysteria over, oh, one dose permanent brain damage. Now you're functionally compromised. And so it was out of that fear that MDMA penalties were created and they bear no relationship to reality at all. And it's just not even, I mean, for MDMA to be more criminalized than cocaine is absurd.

[Vanessa Simmons]

So, Rick, you've spent decades in a space that is heavily stigmatized. What made you decide and believe that this research was worth committing your work to?

[Rick Doblin]

Most importantly, my own personal experience. We all judge on our own personal experiences. If I had taken these drugs and I thought that they didn't have any value, I wouldn't be working on it. But the other was something that happened in 1972 when I was 18 years old and I had started college in 1971. I had believed that LSD caused chromosome damage, that it, we were taught, and I don't know if you're still taught this, but we were taught that if you take LSD five or six times, that's enough for you to be considered certifiably insane. That was a big part of the propaganda when I was growing up and that you might take it and fly out of a window and die. And it just was the worst, worst possible thing. And so I believed all that. And then in my senior year of high school, a friend of mine loaned me a book and I loved it because I was always reading. And I gave him back the book and he said, do you realize the author of this book wrote part of it while he was under the influence of lsd? And I'm like, that's impossible. Nothing good comes from lsd. But it was true. And it was Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and he did write that. And so that started me thinking. I've been told stuff that maybe is not completely true. So then I started taking lsd. And really it was my first experience with LSD that brought me to a new appreciation for what it was. Now the other thing I'll say is that in history there's been rites of passage for people when they're like 12 or 13 a lot of times all over the world in different cultures. And I'm Jewish and in our Judaism there's bar and Bat mitzvahs when you're 12 or 13. I'm the oldest of four kids. So I thought that this rite of passage was going to changed me spiritually somehow. I would be touched and I would be different, and I would be connected to a deeper spirituality. And I remember, sadly, the morning after my bar mitzvah, which, by the way, was a good party, but I felt like I'm no different at all. This rite of passage didn't touch the deeper parts of me where I needed to. I felt really empty. It was really sad. Um, but when I was 17 years old and tried LSD for the first time, I thought, ah, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been. You know, who am I? Where do I fit in? What's the bigger world? What's beyond my ego and my sense of self? How am I connected to everything and everybody? I'll now add kind of a note of caution is I had the wrong idea. I had the idea that the more psychedelics I take, the faster I would evolve, you know, and that's a recipe for disaster, because what I didn't realize is that it's not the drug experience that matters the most is the integration. It's what you bring back from it. It's how you try to change your baseline. So, Vanessa, when you asked about the difference, in a way, between recreational and therapeutic, I would say recreational use of any kind of a drug is when you're just going for the experience of it, like going to a movie or something like that. But therapeutic or spiritual use is when you're going for the experience. But more importantly is what do you bring back and how do you take what you've learned and learn how to move in those directions without the drug at all? So the goal of the drug experience is to help your baseline when you're not on drugs, not to have all these thoughts about depression or thoughts about self criticism all the time or whatever the thoughts happen to be. It's about what you bring back. So a lot of people can do MDMA or do ecstasy at parties and not have any benefit in terms of their traumas, because they're looking at it as a party drug. They're only thinking about it as a party drug. And we've heard stories of people that have taken MDMA at raves, and trauma comes up and they're with their friends who just want to party, and then they feel like their friends don't want to hear this more complicated, sad story of prior sexual abuse, so they stuff their feelings down, and then months later, they're worse off. So there is this way in which we defend ourselves by pushing things out of our mind. And they go from our conscious to the unconscious, but they still impact us. I think it was Carl Jung who had a great statement that's saying that when something is unconscious and something happens to you, you call it fate, but when it becomes conscious, then you can deal with it. So MDMA brings things the same way dreams bring things to our awareness. I took a bunch of psychedelics and I really wasn't focused on the integration. And I went to an experimental college in Sarasota, Florida. So in 1972, I went to the guidance counselor and I said, I need help with my tripping. It's become more important than my studies. And this guidance counselor took me seriously and he gave me a book to read. So this sort of really now answers your question of what did it for me was this book was by a Dr. Stanislav Grof, and he's the world's expert in LSD. And he was at Johns Hopkins doing research there. He grew up in the Czech Republic. He started experimenting with LSD as part of his psychiatric residency in 1955 when the Russians came in to squash the revolution in the Czech Republic. In 68, he managed to come to America. And then he was one of the leaders at Johns Hopkins. And he had written this book called Realms of the Human Observations from LSD Research. And that was really the book that caused me to devote my life to psychedelics when I was 18 years old because I didn't really trust religion. Religion has so many stories in it that, you know, I mean, if you see them as symbolic, that's good, but when you turn them into literal things, that's more difficult. But I trusted science. And so this was science about experiences that happened when you were growing up or your life experiences. Also birth trauma. What a lot of people don't realize is that when you're being born, it's scary. You feel like you might die. I mean, it's scary for the moms, it's scary for the kids too. So there's this layer of emotions that's sort of laid into us when we're born, in the process of being born. And then there's these transpersonal experiences that Stan talks about that are like all of us, like we all have to deal with what does it mean about death? How do we deal with the fact that we're here only for a limited amount of time? In what ways do we talk about spirituality or how are we all connected? You know, is there now since you're a brother and sister, I don't know if ever you feel like you know what each other is thinking, you know, or that. But you hear sometimes of mothers and their children that they have this kind of telepathy in a way. So is that real? What is that? If that's true, how does that work? Because it's beyond our normal five senses. So this is this whole transpersonal way. It's sort of the quantum way, how things are all interconnected. So that was the key for me, is that when you can feel that we're all interconnected, that has political implications. Meaning that how can I dehumanize you if I feel we're all connected? How can I be racist? How can I be trashing the environment when I realize that nature is the same as us, too? So this was sort of scientific justification. And I'll add something further, that there was an experiment in 1962 that was called the Good Friday Experiment. And this was Timothy Leary at Harvard. And he wanted to see all these stories about whether psilocybin could produce a mystical experience. And so there was a fellow that, Walter Pankey, who was getting his PhD. He was a doctor and a minister, and he was getting a PhD and he wanted to study whether psilocybin could produce mystical experiences. And he met this incredible African American minister, Howard Thurman. He was the minister at the Boston University at the Marsh Chapel. But the important thing about Howard Thurman is that he had studied with Gandhi. He had met Gandhi, and he had talked about nonviolent resistance and how Gandhi used that to try to win freedom for the people in India from the British. Then he comes back to America. He's the chaplain at the Mars Chapel at Boston University. And Martin Luther King comes and tries to get his PhD at Boston University. And Howard Thurman was his mentor. And so that's how we got nonviolence into the American civil rights movement was from Gandhi to Howard Thurman to Martin Luther King. And then Howard Thurman, when he was asked about in 1962, would he permit his church to be used to study whether psilocybin could produce a mystical experience, he said yes, because he was very interested in how, when we feel we're all interconnected, you could say the political implications of the mystical experience. And so he said yes, that this experiment could take place in his church and on Good Friday. And on the Maps website, we do have the tape recording of the original service by Howard Thurman. He's one of the most eloquent ministers I've ever heard. It's absolutely incredible. But this idea that psychedelics can produce this feeling of interconnectedness that can make us feel more compassionate for everybody, make us realize we have much more in common with everybody. Then we have differences. And if you can feel that and not just hear it, but feel it, then we can have a better world. So when I read Stan Grof, the other part of what Stan Grof was doing was it wasn't all theories. It was about therapy. It was how. How do you use psychedelics to help treat trauma, help keep fear of dying, help alcoholics and heroin addicts? And that was the reality check. So I was 18, 1972. Psychedelics had just been criminalized in 1970, the big backlash. And I was a Vietnam War draft resister. That's why I knew a lot about nonviolent resistance. So the arc of my life since 1972 to now has been to try to go from counterculture to culture, from criminal to legal. And I have consistently found that psychedelics have played a role throughout the lifespan. I'm now 72 years old, and as you age, there's different issues. So I think that psychedelics are one of the gifts to humanity from nature and from chemists. But the challenge is, how do we use them in a proper way? So, as I said, when people use them in a recreational way, when things get difficult, a lot of times they push them away. But what we like to say, that difficult is not the same as bad. If something's difficult, that's where you can often learn the most.

