What has been the role of storytelling in the psychedelic movement? This episode explores how story has contributed to and inhibited the psychedelic movement over the last 30 years.
Consciousness is one of the six themes of the Denizen podcast and the role of psychedelics is an important subset of that inquiry. It's an honor to bring Rick Doblin to the podcast with this episode; he has been at the forefront of the movement since founding the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986. Rick is joined by Nirvan Mullick, filmmaker and founder of Interconnected Media, who has been working on a documentary about Rick and MAPS for ten years.
This episode extensively explores the role of storytelling in the psychedelic movement. Rick takes us back to the cultural context of his childhood and shares his own experience of awakening through experimenting with psychedelics as a young adult. We discuss MAPS’s strategy and how storytelling complimented their data-driven approach with clinical trials. We talk about MAPS's corporate structure and how it evolved over time, with its incentives slowly corrupted as MAPS was forced to bring in venture capital to continue its work.
Rick shares the story of the year leading up to the FDA's response letter, and how MAPS's leadership inhibited his ability to contribute to a more balanced narrative about the treatment of MDMA for PTSD. We then look forward to what comes next, and how storytelling is critical for the movement to succeed in bringing psychedelics to the mainstream to enable a global shift in consciousness. Throughout, Nirvan shares his insights as a filmmaker documenting Rick's story over the last ten years.
Rick Doblin: [00:00:00] LSD caused me to question, who am I, where do I fit in? It felt like LSD was something that gave me intimations of this deeper interconnectedness. And so that was the new insights that led me to think that if we can Have everybody understand this story. If we can have everybody meaning billions of people, if this can be a global consciousness shift, that we have the resources to live in paradise.
There's more than enough for everybody.
Jenny Stefanotti: That's Rick Doblin. He's the founder of maps and a prominent leader in the psychedelic movement. This is the dead as in podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stone. In this episode, we're talking about the role of storytelling in the psychedelic movement over the last 30 years. Consciousness is one of the six pillars of this podcast, and psychedelics are an important area within that inquiry.
As many of you know, last August, the FDA issued a complete response letter to Lycos, formerly MAPS PBC, expressing that it would not approve MDMA for the [00:01:00] treatment of PTSD based on evidence from phase three clinical trials. The letter was a major setback for the psychedelic movement after decades of progress.
So we're catching Rick at a very critical moment in time. This episode is a pretty epic story in and of itself, taking you from Rick's childhood in the 1950s to the front lines of maps and Lecos in the months leading up to the FDA's decision to today as the movement in Rick's words is lying in ashes on the ground, asking, where do we go from here?
Throughout, we discussed the role of storytelling, how it complemented MAP's strategy that was focused on clinical trials and data to influence policy, how narrative trumped data in the end at the FDA, and why storytelling is a critical component of the movement's strategy moving forward. Rick is joined in this conversation by filmmaker Nirvan Malik, who's been working on a documentary about Rick and MAPS for over a decade.
As always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website becomingdenizen. com. There you can sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about online and virtual Denizen events [00:02:00] and announcements from our many partner organizations.
With that, it's an honor to bring Rick and Nirvan to the Denizen podcast. So, it's actually pretty surprising to me that this is the first conversation that we're having on the podcast about psychedelics. We had several conversations on Clubhouse, but I have yet to release one on the podcast. So very happy to have the two of you join me today because it is a really important component of consciousness.
Denizen is partnered with not one, but two organizations in the psychedelic space, Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative and Northstar. So we've always been talking about what is the right series of conversations about this topic. It's a very important topic. So absolute thrill and honor to have the both of you join me today.
Thank you.
Rick Doblin: Looking forward to it.
Jenny Stefanotti: So we're going to talk about storytelling in particular in the role of the psychedelic movement, but I want to start with some higher level questions about psychedelics and storytelling as it relates to this broader conversation that we have on the podcast about systemic change.
And Rick, you just said to [00:03:00] me, there's a question of why do this at all? I would love to hear from you. How you think about the role of psychedelics in the change that we want to see in the world?
