YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Doblin

lines on the record: 189
first: 2021-07-21
most recent: 2021-07-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so, what Tom said is that there are two main approaches that they think are important to reduce bias. The first one is easy to do. It's called random assignment. So, you know, sometimes there are studies where you'll treat a bunch of people with something and some fraction of them will get better and some won't. And then you say, okay, all those who didn't get better, who volunteers to get this new treatment? And then you give them the new treatment. But the people that volunteer are more likely to want to get better. They're not representative sample of everybody that has the disease. So when you have random assignment, everybody is similarly motivated.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Tom Lawfren, a doctor who used to be head of psychiatry products at FDA, is our main advisor. So the first thing he said is that the double blind fails in practice a lot, even with SSRIs. Because there are certain side effects that you have with these drugs. And the doctors who are doing these research, when you're reporting your side effects, they can say, oh, that's probably you got the active drug instead of the placebo. So the double blind is, in theory, is terrific, but in practice Doesn't always work quite as well”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will make it easier for us to find a difference between the two groups. And so we suggest that we do therapy with inactive placebo versus therapy with full dose MDMA. That will cause a problem because most people will be able to tell what they've got.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we call it an anti therapeutic effect. I don't mean to imply that they got worse, but it made people uncomfortable. People didn't like it. But we would still help them make some progress. So we had the blinding, but what it meant by reducing the effect of therapy with inactive placebo is that it would make it easier for us to find a difference between the two groups. And so, the real question is if you can do it with therapy, why bother add a drug? So we went to the FDA, and so this was what we discovered during phase two. We went to the FDA at this end of phase two meeting, and we said, we can give you blinding, but.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they didn't reduce the fear, and so people still got better with the therapy, with Lodos MDMA. But if we gave them therapy with inactive placebo, they did even better. Then if we gave them therapy with low dose MDMA.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we discovered is that my dissertation was wrong and that there is no good solution to the double blind problem. What we found is that, to our surprise, actually, was that $75 milligrams was an effective dose. We didn't think that. I mean, the normal dose is like full dose is like 125 milligrams. Something like that. But 75 milligrams was an effective dose. And we discovered that the lower doses, so I was half right, you could say the doses of 25, 30, 40, 50, they could produce enough confusion that you could say that they were successful at blinding. Not perfectly, but enough confusion so that people, therapists, couldn't know for sure. so that there was this reduction of bias, you could say. But what we discovered again to our surprise was that the low doses made people uncomfortable. Oh, interesting. They stimulated them.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big part of my dissertation was how to do the double blind study. And I thought I'd solve the problem, and I persuaded my dissertation committee that I'd solve the problem. And the solution was therapy with low-dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. And everybody knows that they're going to get MDMA. Most of these people have never done it before. They'll be confused about is it full dose or low dose? And then the challenge is to pick a dose that's high enough so that there is this confusion, but not so high that it's so therapeutic that we can't tell the difference between the groups. So we studied zero, meaning inactive placebo, 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100 milligrams, 125, and 150.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do score fairly high on the scales of mystical experience, not as high as they do with the classic psychedelics, but they do score pretty high on average. And a significant number of them have over the cutoff are what would be considered a full mystical experience. So enough to say that we could look at a correlation and we didn't find any. The other thing that we discovered, and this was more humbling, I would say for me personally, is that my dissertation at the Kennedy School, a big part of it was on the, you know, it's about the regulation of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The treatment of addiction, for working with people's life-threatening illnesses for OCD, for obsessive compulsive disorder, that there's with the classic psychedelics, both in the 50 years ago and then the research now has been that there's a link between the depth of the mystical experience and therapeutic outcome. What we discovered is that that's not the case for MDMA.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we discovered safety. We could demonstrate safety. We also figured out that our measure, the caps, the clinician administrated PTSD scale, that it's the gold standard all over the world for measuring PTSD symptoms. It's what the FDA and the EMA require. We discovered that it was a good measure for us and that we could show changes in that. The other big thing that we learned is that, and we haven't mentioned this yet, but the work in the 50s and 60s with LSD and psilocybin in the modern research over the last 20 years with psilocybin and classic psychedelics has demonstrated that there's a link between this mystical experience, this unit of mystical experience, and therapeutic outcomes”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we learned is that MDMA assisted therapy works just as well in men or women, and it works in combat-related PTSD. It works regardless of the cause of PTSD. We also discovered that even though there are stories that people take MDM at raves and they dance all night and they overheat and they get hyperthermia and they die from overheating, which is true and can happen from pure MDMA, or that sometimes people have heard about needing to cool down. And so they drink water and then while they're dancing all night and then they drink too much water and then they dilute their blood and they die from hyponitremia. So there are risks of MDMA, but we discovered that in a therapeutic setting, we can control all those risks, noticing don't happen at all.