[JoJo Simmons]

PTSD is at the center of much of your work. Why has it been so difficult to treat with traditional methods alone?

[Rick Doblin]

Because the memories are so fearful. People feel that they're going to be overwhelmed. They feel like if they let these feelings in, they'll just. They'll be crying all the time, or they'll be shaking or fearful all the time. It's just. It's too much for people to handle. And it's true when the things are happening, it's too much. But how does that turn into, like, permanent trauma? It's because people just don't have the support. Often people who have had what are called ACEs, I don't know if you've talked about the ACE scores, adverse childhood experiences. And so there's a whole theory about how the more aces you have, like, if your parents get divorced or if one of your parents dies or one of them goes to jail or you're suffering from extreme poverty or there's any. Or you get beaten up, or all these aces contribute to future mental illness, and they make people more vulnerable when other traumas happen because they don't have this solid background of love and support, then they can't process the new traumas and they get stuck. It's like the same way in a depression where you're just over and over negative thinking. It doesn't make sense to be alive. It's just this kind of over and over negative thinking. So PTSD is like this over and over fearful thinking. And people just think if they open up to it, they'll be overwhelmed. And what we have are drugs, SSRIs in particular, like Prozac, Zoloft, Serotonin, selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs that they just control the symptoms. So the medicines that the pharma companies make are just symptom controllers. They don't really get to the root cause. And the therapies that are designed without drugs to try to help people with trauma, they can work for some people. But to give you an example, they're re traumatizing. So the Veterans Administration did a study, took them about six years, 914 veterans. And it was comparing two different kinds of therapy, Cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure. So prolonged exposure, you just talk about your worst trauma over and over to try to desensitize it. Cognitive processing therapy, you try to work your mind like that was then, that's not now. You know, can you see you're safe? You're telling yourself a story, you're always at risk, but it's not the case. But in this particular study, half the people dropped out because it was too painful, too re traumatizing to go over their traumas. So that's why I think people get stuck in ptsd. They don't have the resources or the safe background or to just say this was a terrible thing. But this isn't what life is all about. There can be moments of beauty, there can be moments of good. It's not all bad, as you said, you know, there can be moments of good. There can, but you get this filter that you see the world through the trauma lens. And that also tells you you can't trust anybody.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah.

[Rick Doblin]

And then when you feel like you can't trust anybody, how are you gonna find love? How are you gonna find connection? Because everybody will betray you in the end and you can't. So you end up in this self reinforcing negative cycle and then you get stuck in trauma. I will say though, you can always get out of it. So I really want people to understand. We have had people who had ptsd from Vietnam 50 years ago that are still able to get over PTSD.

[JoJo Simmons]

Good for them.

[Rick Doblin]

So there is always powerful.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah, yeah, Good for them, good for them.

[Vanessa Simmons]

So the people that are still afraid of psychedelics, there are a lot of people who are still afraid. What safeguards are in place in clinical settings that ensure safety and ethical practices.