Rick Doblin: Well, it's more, I would say about the psychedelic experiences and not so much focus just on the drug themselves, because the experiences that you can have a very wide ranging and some can be beneficial, some can be harmful.
So it depends on the context. So certain kinds of psychedelic experiences struck me as kind of essential. Or humanity and culture at large. And so maybe I'll start with a quote by E. O. Wilson is very illustrative. I think of the importance of what we're trying to do to deepen our spiritual connections, deepen our emotional clarity, get over our traumas.
What he said is the real problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions with medieval institutions, um, [00:04:00] With God like technologies. And so what that means is that we have brilliant advances in our minds, but our emotional maturity, our spiritual understandings lag way behind. And as a result, we really are seeing a lot of problems with the technologies that we do have,
Jenny Stefanotti: you know, that's just on Harris's probably favorite quote.
I've heard him say that many, many times.
Rick Doblin: Oh, that's great. Yeah. I didn't know that. The other quote that's really evocative for me is from Carl Jung from 1959, a few years before he died. And it's about how we need to study human nature. We need to study psychology because he says the only real danger is man himself.
We know far too little of man and we are the source of all coming evil. So this was a depth psychologist who had lived through World War II and so it is incumbent, I think, on all of us to [00:05:00] recognize that we're very unbalanced, both as individuals and as cultures and as a world consciousness. And that this idea of sort of refining our emotions, refining our understanding of who we are, so that you could say is the key story of who we are and are we are all the different ways that we identify ourselves.
You know, are we are nationality? Are we are religion? Are we are? Gender, our race, our socioeconomic status, or is there something, a deeper thing that we are, which is part of this, you know, magnificent universe and we're all interconnected in certain ways. And if you have that deeper understanding of who we are, the story that we tell ourselves.
We're interconnected with everything and everybody. Then hopefully the idea is that we will be more compassionate for other people. We will be more appreciative of differences and not scared of differences that we won't be so willing to demonize others, scapegoat [00:06:00] others or trash the environment. You know, because we're all part of it.
So I think that identification of who we actually are in that storytelling. The other thing, just very quickly to kind of get into it, is that in psychedelic experiences, It's just astonishing how much we see people speaking to themselves in metaphors and in imagery and in storytelling. So, many people talk about their psychedelic therapy as helping them rewrite the story of their lives.
They reframe things in different ways. And that, I think, when we talked about memory, even. That there's this process, when we think about this memory palace, it's like, how do people remember these? Some people can remember, you know, enormous number of numbers or different kind of things, the people that are experts in this memory, they do it through what is called the memory palace.
So it's through attaching a story to these different items.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, sure.
Rick Doblin: [00:07:00] Yeah, so that it's really this internal storytelling and then cultural storytelling. So if we can really tell a different story, and this is also a story that has been enabled. The new story has been enabled by humans going into outer space and looking back at the earth as one thing.
And so we have astronauts talking about how once they see we're all from this one, you know, tiny blue dot, this one small, you know, Little planet in the midst of this enormous universe, it changes the way they think, and they become more collective in their thinking, more universal in their thinking, universal in terms of humanity.
One of the things my youngest daughter, one of her friends growing up, her grandfather was Michael Collins, was the person on the Apollo that as Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin came down to the moon, he stayed in the spaceship. And After they came back from the moon from the first historic landing on the moon and they traveled [00:08:00] around the world, what he said was, Michael Collins, what he said was that it was this sense that we had done this and we in humanity, not we being Americans.
So
Rick Doblin: I think that's the storytelling idea that is this we that's moving from this I to the we, and I think that can then be the grounding for the kind of political change that we want to see, which is sort of the opposite of what just happened at the election, the us and the them. And so maybe that's a good way to end this.
It's this little intro section. It's not about the us and the them. It's about the we and how do we switch our identification to think of ourselves more as part of this we than the us and them.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, consciousness is one of the six pillars of the inquiry of the podcast and what you're speaking to makes me think of Charles Eisenstein's work, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.