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“november twenty ninth, twenty sixteen, which is when we had the end of phase two meeting with FDA. So it took 30 years from the start of MAPS to the end of phase two meeting with FDA. And what we had discovered during phase two was several different key points. The drugs that are available right now for PTSD, the SSRIs, Zoloft and Paxel, that have been approved by FDA and regulators in Europe as well, the European Medicines Agency, for PTSD, they work better in women than in men, and they failed in combat-related PTSD.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, for us, when we started Maps in 86, as I said, it was one year after the criminalization of MDMA in 85, we had five different protocols that were rejected by the FDA for studying with MDMA. And these were all various phase one studies. They came from Harvard, from UC San Francisco, from the University of Arizona, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, all over. And they were all rejected. 1992, six years after we started, we got the first permission for phase one. And that took us through much of the 90s. Again, things are slow because we have to raise the money through donations. And then in 1999 is when we started to work with PTSD And that then took us till”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They talk about triple blind. So the other part is the raiders that evaluate the symptoms before and after. So you ideally want triple blind. You want the patients. The researchers and the evaluators of the outcomes, all of them not to know what the drug, whether it was drug or placebo, and that's to reduce experiment or bias. And then you move to phase three. Once you've figured out how to design the phase three studies and phase three are the large scale multi-site placebo-controlled double-blind studies where you must prove safety and efficacy in order to get permission to market the drug.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the patients, but you still are doing sort of dose response safety studies. But you use patients. But most phase one studies are healthy volunteers. Phase two are where you start bringing in the patients and you start experimenting with various different things. The purpose of phase two is really just to design phase three. Now again, I'm sort of putting out of the picture in another area's mechanism of action. How do these drugs work? Phase two, you're trying to figure out what they do, who your patient population is, what are the risks, who do you include, who do you exclude, what are the doses, what is your treatment, what are your measures in our case, it was, you know, how do you do a double-blind study? That was a big part of phase two. That's a big challenge for psychedelic drugs, any kind of drugs that have a real strong effect, how do you do a double-blind study?”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this study came out May 10th in Nature Medicine, so one of the highest impact factors in medicine, journals, it was tremendous. So to make a drug into a medicine, the first thing you need to do is what are called non-clinical or preclinical studies, meaning safety established in animals. What does the drug do? What are the side effects in animals? Where do you see the risks? And then you negotiate with FDA to do phase one studies. And phase one studies are where you move from animals to humans. And those are more safety studies and trying to describe what the drug does so that you can determine if there is potential medical value there. Certain drugs like cancer drugs are so toxic that you don't have phase one studies and healthy volunteers. It's like phase one slash two, where you bring”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, how are we going to really evolve enough over the next couple decades so we don't destroy the planet and don't kill each other? That's why I think psychedelics have an important role to play. That's why I've devoted my life to psychedelics. And it is frustratingly slow. What I said to myself is our whole effort has not been fast enough.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So while we say it's frustratingly slow, and it is, you know, I mean, it's 50 years since the psychedelic 60s. Right now, it's 36 years since MDMA was criminalized. And you think about all those people that committed suicide from PTSD or from anything else. And all those people that could have been helped if the DEA had accepted the administrative law judge recommendation that MDMA stay in Schedule III. It's tremendously sad. At the same time, culture evolves slowly. You know, you read the Bible or you read all this stuff. We're not that different from people thousands of years ago.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, one thing that I've learned from being a parent is that when you have little kids, it seems like they'll be with you forever. But then when they grow up and they go to college and they leave, you look back and like, where did that? 20 years ago. We're still dealing with the legacy of the Civil War and slavery in America. So actually, a 20 year plan is not that long.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think that we will move to licensed legalization, which is when you will have the option of just going somewhere, once you've done this educational stuff, potentially, I also think it would be better to have the opportunity for people to go for free, paid for by tax money to these clinics. And you have your first experience with psychedelics under supervision. And you know it, you're getting into. Task a questionnaire what the risks are with the drugs then you get your license So 2035 is when I think that'll happen. And the clinics will be sites of these initiations.