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah, terrific question. So the first thing that we try to say to people is that it's not the drug, it's not the psychedelic, it's the therapy, it's the safe support. So if we were to give people who have severe PTSD MDMA on their own, it doesn't mean they're going to get better. In fact, when things come up, if they don't feel safe, they could end up worse. In the same way that these other therapies made people drop out because bringing up the therapy. So the first part of it is that it's embedded in a process of therapy and the real focus is on the integration, what you bring in. We also tell people, you may hear people go to raves and they take MDMA and then they get really tired and the next day they're low mood, things like that. We don't see that in the study more in the PTSD people than the people that got the placebo. Because we do the MDMA during the daytime, it's not at night. We have two therapists there. We had preparation meetings. So they get to know the therapist before they even do the mdma. And then they are told to think about it as a two day experience, the first day to do it and then try to sleep that night, and the second day to have no appointments, no responsibilities. The therapists come back and they talk to more about what happened when you had the experience. So that's part of this integration process. Then we call them every three times during the week to check in on them. And then they have weekly psychotherapy to do the integration. And then our treatment approach is three MDMA sessions one month apart with twelve 90 minute non drug psychotherapy sessions, three for preparation and three for integration after each one. So I think the ethical part of it is that we're trying to help people heal themselves. So a lot of times when you hear about gurus or about, you know, cults and stuff, the power dynamic, even in old psychiatry, Freudian analysis, the analysts knew all this stuff and they would tell you the interpretations, but that's the analyst that started taking the power for themselves. So I think a big part of the ethical aspects of using psychedelics is to realize that we don't even use the word Guide, we're helping people to heal themselves. We don't know their history. We don't know where they need to go. And a lot of times, people don't even know themselves. So I'll give you one example. There was one. This was a soldier who had seen a bunch of his fellow soldiers murdered, and there was an infiltrator, and they were murdered in their sleeping bags. And 10 years later, this guy, he just completely collapsed. He would hide under the table at home. He had a wife and kids, and he just became completely dysfunctional. So under the influence of MDMA therapy, because everybody saw it, and this is what he said, is that the trauma came from seeing these bodies blown to bits. Under the influence of mdma, what he said is, it was so terrible. It was so terrible because they died in their sleeping bags. They died when they were helpless. If they had died in combat, it would have been a bit different, but they died when they were helpless. And then for the first time ever, he said, you know, when I was young, my father used to beat me up, and I felt so helpless. So it's that kind of pivot that was getting down to a deeper level of his trauma. But he didn't present with that. He didn't even know or he didn't even share that to the therapist at the beginning. So a big part of the ethical part is that the whole therapeutic approach is to support the patients wherever they're going. And they may have layers and layers of trauma, but we believe that they are the ultimate authority on their own experience, and we need to help them learn how to heal themselves, because there will be future traumas. It's not like you can have a life without trauma. Even if you have a beautiful life, people you love will die. People will get illness and sick. You're going to have terrible sadnesses and traumas and letting go. And so we need to really embed the. The power to heal in the patient themselves. So I think that's a big ethical aspect of it, is that we don't think, oh, the therapist is the power, and the therapist knows the most, and the therapist is going to heal you. It's the opposite. It's that with this MDMA or other psychedelics that you will have these experiences, and we will try to help you learn how to heal yourself.

[JoJo Simmons]

Great answer.

[Vanessa Simmons]

How.

[JoJo Simmons]

How does MDMA physiologically and psychologically help someone process trauma differently than talk therapy by itself?

[Rick Doblin]

Here's a good way to think about it is if you go and you need an operation, right? You know you get this anesthesia so you can have your body cut apart. You can, while they're trying to help you in one way or another, but your mind is somewhere else and you don't know. So this anesthesia permits this deep work to be done. So mdma, or psychedelics, in a way, are like this anesthesia so that you can do the deeper, more painful work. You're filled with this sense of love, of connection of self, love of self, compassion. A lot of the healing of trauma actually has to do with trying to understand why people did this to you, whatever it is. And often there's a lot of understanding of that. The people had their own traumas in their own lives. So people often develop compassion and forgiveness. So that's what really frees you, I'd say, from these traumatic stories, if you can. Forgive isn't the same as forget. Forgive isn't the same as not judging. But forgiving means you understand that they themselves were twisted in different ways and they didn't know better. So I think that the MDMA is kind of like the anesthesia that helps the therapy be less painful so that you can talk about the traumas. Here's a story that I recently heard. Heard this was a veteran, and after he came back from Iraq and Afghanistan and other things that he was doing, he had a child, but he never felt connected to his child. He felt like there was this whole barrier. He couldn't really connect it. And then under the influence of mdma, he realized that in one of his military assignments, he was jogging along the beach, and there was a boat that had been of migrants, of refugees and migrants, and the boat had capsized, and most people had drowned. And there was all these babies that were dead that he ran by, and he tried to, you know, pick them up and move them out of the way. But. But under mdma, he connected that. That babies die. And if I get emotionally attached to my. Attached to my own baby, then I might lose him, and it might be so painful. So he connected the desensitization that he went through when he saw these dead babies, refugee and migrant dead babies, to how he was protecting himself from similar kind of pain if he were to lose his own child. And once he could process that, then he could now fall in love with his own child because he could accept the fact that if something happens, he can deal with it. But the worst part is to not love this child at all.

[JoJo Simmons]

That's crazy.

[Rick Doblin]

These strategies that we use to protect ourselves often are the wrong strategies, and they hurt ourselves in Other ways harm

[JoJo Simmons]

us more than they help us. Yeah.

[Vanessa Simmons]

What is one thing you've seen in patients during the clinical trials that have surprised you?