He talks about changes in consciousness and changes of story of who we are. And I think, [00:09:00] well, for me, there's this very obvious scope of discussions that get into political and economic institutions. One could argue that consciousness is at a more fundamental level. Because I'm like, Oh, if we can figure out economic incentives, people will go solve all the right problems and I don't have to worry about the problems themselves.
I don't talk about climate change, but you could say if we just focus on consciousness, the institutional stuff would follow as well.
Rick Doblin: Well, and actually this was something that Tim Ryan, who is the former congressman from Ohio. What he said was that politics is downstream of culture.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.
Rick Doblin: And so really when the change that we want to happen in the political sphere, it changes what really is the sort of root cause or the regenerating thing is this culture and the cultural change.
Jenny Stefanotti: Culture is another one of our pillars. Politics is one of our pillars. Economics is one of our pillars. Technology and justice, those are the six.
Rick Doblin: You've got it covered.
Jenny Stefanotti: Trying. I'm going to be at this for a while, but I do love how much this work touches on, it touches on economics. We're going to get into corporate [00:10:00] governance.
It touches on politics. It touches on culture. You're spanning so much of it with this work, but you talked about cultural change and I want to turn to Nirvan. As a storyteller and a filmmaker this culture is one of my pillars and I'm very interested in our conversations about how does cultural change happen?
What is the role of storytelling? What is the role of particular mediums? So again, I just wanted to get this high level perspective from both of you because it's so valuable before we dive into the specifics of the psychedelic movement. Nirvan, I'd love to hear your take.
Nirvan Mullick: So yeah, I'm a filmmaker and I've always been interested in.
That intersection between storytelling and social change, changing culture, I think cultures organized around stories, religions organized around stories, they become like these organizing principles of building trust of other people who kind of believe in the same story that you believe in. And then, in a lot of ways, you can look at the world as sort of this competition of different stories.
And at the same time, [00:11:00] storytelling can change those cultures. Because the story is something that we're collectively writing as we go. So, what kind of stories do we want to tell? And what kind of story do we want to live as a society, as a culture? I think stories are also rooted in perspective. You know, bias, experience.
And you know what Rick's talking about, like when astronauts go into outer space, that's a big perspective shift, right? And you get to see a look at the world without the stories we tell around borders and tribalism and difference. And you get to see that we're all kind of part of the same story. And I think psychedelics are also a big perspective shift kind of tool in letting people kind of see a different story and imagine a different story.
So. There's that level of it. And for me, like being attracted to this story and psychedelics, I think psychedelics are such an interesting lens to look at kind of the world and our values and the way psychedelics have been either [00:12:00] celebrated in sort of ancient cultures or vilified at different times, and then sort of the work that Rick is doing.
So I see Rick as. A fascinating, inspiring human and character, if I may call you a character, incredible character. And so for me to like root what I find to be an interesting idea concept around psychedelics and kind of the role they played in shaping culture and then the work of Rick to change culture story.
I think it's just fascinating to have those two things come together. And here you have a character driven story that kind of looks at our own nature. And how people are trying to shift and change that perspective. So it's like a character driven story about changing the world.
Jenny Stefanotti: It's a very inspiring one.
And that's a great segue into actually the next question that I had. Because Rick, I've told you this before, but you are a personal hero of mine. Not only are you a personal hero of mine, but I didn't have any personal [00:13:00] heroes until I've heard your story. Because I thought it was so incredible the way that you conceived of and executed on a strategy for really complicated systemic change across decades.
So can you take us back 30 plus years to the genesis of this strategy and tell us about your thought process and then particularly as you tell us the story, can you punctuate the role that you thought of storytelling would play?
Rick Doblin: We'll have to go back further. You know, I'm about to turn 71 soon, so I'm 70 right now, but about to turn 71.
So I think the stories that I were told by my parents as I was growing up. Were first off that I was Jewish and that I was born in 53 and the stories of the Holocaust were like a big part of my upbringing and it was tolerable. You could say because I was born in America at a [00:14:00] time where. American exceptionalism was a big thing.