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that what we're going to have 2023 is MDMA approved by the FDA. Chances are psilocybin will be a year or two after that. Then what we're going to need is a decade of psychedelic clinics that are going to roll out across America, also other countries as well, thousands of these psychedelic clinics. We already have hundreds of ketamine clinics. That are ketamine for depression, more and more people are realizing that ketamine when it's used with therapy, it's better than when it's not. But the therapists want to be psychedelic therapists. They don't want to be a ketamine therapist or an MDMA therapist. So the cross train. So we will have a decade of these thousands of psychedelic clinics and all these stories of people getting better. In 2035.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my sense of things is based a lot on watching what happened with medical marijuana and marijuana legalization. So we're sitting here in Massachusetts where marijuana is legal. But what happened first was medical marijuana. So what we see is that medicalization by demonstrating that under certain contexts, the risks are much less than the benefits. And then there are benefits. And then people hear stories about people that had gotten better. And then that changes their minds. And then eventually that builds up to why are we throwing people in jail for this?”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pients can negotiate directly with pharma companies to get access to their drugs. That's starting to happen, I think, in Canada now. They're letting people have compassionate access to psilocybin for life-threatening illness because there has been studies with psilocybin for cancer patients and others with life-threatening illness. As far as your question about when will you be able to access this for personal growth outside of medicine? I'll take that to mean, you know, fully legally where you can just go buy pure drug somewhere. When will that happen? We already are starting to see the decriminalization in certain areas of plant psychedelics. And we see overall drug dry crim like that passed in Oregon so that any drug is now, it's not legal. You can't really fully set up clinics to offer it to people or there's no legal supply like that, but it's decriminalized.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they have to pay for it themselves. The sponsor has to pay for all the research, but expanded access because there's no control group, everybody gets the MDMA. People can pay for it themselves. And we think that'll start in a couple months. But it's very limited. It's limited to certain cities. There's also a program called Right to Try, which is passed through Congress. It's similar to this idea of compassionate use, but it cuts the FDA out of it.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might not be covered by insurance, they have to be a little bit careful about malpractice, but I think the end of 2023 is when you will be able to do that. Now, there's actually another program very limited called expanded access, which is compassionate use, which means that, and we have approval for 50 people for compassionate use right now. We think that'll grow. So that's going to open up in about two months. And so those are people with PTSD, they have to be treatment resistant. Nothing has worked for them, and they can access MDMA while we're doing the phase three studies.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the end of 2023, so two and a half years from now, we anticipate FDA approval for the prescription use of MDMA for PTSD. Because the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine, there is what's called off-label prescription. What that means, the label is what it's approved for. So the label says, this is a proof for PTSD. Let's say you come and anything else, social anxiety or whatever, you can go to the doctor, they can give it to you.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's not medicine. So that's why we need to medicalize to have things covered by insurance to change people's attitudes, the public attitudes. And then we get this subsequent drug policy reform. And we're talking about it in terms of licensed legalization. So my view is you should get a license to do psychedelics. You get a little education stuff, and then you should be able to buy it and do it on your own”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. To further answer that. So that's where the drug policy arm comes in. Drug policy reform. So you should be able to get access to psychedelics for your own personal growth.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the reason is because the benefit corp is designed as a pharmaceutical company. So, we can only work on clinical indications. So let's say you come to me and you just say, oh, I'm really depressed. Can I get MDMA to overcome my depression? Overcome my PTSD. You know, we'll have to do research in those indications”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because I'm interested in political change. The other part of it, which is that the brain is the most complex thing we know in the universe, it's endless. I mean, when are we going to really like this idea of will we figure out telepathy? Will we figure out tapping into the collective unconscious? What is the extents of our brain? How does the brain actually work? You asked chemistry questions. If it's just the pursuit of knowledge, that is an endless thing. And how does that end the drug war? How does that help people directly? So that's why we're focused on drug development more than mechanism of action.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While the research now is done in the Benefit Corp. Yeah, so what happens is people donate to maps, get a tax deduction. Maps transfer the money, or you could say invests in the benefit corp. Yes. The benefit corp will do the research and then maps as the sponsor, but then we will license the sale of MDMA to the benefit corp. Got it.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oregon has passed the organ psilocybin initiative. So, in those areas where maybe more people are going to gravitate to do psychedelics, we want there to be harm reduction so that we don't have bad stories coming out that would change that. So MAPS does the psychedelic harm reduction. We do public education. We do a lot of it. That's what you and I are doing right now. We're doing.