[Rick Doblin]

I'll tell this story that was maybe one of the most surprising things of all. Um, so this was also a veteran story. And what he said was that. And. And he signed up for three MDMA sessions. He was in the protocol. He got the mdma. He had three MDMA sessions, one month apart, in the first MDMA session. Now, he had had soldiers killed. He was in Iraq. He had a lot of trauma from those people that he had in his unit that had died, and he couldn't operate at all. But under the influence of mdma, he had this realization. So I think that a lot of our thinking is blocked by our emotions. And if you can be more open emotionally, then you can think certain things. So under the influence of mdma, he realized that he had benefits from having ptsd. It wasn't just that PTSD was terrible. And what he realized was that this benefit that he got from PTSD is that was how he was showing his loyalty to his friends who had died. As long as he's thinking about them, he's keeping their memory alive. This is how he's keeping them. And then he realized, though, and this is the thing about MDMA and other psychedelics, once he realized that. That this was about loyalty to his friends, then he somehow or other saw himself through the eyes of his dead friends. Wow. And so, in a way, he had a conversation with them, and what they were saying was, we are dead. We can't live. We don't want to see you squander your life with ptsd. There's a different way that you can honor us, which is by living. And let us live through you and live your best life, and you're not gonna leave us behind. Let us live through you. And he said, you know, in that moment, he said, okay, what am I gonna do with the rest of my life? And he said he cured himself from PTSD right then.

[Vanessa Simmons]

What a powerful experience.

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah. Now it goes even further. Then he said, I am taking opiates for pain, but I don't really think I'm taking them just for the pain. I really think I'm taking them to escape the emotions. I don't need these opiates anymore. I'm gonna stop the opiates. And then now the MDMA sessions are eight hours long.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Eight hours.

[Rick Doblin]

Eight hours. So the therapy is eight hours long. So we give an initial dose, and then two hours later, we give half the initial dose to keep it going because it's such a precious opportunity. So then he started saying after a while, you know, he said, I think I'm done. I don't need MDMA anymore. I'm going to drop out of the study. And the therapists were like, you've got two more MDMA sessions. You have all these integrative sessions. You have all this work. And he said, I don't need it, I'm done. I'm dropping out of the study. And they said, okay, if you'll at least do the two month follow up and the one year follow up. And he said, yes. Two months, no PTSD. One year, no PTSD. And that was well over 15 years ago. And he's still doing great.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Wow, that's an incredible story.

[JoJo Simmons]

I love how, how, how he was like, I got what I needed. I'm done, I'm good, I'm good to go. I'm, I'm fixed. I'm not fully healed, but I'm ready to go attack the world again. I love that for him. For real?

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah. And it's not like, oh, I need to take it over and over and over. Either there's something.

[JoJo Simmons]

And that goes back to the question of, you know, recreational or like using it intentionally. And it's that. And he, he, he clearly got that, that message.

[Rick Doblin]

Right, Right, he did.

[JoJo Simmons]

So there's a cultural shift happening around mental health. Do you think psychedelics represents a medical revolution or an evolution?

[Vanessa Simmons]

Hmm.

[Rick Doblin]

That's a real interesting thing. But I would say in a way, I would go more for revolution than evolution.

[JoJo Simmons]

Okay.

[Rick Doblin]

Because the reason I would say that is that the traditional pharmaceutical companies have reached a dead end. Keep in mind that traditional pharma companies are not. The first thing is not how do I help the patients, it's how do I help the shareholders.

[JoJo Simmons]

Right.

[Rick Doblin]

It's about business more than it's about healing. So with the SSRIs that control symptoms, that's an enormously great business plan. You need to take it every day. It doesn't solve your problems. If you stop taking it, the problems come back. And if you stop taking it, you get new problems. A lot of people when they try to stop SSRIs, they have different kind of uncomfortable feelings. It's hard to get off of these drugs. So I would say that it was more about the pharmaceutical industry and also the non drug talk. Therapies had reached pretty much a limit of what they could do. And there was loads of people that were still treatment resistant that term I'll just say is kind of negative because it implies that the problem is the patient. They're resisting the treatment. They're treatment resistant. It's not that the treatment isn't good enough. Oh no, it's the problem of the patient. But I think that there was this sort of over focus on pharmacological solutions. The psychological solutions had reached their limit. And so psychedelics came, I would say more as a revolution. Then they didn't evolve out of what pharma was doing, they came out of what humans have been doing for thousands of years, which is psychedelics. And it's been the core of a lot of cultures. So that's why I would say revolution more than evolution.

[JoJo Simmons]

Great answer, great answer. Thanks.

[Vanessa Simmons]

How do we balance accessibility with responsibility if these treatments become more widely available?

[Rick Doblin]

Okay, so this gets into a really big, interesting question of accessibility. Maybe I'll say it this way, when you talk about responsibility. I would say responsibility is you take it under supervision of trained therapists. It's covered by insurance, there's medical screening beforehand, and there's preparation and integration. That I'd say is the most responsible way to do it. However, that's going to be expensive.

[JoJo Simmons]

Right.

[Rick Doblin]

The other part, and this gets to what I would say is the. What has made maps and my work so controversial is not just about psychedelics. We've had two parallel paths. One is develop psychedelics through fda, through science, through medicine. But the other is drug policy reform. So I believe that the drug war is so bad and so counterproductive that it should be eliminated right away, even before we have systems of pure drugs, of honest drug education, of peer training, people in peer support, of treatment on demand. So when you talk about accessibility, if we just rely on the pharmaceutical companies, it will be accessible at high prices to people that have insurance, but it's not going to be accessible other ways. So I think that we need drug policy reform. So the same way that now in Massachusetts, in most states, you can buy marijuana legally without it having to be medical use, so adult use. I think that we should have something similar like that for psychedelics so that people can learn how to heal themselves and people can grow from it. And we have millions of people. Supposedly over 10 million people last year did LSD and similar amount did mushrooms and more even are doing microdosing.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yeah, I was gonna bring that up. The microdosing.