So this other part of the story was American exceptionalism, that I was the Jewish chosen people, that I was male, that I was white, my family was well off. And so I got this message that I was part of this leading edge that had the ability to impact how things were happening in the world. And at the same time, the story was about how perilous my life was, and how precious life was, and how easily it could be overwhelmed by irrational factors.
That was sort of the early education that I got. And then there was this, more than an active shooter drill, it was There could be a nuclear war between the U. S. and Russia and that the story again was that on the one hand, we're being told if the bombs go off, duck and cover under your desk and you can survive and, you know, but the story was again about how the technologies that we had [00:15:00] with the conflicts that we had could end up.
You know, destroying everything, nuclear winter, all of this. And so it just was further. First off was the Germans and it was the Russians. And then the next story was seeing my own country going to Vietnam and being one of the last years of the lottery and that I might indeed be sent by my country to go kill people that I didn't know that it didn't seem to me to be a justified situation.
There was all this turmoil over the Vietnam war. So the story was just that the irrationality. And the passions of you could say the primitive mindset of people was a direct threat. And so while I had this support from my family and was told that I would be provided with food and shelter, you know, that I could survive and that I should work on these deeper threats, that that was sort of my mission.
So the story was this Tikun alum, you know, um, Healing the world and that that was [00:16:00] my obligation. So just as one example, I studied Russian to learn about the other in high school. And after my junior year of high school, my parents sent me to Russia in 1970 with a group of high school students and they gave me prayer books to bring to Russia.
So prayer books were illegal at the time. This idea was that there's big factors that you can't really do a lot about, but if you can do something little, you should do it. So that was the sense that we all have capacities to react to certain ways. Maybe it's only little that we can contribute. Maybe it's just going to vote or maybe it's whatever it happens to be.
Maybe it's helping some one person that needs help, but that that was our obligation. So the story was that I had all this privilege to make change. I had this big responsibility to make change. And if these irrational passions were to rise again, I could easily be a victim and so could many other people.
And so could the whole world. So all of that was just [00:17:00] like, what do I do? It just led me more and more to psychology and to thinking about the human psyche. But I grew up in an era where I believed all the stories about LSD being, we were told that six times you take LSD, you're certifiably insane. That that's all it took and that it would hurt your chromosomes.
So all these negative stories sunk in with me. I didn't know to believe differently, but it was a book actually. So it was a different kind of a story. I read this book. I loved it. A friend of mine said that the author had written part of it under LSD. And I said, that's impossible. You know, nothing good comes from LSD.
And it turned out it was true. It was Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And that is a story of the individual against the system, the system crushing in many ways, the individual. And that opened up everything for me. So this idea that the stories I had been told about LSD could not be true. If something as powerfully evocative as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest could have been written [00:18:00] by somebody who had done LSD and wrote part of it.
Under LSD, that sort of cracked the propaganda that I had received and made me see a different perspective and then it was doing the psychedelics myself and feeling that they were moving these inner energies that my bar mitzvah had not done. So the stories and the rites of passage that had been passed down from my, you know, thousands of years from my culture, I think at least for me and for many people.
Those kind of stories didn't have the engagement with the inner psyche, the way I think that they might have had and probably did have in the past. So it was when LSD caused me to question, who am I? Where do I fit in? I need courage. It's frightening to see your ego dissolve. It's frightening to let go, to go into the unknown.
So it felt like this LSD was the Hero's journey. It was a vision quest. It was something that gave me intimations of this deeper [00:19:00] interconnectedness. And so that was the new insights that led me to think that if we can have everybody understand this story, if we can have everybody, meaning billions of people, if this can be a global consciousness shift, that we have the resources to live in paradise.
There's more than enough for everybody. We just have such. You know, income inequality, which is, of course, growing now in America, you know, worse than ever before. But the story for me was this sort of therapy story to work through multigenerational trauma and traumas that we experience and the story of interconnectedness and inspiration from being part of this magnificent experiment of life.
And so that's where I decided to focus my life on psychedelics. And the fact that Nixon was saying that Timothy Leary was the most dangerous man in America, it made me wonder, what are the stories that Leary is telling that make Nixon feel so threatened? And because I woke up to sort of the value of psychedelics in 1971 and 72 after the backlash, then I thought, I have [00:20:00] this privilege.