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just from the US. And we're talking about trying to do this research around the world as well. So that's what the benefit corporation is. The benefit corporation is our pharmaceutical arm. We're about 130 people now somewhere in that fluctuates, but one-third of them are in the nonprofit. We do harm reduction, psychedelic harm reduction. We help create programs for people with difficult psychedelic experiences at Burning Man, at festivals all over the world, even in cities. We're now negotiating with the police, the city of Denver, because Denver has made the mushrooms the lowest enforcement priority.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. Although there still will be profits and the profits that we're going to make are going to be used towards the mission of maps, which is, again, is this mass mental health and ending the drug war. And in fact, we've hired the Boston Consulting Group to help us plot our commercialization strategy. And so there is some suggestions based, there's so many different assumptions in this. The number of therapists that we train, the price that we set for the MDMA, whether insurance companies will cover it, but there's the possibility of somewhere in the range of three quarters of a billion dollars in profits during this period of data exclusivity.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You market it with the profit maximization motive, we end up in the extreme getting the distortions that we have in America where we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world per capita, but our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 among the countries, our average outcomes. We don't have third of the people or so don't have insurance. And it's just very inequitable. What we're trying to do is show a different way to market drugs and it's a modification of capitalism is called the benefit corporation. Where you maximize public benefit, not profit. You still make a profit. So selling MDMA for a profit is not something we could keep inside the nonprofit because it's taxable. It's a business. So we've created the Maps Publit Corporation, which is 100% owned by the nonprofit. So we have a nonprofit that owns a pharma company.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To market a generic, and that will effectively be, well, it's five years, you do pediatric studies, you get six months extension, and we are being required if we succeed in adults to work with adolescents with PTSD. It blocks a generic competitor from applying till that five and a half years is over, takes FDA at least six months to review. So more or less six years of data exclusivity, ten years in Europe is data exclusivity. The story then became to the donors that you're not going to have to give us money forever because we can make money selling MDMA, but we want to do two revolutionary things, you could say. One is psychedelic assistant psychotherapy, but the other is marketing drugs.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Maps is a nonprofit, but in our 35 years, we've raised about $110 million in donations. What I didn't know when I started MAPS, and it took me quite a few years. I didn't even know this until about eight, nine years ago, was that in 1984, Ronald Reagan had signed a bill to create incentives for developing drugs that were off-patent. So MDMA was invented by Merck in 1912. It's in the public domain. These incentives are called data exclusivity, which means that if you make a drug into a medicine that does no patent protection, nobody can use your data for a period of time.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the Rockefellers and the Buffets and some of the Pritzkers were involved in funding this. So that was the first nonprofit. But the maps was designed as. The very beginning, not academic research into psychedelics, but drug development. And that's a fundamental distinction. And that's why I think we're years ahead now of everybody else in terms of making a psychedelic assistant therapy into a medicine. Because our goal from the very beginning was not knowledge, not academic research. It was practical. It was drug development. How do we create new? Social structures, how do we create legal access to these things? Now, in December of 2014, we created the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, all of those things have changed. But at the time, it was mass mental health was the goal. Two tracks. One was drug development, the other was drug policy reform. So that it's not just available to people that have a clinical diagnosis, but people who Our personal growth, or they should have access to it as well. I did not know at the time that no drug had ever been made into a medicine by a nonprofit. That was really good. I didn't know that. I might have been a little bit more daunted. And actually, that didn't happen for 13 more years. It happened in 1999. And that was the abortion pill, RU-46, that was approved in Europe, but controversial. No pharmaceutical company would take it. And it was John D. Rockefeller III through the Population Council, with the major donor being Warren Buffett”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what that sort of helped me understand is that the strategy has to be mass mental health. It's not about changing a few liters. We need to change the mass of humanity to this new mode of thinking, this new spiritual way. So MAPS was a nonprofit pharmaceutical company focused on psychedelics. Big pharma wasn't doing this work. Government wasn't funding it. So the only source of funds I thought would be through nonprofit donations. And that's been true up until just a couple years ago now that we have the rise of these for-profits. But that's because we've cleared out the regulatory obstacles. We've got more scientific data about the benefits funded through philanthropy. We've changed public opinion. And there's a lot less zeal for the drug more.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I realized this whole new thing about the Heil Hitler salute. And, you know, he would like push energy out. And then everybody would do the salute back to him. And so it's like the one to the many and the many to the one giving all these people giving away their power. And then how it would just sort of ratchet up in intensity, like these vibrations. And I realized there's no way to get into his head. This idea we've talked about before about you have to be willing.