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah, yeah, I think that that should be legal. But when you do it in that way, when it's legal, it's not gonna be as safe because People won't necessarily have the support systems. You know, they'll have stuff difficult comes up and they might just press it down or they might not know how to handle it. So. But I think really to get at this accessibility question is what are the evils and the harms of the drug war? And they are so bad, I think. I mean, look what's happening in Mexico with all the violence, you know, look what happened during Prohibition with all the violence around alcohol. So we experimented America. So what I like to say. And do you know Carl Hart who Carl Hart is?

[JoJo Simmons]

No, I don't.

[Rick Doblin]

Oh, my God. You might want to interview him. He's incredible. He's African American, neuroscientist at Columbia, and he's written about psychedelics and he's written about drug policy. He's tremendous. Dr. Carl Hart, H A R T. But he was on the maps board for a while and he and I are friends. And what I said to him one time is, the more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal. And I'll explain why that is. My dad was a pediatrician in Chicago, and he and his partners did work on the first study ever of crack cocaine and crack babies. And they did the pediatric evaluations of these babies. So the first thing that my dad said is they're getting better. That this idea that these are crack babies and a grown generation of super predators, all that stuff was really wrong. But he said it's not really from the crack cocaine, it's from malnutrition, it's from poverty, it's from abandonment, different kind of things. And so. But what he said was the women that were pregnant and were still addicted to cocaine, the laws made it so they didn't want to go for help because they were scared they would be put in jail or their babies would be taken away from them. So when you have something that's really dangerous, you want people to feel comfortable to come for help when they want to. And instead what we do is we stigmatize people, we demonize them, we don't give them the help, we drive them away from treatment. So all of that is to say that the accessibility is a real big challenge in America because we don't have national healthcare and a large percentage of people don't even have insurance. And when they have insurance, it's not likely to pay for a lot of therapy. So when we talk about accessibility, we can't just leave it to the pharma companies. That's.

[JoJo Simmons]

But.

[Rick Doblin]

But I think we have to take A greater risk. So my, my ideal solution would be like a driver's license. So you have to pass a little test to get to buy mdma, let's say. So you get a little license to buy mdma and you take it into your MDMA dispensary, which also has mushrooms and LSD and all this kind of stuff. And what is your license for? You've learned a little bit about it. But the main point of the license is to encourage good behavior. So, for example, if you're a drunk driver and you're caught by the police and they take away your driver's license, but you can still go into a bar or liquor store and buy alcohol, and you can still get into your car and kill people. So if you misbehave under a drug, we should make drunk drivers have a harder time buying alcohol.

[JoJo Simmons]

Right.

[Rick Doblin]

So that's where I think the license is that if you get this license, let's say in this legalization context, and you misbehave, then you lose the license for a while and you have to get reeducated. So because there's another part of this with mdma, which is that we can train people to some extent to help heal themselves. People. MDMA is the most inherently therapeutic of all the psychedelics. I would say that's a pretty big statement. But I think that it's going to be a challenge. There's 13 million people with PTSD in America. 13 million according to the Veterans Administration. Most of them are not veterans. Most of them are women, survivors of sexual assault of some kind or childhood trauma, or these aces. So how are we gonna help all those people? And the more damaged you are emotionally, the less likely you are to have insurance, the less likely you are to be able to work. So we've got the people that need it the most, often that don't have access.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Hmm, sad.

[Rick Doblin]

And so that's where I'm talking about drug policy reform, as well as drug development through the fda.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Your idea for the sounds like a good idea. The system with the driver's license.

[JoJo Simmons]

Critics argue this could be a slippery slope, as we know. So how do you respond to concerns about misuse or commercialization?

[Rick Doblin]

Well, slippery slope to what? So the. The biggest thing that I worry about right now in terms of commercialization is that we have the for profit psychedelic companies are running away from therapy. They just want to sell the drug. And so the best example here is ketamine spravato, which is used for depression, but it's given without therapy. And as a result it doesn't last that long. It lasts a week or two and then people's problems come back. So ketamine can be helpful for breaking these patterns of thought, for helping people get over their depression. But it fades and what happens? You need more ketamine, you need more ketamine. So Johnson and Johnson, which markets Spravata, which is a nasal spray, they're now reaching $2 billion in annual sales and it's increasing and it's no therapy. But if you add therapy to ketamine, what happens is you get better outcomes, you don't need as much ketamine, and then eventually you can go without the ketamine at all. But the pharma companies don't make any money on the therapy. They only make money on selling you the ketamine. So the commercialization that's going on now by almost all of the for profit pharma companies is they're trying to reduce the amount of therapy and then try to say, we're going to leave the therapy to others. We just want to sell the drug. So I think, I think that's a terrible. It's not about for maps, it was about what's maximizing patient outcomes. Yeah, but in technology we've got this phrase called minimum viable product. You know what, what's the minimum you need to do to get FDA approval to get your money from selling the drug over and over and over. So that's one thing. Now you also asked about misuse. So here we get some other, you know, there's no end of controversial things. So misuse these drugs, mdma, psilocybin, ibogaine, all the psychedelics, even right now for most people, ketamine, it's administered under direct supervision. During the pandemic, there was some shipping ketamine to people at their homes to do this is lower, a little bit smaller doses and that can lead to, it can help some people, but it also can contribute to misuse. But in general, the psychedelics will only be administered under direct supervision, not as take home medicine. So then that gets to what is the issue about training therapists? How do you properly train the therapists? And this is the part I was gonna say that's controversial is that. Well, let me just put it this way. You would probably never take guitar lessons from somebody that had never played the guitar.