I have this opportunity. The world seems in dire straits. And so I will focus my life on psychedelics. And the story that my parents had told me was that they would support me. Whatever I wanted to do. And I sort of put that to the test when I dropped out of college, I'm the oldest of four kids, and so I was the first one to leave the nest.
And in the middle of my freshman year, I said, you know, I want to drop out of college, I want to study LSD, I want you guys to pay for it, and they agreed. And so they really lived the story that they had told me, and that permitted me then to embark on this now 52 year journey of trying to promote the psychedelic renaissance.
Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you for sharing that. I don't think I've heard that fuller story of how you landed on this being your life's mission.
Rick Doblin: Well, let me add one last thing to that. Was the dream. So again, a lot of times stories come in dreams and dreams are especially powerful. And so what really cemented this for me and made it so [00:21:00] that I never felt like I could give up was a dream that I had in my early 20s.
Now, this is after I decided to focus my life on psychedelics and the dream was of a Holocaust survivor who was on his deathbed similar to 2001 Space Odyssey when the astronaut is You know, on his deathbed and this person is saying, you know, I was almost killed and I managed to survive miraculously. I knew I was survived for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was.
And I said, okay, he said, well, let me show you what happened. And then we had this scene from the Holocaust where he was almost killed and didn't miraculously managed to escape. And then we're back in the room and he says, okay, now that you've seen that, I want to tell you now, I know what, okay. My purpose is and I'm like, well, what is that?
He said is to tell you to study psychedelics because we need to feel these interconnectedness so that we don't otherize people and we don't dehumanize them. And in my mind, you know, I said in the stream that I'd already decided to do that. And [00:22:00] so you can die in peace. I will take this mission on and then he died in front of my eyes.
And it was that story sort of not reincarnation. I don't really believe that in that way, but I believe that this historical. Legacy of my culture and my tribe saying so many of us died and we think that you and others need to feel our interconnectedness. And so that's what's really that story in the dream is what has been the primary motivating factor in my life.
Jenny Stefanotti: Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. That's really beautiful. You stepped in earnest into this at a moment when the story of psychedelics, as you mentioned, was you'll go insane and it'll screw up your chromosomes and this is dangerous and things became illegal. Everything went underground and it was in that overall context that you conceived of a strategy for MDMA.
In particular, through clinical trials. Tell us about your thinking there. And [00:23:00] also, I think it's really important the role that data would play in the story.
Rick Doblin: Yeah, so I sort of made my initial decision when I was 18 to focus my life on psychedelics. I had no knowledge that there was even such a thing as MDMA.
So it was 1972. It was basically LSD, mescaline and mushrooms that were my inspirations. But I Had the erroneous idea that the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve. I didn't know that was erroneous at the time. And so I did my very best
Jenny Stefanotti: more drugs in total or more different types of drugs.
Rick Doblin: Both. I'm just sort of focusing on the psychedelics, What that meant is that I had completely underestimated the critical nature of integration,
but you
Rick Doblin: just take more and more and you can get more lost and more disconnected unless you do the work with integration.
And so I realized then that I needed to get grounded and I needed to do so. What I told [00:24:00] myself was through building things in the physical world, that was 10 years. So I dropped out of college for 10 years. I did get grounded. I got more balanced and I said, okay, now I'm ready to sort of go back and make this the foreground.
And I went back to school as a college freshman, a new college where Nirvan also went in Sarasota, Florida. And in 1982 is when I went out to Esalen to do a month long workshop with Stan and Christina Groff of The Mystical Quest, and my goal was to design a curriculum for me to become a psychedelic therapist.
And that's where I learned about MDMA. And so I learned that it was both this incredible new therapeutic drug, but that it was also becoming a party drug under the name ecstasy. So it was clear that it had revitalized the underground psychedelic therapy movement, even though it was still legal, it was kept quiet.