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Resumption is that it's more of this mystical sense of thinking that we're all connected. And then, if we realize that we're all connected, we're not going to blow up the world. So a lot of people say that, you know, if we could just give LSD all the world leaders, that would be, then they'd have these spiritual experiences, the world would be better. But actually had academine experience the day after that DMT experience I described with the inner Hitler. This getamine experience was I was above and behind Hitler as he was giving a speech, like in the Nuremberg rallies. Of thing, and I was trying to think how do I get into his head? How do I undo what he wants to do? How can we deal with him?”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Americans are open to medicines, that tools to ease suffering, that was the opening wedge, the opening door to changing attitudes. And it would be through science, I would say, that my religion is more science than anything else. And culture and religion are metaphorical, but often too much they become literal. But I felt that through science, through medicine, there would be way to bring these drugs back to the surface. And the mission was always this mass mental health, this idea that what we need to spiritualize humanity. Einstein said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe, which shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking. So, what is that new mode of thinking?”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we did that in preparation for this eventual crackdown because MDMA was called Adam used as a therapy drug, but it was also beginning to be sold as ecstasy as a party drug. And that was taking place in public settings and bars. And so it was inevitable that the crackdown would happen. And so I had a nonprofit connected to Buckminster Fuller, Earth Metabolic Design Lab, that we used to support this lawsuit against the DEA to block them from criminalizing MDMA. We were winning in the Court of Public Opinion and winning in the court. The DEA freaked out and the emergency scheduled MDMA in 85. The handwriting was on the wall, that they were not going to permit the therapeutic use to continue because it gets in the way of the narrative of the drug war, and these are terrible drugs. So in 86 is when I started MAPS as a nonprofit pharma because the strategy that I realized is that”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Maps is a nonprofit organization. I created it as a nonprofit pharmaceutical company. I created an 86 after DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration criminalized MDMA in 1985. And that was after they started trying to do that in 1984. And as I mentioned, this, Terrence McKenna sponsoring, you know, motivating us to do this safety study.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Promised the benefits. And then the conquered prison experiment, it turned out that Tim had fudged the data completely and it wasn't really successful. Fault him for that. The outside world was doing the opposite. It was exaggerating the risks and blocking research.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thorazine is like a major antipsychotic drug. It's a horrible drug. But it knocks people out, tranquilizes them. We would never do that today. We don't abort a difficult experience like that. But in any case, they hid that. That was not part of the write up of this experiment. So what they did is, in a sense, a little bit exaggerated the benefits. It later became out three years later after the experiment or four years in Time magazine. It said everybody that got the psilocybin had a mystical experience. It wasn't true, not everybody eight out of the ten did, but not all 10, not this guy. And they minimized the risks. So there was a bit of that. I think Tim was reckless in that way, was underplayed the risks and over.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he said, What am I doing here in this basement chapel? Listening to the service, I got to go tell people, man, of Christ. So he went, they thought he was just going to the bathroom, but he ran out the door. He's running down Commonwealth Avenue. And Houston Smith and Tim Leary go after him. And he had thought that since he should tell somebody, he should tell the president. Like, why not? But then he realized, well, the president's in Washington. Here in Boston, I'll just tell the president of the university. So anyway, he's running down the street, and Leary and Houston Smith go after him. And he doesn't want to go back inside. They finally get him. He's not hit by a car. But they end up giving him a shot of Thorzine.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually have three hours long. We actually have the original sermon from the Good Friday Experiment from Howard Thurman up on our website. It's incredible, but part of it was tell people there's a man on the cross. And this one person sort of heard that and he thought, okay, I got to do that. I got it to Howard Thurman was such a dynamic speaker. He said, I got to tell people there's man on the cross.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I discovered that one of the persons Who had the psilocybin had this experience during the Good Friday service that Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister? He was Martin Luther King's mentor. And Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister at Marsh Chapel. Martin Luther King got his PhD at Boston University. And Howard Thurman had spent time with Gandhi. And so he was really kind of this hidden person behind the civil rights movement about nonviolence as their strategy. But he was interested in the political implications of the mystical experience. So he permitted this experiment to take place. And there were 20 divinity students from Andorra Newton in the basement and 10 experimenters, all the people on religion and psychology, the Houston Smith and Malta Clark and Leary and Ramdas and others were there as a support part of it. And the sermon was like three hours later.”
2021-07-21 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #202 – Rick Doblin: Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source