[JoJo Simmons]

No.

[Rick Doblin]

You know, you wouldn't take flying lessons from somebody that never flew a plane. You wouldn't go to ayahuasca ceremonies with an ayahuasca shaman that has never done ayahuasca so one of the ways to train therapists is for them to have their own experience with the medicine that they want to give to their people when they're in a sense being the patient themselves. That's how we trained all the people for our phase three. We got a protocol from the FDA to give MDMA to therapists as part of their training, and they said that it was one of the most important parts of their training. So I think misuse is something that maybe the therapists aren't properly trained. And so I think therapist self experience and therapist training are a big part of this approach to try to reduce misuse. The other part though, which is I want to add, is that mdma, one of the best uses of it, I think because of this reduction of fear and the sense of self love and self acceptance, one of the best uses is MDMA for couples therapy. I don't know if you've ever talked to people that said that MDMA helped them fall in love or that they had MDMA with their partner and now they have deepened their love affair with each other.

[Vanessa Simmons]

That's intriguing.

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah, so. So it gets to a little bit of this idea of the misuse. So the proper use of MDMA is not only just for depression, ptsd, anxiety, fear of death, diagnosable disorders, it's also for wellness. It's also for flourishing. It's also for love and couples therapy. So some people would consider that misuse if you take it out of the medical frame and you put it into a different frame, personal growth, healing, love, connection. So I don't think that's necessarily misuse. And this is one of the reasons I'm so glad to be talking to you guys, because we want to help educate people about what's possible. Because when people only think about ecstasy as a party drug, when they get into deep emotions, a lot of times they may think, oh, I can't really deal with this, this is going bad, I have to push it away. So I think that's it. But I do think we're working to try to start a study on MDMA for couples therapy. And this will be in San Diego with a group called Annamari. So they do ketamine assisted couples therapy, but they want to do now MDMA assisted couples therapy. And it's going to be a big breakthrough from the FDA point of view because it's looking at wellness, not just illness.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yeah, I'm interested. You know, you're really opening my mind with this conversation because I've only always Known, you know, these things to be party drugs. I've never really explored the therapy side of it all, so it's really, really interesting to me.

[JoJo Simmons]

I was paying attention. And write in the comment section, I needed this. And make sure y' all hit that subscribe button if you're enjoying this conversation.

[Rick Doblin]

Yeah. So, Vanessa, I'm just wondering, once your brother said that he started just experimenting a little bit, were you worried for him or what were your thoughts?

[Vanessa Simmons]

Well, I have friends, you know, I'm not completely ignorant. I have friends and people who have done it, but I've always just been kind of afraid, you know, you know, just really stay away from that kind of stuff. But this is just really eye opening information. You know, I've, I've only known it to be just the recreational side and, but I've heard of great things and outcomes that other people have had connecting deeper with themselves. But I've never heard it from a clinical standpoint in this way. So I'm enjoying this conversation. And I do have another question, though. We may have touched on this a little bit. So. But for communities that have been historically over policed for drug use.

[Rick Doblin]

Yes.

[Vanessa Simmons]

How do we ethically navigate this new chapter?

[Rick Doblin]

Well, I think what we really need to do is try to help people realize that the drug war is counterproductive. It's really, it causes more problems than it solves. And I think that over time, in the last couple years when we've had so many people die from opiate and fentanyl overdoses, for a couple years, it was over 100,000 people a year died. People have realized that the drug war is not helping us. One of the worst parts has been in Florida where the drug war has been used to take people's right to vote away. So if you may know what's called felony disenfranchisement. So this is how we have such Republicans dominating in Florida because there was a targeting of African Americans for all sorts of and Haitians and other minorities for drug crimes and then they would take away their right to vote. Now it's a state by state thing. So the drug war has been really used as a tool to discriminate and to change who votes. So I think that this, communities that have been over policed feel less safe experimenting because you're always under pressure in certain ways. And so I think we just have to really speak more directly. And this is where I think Carl Hart, I think if you can reach out to Carl Hart, he can talk to you about the problems with the drug War. So I think we really need to take away a lot of the support from the drug war, because it's. The drug war has never been about drug abuse. It's always been about persecuting minorities. So in 1970, you know, Nixon is like, oh, the drug war. Okay. So John Ehrlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor, did an interview. I think it was 1978 or 1979. And what he said was that the two main enemies of Nixon, the Nixon White House, had two main enemies. One were the hippies that were against the Vietnam War, and the other was the civil rights movement. And so he said, we couldn't stop them from protesting, but we could criminalize the drugs they were using and we could use that to arrest them, to bust up their meetings, to arrest their leaders, to put them in jail. And he said, did we know we are exaggerating the risks of drugs? Yes, of course we did.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow.

[Rick Doblin]

Why was marijuana after Prohibition for alcohol? You got all these agents looking for something to do. And at the time, marijuana was used by Mexicans and African Americans. So, okay, you know, let's criminalize marijuana because minorities are being used. The very first drug laws in America were against opium and they were against the Chinese laborers that came in to build the railroads. And then there was the fear that, okay, now that they're going to so many here in America, they're going to try to get low wage jobs, they're going to take jobs away, Americans. So let's criminalize the opium that they use. So I think that for communities that have over maps has a project that is for what we call system impacted people, meaning the criminal justice system. People that have been impacted by the criminal justice system, often unfairly in all different abusive ways, to try to help fight back in different ways. But what we're wanting to do is do therapy with people that have gotten out of prison. Because prison doesn't make you a better person, right?

[JoJo Simmons]

No, it doesn't.

[Rick Doblin]

Nope. You know, but in other countries, prison is more about rehabilitation. In America, it's more about punishment.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah.