And it was remarkably. gentle and yet profound and that it was doomed. And so I thought, okay, I woke up to [00:25:00] LSD and so as I've been after the backlash, now I'm waking up before the backlash. And so I can now get politically involved to try to protect it. And speaking of theories of change, I had read a book by the Assistant Secretary General of the UN, Robert Mueller, New Genesis, Shaping a Global Spirituality.
This idea of the global spirituality is what I sometimes refer to as, you know, spiritualized humanity or mass mental health. And what he was saying is that The United Nations has created to try to mediate conflicts between countries. A lot of them are religious based and we need to understand that we're all in this together.
This global spirituality in the picture on the front of the book was the earth from space and it was really inspiring, but he didn't say anything about psychedelics. So I wrote him a letter. And I had no idea if he'd ever reply, but I wrote him a letter and said, please consider the fact that psychedelics can help us understand about spirituality.
They're currently suppressed. Psychedelic research has been suppressed for decades. I said, would you help bring back [00:26:00] psychedelic research? And to my utter shock, he wrote me back and he said he would help, referred me to a bunch of mystics from all these different religions to whom I sent MDMA, and they reported back to him.
And so now this kind of confirmed this sense that if we can all come to this deeper understanding of who we are, that that can be a basis for cooperation. So. As it turned out, the DEA did move to criminalize MDMA. We had lawsuits and DEA administrative hearings and we won them, but the DEA rejected the recommendation of the judge and kept MDMA illegal.
And they all also, you know, exaggerated. Massive scale the amount of stories that mdma one dose permanent brain damage major functional consequences and so even though we won the case even though we did everything I realized that that was not going to work and that we needed to. Find a way forward and that was [00:27:00] going to be through the FDA and through science.
That would be the only way that we would be able to move forward. So what I'd like to say a lot is that the FDA needs data, but people respond to stories. And so it was both of those things that we need to both move through the FDA, challenge the drug war and have as many people as possible tell their stories of psychedelic coming out.
And
Rick Doblin: we see how effective that was. For gay rights and gay marriage is the people coming out that strategy. So one of the most important factors. This is polling has been done by political consultants that look at legalization of marijuana. And why would somebody vote for the legalization of marijuana and.
The most important factors include if you know a medical marijuana patient, so that if you hear a story from somebody that you know about something that helped them, that counteracts all the propaganda that you hear in all these other ways, because you're not sure what to believe, but somebody that you [00:28:00] know and trust says, oh, this helped me, that's like the crack in the wall of propaganda.
So that led to this strategy for all these 38 years now of MAPS is on the one hand, getting the data. That would then convince key opinion leaders and regulators through the drug policy reform work was having people really step up and tell their stories. So that was the parallel theory of change, both getting the raw data and then getting people to speak out.
Jenny Stefanotti: I love that. I didn't realize that. I just always really appreciated the notion that by addressing through clinical pathway. You're not only addressing issues in many cases that are, are not addressed with other treatment options. There's just much more political feasibility when you couple that with, or ostensibly, right?
We'll get into what's happened recently, coupling that with data.
Rick Doblin: Just one aspect of that, which is how do you get your message across? So one of the things about science and about data is that we are in a culture where the [00:29:00] media will report on new scientific discoveries. So there can be billions of dollars and there have been billions of dollars spent on anti drug education, and there's no way that we have those resources to do that, but how do you get earned media through science and through data?
And so that was another aspect of going the data route through the FDA, because then we will be able to inform a whole lot more people and change the cultural narrative through the propagation of stories about the results of scientific studies.
Jenny Stefanotti: Thanks for that. Nirvan, you have been working on a documentary about this story for 10 years.
So you have had . How many years was it originally, did you think?
Nirvan Mullick: We originally thought it would take two to three years. Yeah. . Yeah.
Jenny Stefanotti: But you've had a front row seat to this for a very long time, and I'm just curious, well first tell us about the genesis of the film and how you thought about its role in the movement and how you're thinking [00:30:00] about its role in the movement.
I know we'll get into the current state. We're mostly backward looking now, but I wanna inject your role now.