[Rick Doblin]

And if you go in there and you're traumatized, you're only going to come out even worse. Yeah, yeah. So I think that's one of the things that we need to do is try to help people to try to reduce recidivism. Because once you are in prison, it's harder to get a job, it's harder to get a apartment, it's harder to find a place to live. Everything is harder for you. And if your Emotions are all negative. Too many, many people go back to jail. And so we want to avoid that cycle. So I think about people who are system impacted or from overly policed, you just need to make a special effort if you're going to do psychedelics, to do it in a way where you feel safe. It's even more important that you have that sense of safety because there are so many threats. Then the other thing, and this is kind of, I'll mention an interesting point, is that in the research, the way you measure PTSD symptoms, it's a measure called the caps, the clinician administered PTSD scale. It's an hour long interview with people about what their worst trauma is. So you pick what's called an index trauma, your worst trauma, and that's what you go over and over. How do you react to that? We had several people that had terrible PTSD that wanted to volunteer in our studies. These were African Americans and they said that they have a lifetime of prejudice, that they could not identify the one worst thing because so many different things have happened and they couldn't even be in the study then.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow.

[Rick Doblin]

I think that if you help people process some of the trauma, even if they go back into a traumatizing situation, they'll be a little bit better able to cope with it.

[JoJo Simmons]

What role do preparation and integration play in the success of psychedelic assisted therapy?

[Rick Doblin]

Wow. I think they're absolutely essential because again, this is the difference that we talked about in terms of recreation just for the experience or therapy. So there was a paper that just came out that looked at exactly, that said that the deeper the preparation, the better the outcomes were. Because it's scary when you're even in a therapeutic setting with MDMA or with LSD or with psilocybin or with ibogaine and these memories come up. It's really frightening and you feel overwhelmed, it's difficult. So the preparation that you get, which is don't fight it, open up to it, feel free to shake, to let out your feelings, you can cry, you can scream. It's not like talk therapy where everything has to be like toned down so you can talk, you can scream, you can. People spend a lot of time shaking, a lot of times just getting out that energy. So one of the best ways to train therapists is for them to have an experience of the same psychedelic that they're going to give to patients, but where they're their own patient in a therapeutic setting. So we have now permission from Health Canada for a study in Vancouver that is to train therapists with their own MDMA experience. But because it's a protocol, there had to be science. So the protocol is designed. There's a measure of the extent of preparation and then there's a measure of the extent of integration. So the science of this protocol to give MDMA to therapists is, is there a relationship between the depth of preparation to the depth of the integration? So these are not patients that are PTSD patients, these are therapists. So we're not measuring PTSD or depression, but it's to see that I believe that it will show that there is a relationship between the depth of the preparation and how much work you can do on the integration side of it. So I would say that those are absolutely critical elements. And in recreational settings, the preparation and the integration are often just abandoned. But when we talk about spravato for depression, there's no integration. They don't think about it. They just think about it's a drug, the content doesn't matter. Okay, now good. It'll fade in a week and a half, two weeks. Now we got to give you more of this expensive drug. So I would say that when you really are, it's a, it's a good way to assess therapists. If you want to do psychedelic therapy with someone, if they start talking about preparation and integration, then you know you're on the right track. And if they don't talk about that, go somewhere else.

[Vanessa Simmons]

So looking forward 10 years, what does the.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah.

[Vanessa Simmons]

What does the future of mental health therapy look like if this type of research continues on?

[Rick Doblin]

Well, my guess is in the next couple years that there will be FDA approval of MDMA, psilocybin 5, MeO. DMT, which is the, the toad we've heard of, LSD, will also be approved. It's being studied for generalized other drugs like mdma. Methylone is being studied. So I think in the next three, four years there will be a whole bunch of psychedelic tools that therapists and psychiatrists will have available. And we already have several thousand ketamine clinics. So I anticipate that what's going to happen over the next 10 years is going to be the growth of psychedelic clinics and therapists that are cross trained in the different psychedelics so that they can kind of decide, oh, and talk about with the patient, let's try this next, let's try this next. So I think there'll probably be five or six thousand or more psychedelic clinics around America.

[JoJo Simmons]

Wow.

[Rick Doblin]

There's around 6,600 or so hospice centers. So every community that has a hospice to help people die in a more humane way, will have at least one psychedelic treatment center. So I think that in 10 years we will have mainstreamed the use of psychedelic therapy. The thing that worries me the most is what about insurance coverage? Will that really come along? Because it's not just the drug, it's the therapy. But the other part of it is to say that if we look at the history of marijuana legalization compared to the history of medical marijuana, and so, you know, we're talking, but when I give lectures, I have a chart that shows the American attitudes towards the legalization of marijuana. And it was only like 12% or so in 1970. You know, most people thought marijuana should never be legal. And it basically stayed roughly that way for about 25 years until 1996. And then attitudes started growing towards the legalization of marijuana. And now it's like 80% or 70% of people really think marijuana should be legal. And it's like 80 or 90 think marijuana should be legal for medicine. But what happened in 1996 was the first medical marijuana states, California and Arizona. And over time, as we get more and more medical marijuana states and more people are saying that they got benefits from marijuana for medical purposes, that changes people's minds about legalization of marijuana. So medicalization changes cultural attitudes, then you get legalization. So I'd say to your question about the next 10 years, we will have 6,7000 psychedelic clinics. We will have so many people telling their stories about how psychedelics have been helpful them. It doesn't work for everybody. Some will have stories where it didn't work or some will say it made me worse. But most, almost all the stories will be this helped me and I think that in 10 years we will have more state level reform. So this gets back, Vanessa, to what you talked about. Access the same way we have the Psilocybin, OR Psilocybin Initiative, and I think New Jersey just put some money into psilocybin research that there's going to be more and more state level reforms that will make it accessible to people outside of a pharmaceutical context, either with state licensed guides or therapists or decriminalization. So I think that the future is really likely to be quite promising for the more widespread mainstreaming of psychedelic healing and also for drug policy reform. But I'm thinking even longer so because the pharma company that we started will get approval eventually. Even though Maps is not connected to it, we'll eventually get approval in the US What I'm focused on and what Maps is Focused on is global humanitarian projects, is globalizing access to high trauma, low resource countries. And so what I've proposed is a new challenge in a way, for maps. As I said, next month it's our 40th anniversary. So I'm thinking about what's up for the next 40 years or plus. So I'm talking about net zero trauma by 2070.

[Vanessa Simmons]

2070.

[Rick Doblin]

So what I mean by net zero trauma doesn't mean no trauma. There's always gonna be trauma, always gonna be death, illness, accidents, but hopefully it diminishes a lot. But there's two kinds of traumas. One, which is what you experience during your life, but the other is multi generational trauma that you inherit from your parents.

[JoJo Simmons]

Yeah.

[Rick Doblin]

And so there has been studies that Rachel Yehuda has done and Carl Hart could also talk to you about this, where it looks like successful therapy can change these epigenetic markers so that you don't need to pass this on to your kids. We're doing a study at Columbia University which is interviewing underground MDMA therapists around the world, how they're doing it to help us design this study for MDMA for couples therapy. And I came across this one. It's a husband, wife therapists, and they specialize in working with couples before they conceive a child to help them work through their traumas so that these epigenetic markers don't get passed along to their children. So what net zero trauma means is that my sense is, and I hope I'm wrong, but there's estimates that there could be up to a billion climate refugees by 2050, where the land is no longer working then this creates enormous stress with refugees and migrants. So my sense is that the burden of trauma on humanity, I don't know if you've heard about this, but the Bhutan, the country Bhutan, has what they call gross National Happiness measure. So there's a way to measure the amount of happiness in each cult. Usually it's Finland, Norway, those companies, those countries are the number one because they have social safety nets, they have almost inexpensive education, free national healthcare, all this stuff. So trying to create a gross national trauma measure and make it so that by 2070 we're not adding to the burden of trauma by the 7 or 8 billion of humans that we have now, probably 8 billion. And so I think that's kind of an aspirational goal. How do we take the world as a whole and reduce the burden of trauma? And I think psychedelic healing will play a big role of that.

[JoJo Simmons]

I love that. I love that. Rick, man, this conversation has been so insightful. I wasn't knowing what to expect as coming into this conversation, but you gave us a lot, man. You really gave us a lot to think about. Gave us a lot to give the subscribers, the listeners, the watchers, you know, to think about. You know, as we. As we wrap this up, I'd like to give you your four good flowers like we give to everyone. They're not actual physical flowers. They're words of encouragement. Thank you for this conversation. Obviously want to thank you for the research that you've been doing, especially when it comes to MDMA and assisted therapy. You know, a lot of people do look at drugs or whatever you want to call them in a way, because of how they are. You know, the media has put out to you and how the narrative is. But there's people like you that's been fighting back since the 60s, the 70s, you know, way before myself and my sister was born. So I got. Thank you for putting in that research, putting in that education, and really kind of spreading that education still to today and. And knowing that you are the age you are. You look really good, my brother. I will also.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Amazing.

[Rick Doblin]

Thank you very much. Well, yeah, I attribute it a lot to. I've been married 33 years, so there it is.

[JoJo Simmons]

There it is being in love.

[Rick Doblin]

But also I think the de stressing that comes from a lot of the psychedelics. I love it. Really important and the inspiration. But I think really what we learn is it's meaning and purpose that give people a sense. And so I'm fortunate to, at a young age, find my purpose. And, you know, I'm reinforced all the time by people that tell me about what they've learned from their own psychedelic experiences.

[JoJo Simmons]

I love that. So before we get out of here, we got to get you to tell our people. Our for good is our good people. Where can they find you? And if you have anything coming up that you want them to know about, please use this platform to tell us.

[Rick Doblin]

Ah, thank you. Yeah. Well, first off, maps.org maps.org is the website and we are a nonprofit organization. And this is our 40th year. So we're having various celebrations for our 40th anniversary that you can learn about.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Happy 40th.

[Rick Doblin]

And we do these really large conferences, the largest conferences in the world on psychedelics. And we've started did one in 2010 that had about 400 people. 2013 had about 700 people. 2017 had about 2,000 people. 2023 was the shocker. We had 12,400 people. We had 8,000 people at 2025. And so we're doing this in May, in 2027 in Denver. So that's where we bring people from all over the world, all the main psychedelic researchers to share with each other. And so. But I do think there's an enormous amount of information on the website, and if you do go to the maps.org website and you put in Good Friday experiment, you'll go to the page and you can play the actual sermon from Howard Thurman that he gave in 1962.

[JoJo Simmons]

The sermon from Thurman. I like how that.

[Rick Doblin]

The sermon from Thurman.

[JoJo Simmons]

From Thurman.

[Vanessa Simmons]

I'm definitely going to check that out.

[Rick Doblin]

He's amazing. He's absolutely amazing.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Yeah.

[JoJo Simmons]

Well, yes. Everybody, make sure you guys hit that subscribe button, that like button. Leave a comment, let us know what you felt about this episode with our new friend, Rick Doblin. This is the For Good podcast where we focus on the good, never the bad. And we're measured by what we do, not what we have. It's your guy, JoJo Simmons, and it's Vanessa Simmons and our new friend, Rick Doblin. We will see you guys next time on the For Good podcast. Peace.

[Vanessa Simmons]

Bye.