Nirvan Mullick: Sure. Well, yeah, as Rick mentioned, I had gone to the same college that Rick went to decades later, a new college in Sarasota, Florida, small experimental college and. Unlike Rick, I had never done psychedelics, so when I got, well, I guess either of us had done psychedelics when we got there, but I continued to not do psychedelics.
And, you know, at the age of 49, I still had never done psychedelics. So I was coming at this story from a very different perspective, but also a lot of curiosity. And so when I was at New College, Rick was sort of this legendary alum, right? And we would hear these myths about this alumni who was doing work with psychedelics with the government.
And we used to party in a house that he built that was this really trippy house. We all called it the Doblin house. So he was sort of this legendary character. And if you cut back to my childhood, I grew up on [00:31:00] sort of a cult adjacent commune that was grew out of the psychedelic movement. So it was sort of like a psychedelic cult.
That's kind of how I thought of it. I called the farm in Tennessee that grew out of lectures in the Bay area around psychedelics. And that turned into a whole community, and they kind of all tried to build this psychedelic utopia. And as a kid, it was a really traumatic place to grow up, and it sort of really turned me off.
And made me very skeptical of all things psychedelic and sort of utopian. And so, to then get to college and see people, friends, both doing psychedelics in ways that were interesting, but also seeing friends have really challenging experiences and some have psychotic breaks. I continued to be very wary of psychedelics and kind of cut to me making my first film at New College as a part of my [00:32:00] philosophy thesis project and Rick ended up being in my very first film, which wasn't about psychedelics, but was about storytelling as a vehicle for ideas and culture change.
And then I started going to Burning Man in 1999, and I've been going off and on for 24, 25 years, always sober. And I would always go hear Rick talk and share, you know, what they were up to with the research. And there's just so much storytelling baked in to the research that Rick's been doing, and MAPS has been doing, and also, you know, the story of this sort of College dropout who wanted to become a psychedelic psychotherapist and then ends up going back to Harvard and writing a thesis about how to do it and then starting a nonprofit and raising tens and then hundreds of millions of dollars to try to make it happen, right?
So, as he was telling the story, I was seeing the story evolve over the years, right? And I would [00:33:00] see the crowds that would come, the audience growing bigger and bigger and lines of people with questions getting longer and longer. And people would start to ask questions or say, you know, I heard you speak up burning man several years ago and I went back to college and I changed my major so that I could become.
I'd be ready to become a psycho, a psychotherapist once this is approved. As a filmmaker, I'm seeing basically in front of me, this story evolving and what feels like a big wave, you know, that could effectively change culture and society in a really massive way, like changing mental health care, changing.
Just, you know, having something that's been vilified suddenly become something that could help heal millions of people in need. And so it became really clear that this could be a really compelling story with a really compelling character. And they were still working on phase two of the clinical trials.
This is back in 2014. And I took my sister [00:34:00] to Burning Man for the first time that year and afterwards. We both kind of approached Rick and said, Hey, you know, we think this could be a really great film as anybody making a documentary about this and nobody was at the time. And so we kind of hashed out this deal with Rick.
Cause I was really interested in telling the true story of how this was accomplished, how social change, how culture change is accomplished, but while following somebody through work that often. You know, touches on the underground, right? There's a lot of psychedelic therapy and work that's been underground.
It's been illegal, still is, and Rick is doing work above ground with maps, you know, and working through all the federal regulatory process to try to get this. And to a prescription drug, but I wanted to tell the full story, including things in the past, you know, that at the time were things that we didn't want to talk about.
Rick didn't really want shared yet, but he, he wants to like, Rick is all about transparency. He's kind of radical transparency. [00:35:00] And at the same time, you know, the work of getting MDMA through the FDA was like more important than telling an individual story. So we made a deal that. The film would come out after the FDA rescheduled MDMA so that we could tell the full story, including parts of the work that that's underground and sort of touches on kind of an idea of, you know, civil rights and people breaking laws that they think are immoral to work towards social change, which I think is a really powerful story and lesson.
So that was our deal and film coming out after FDA rescheduling and. At the time, you know, obviously nobody had ever done anything like this before in terms of taking a psychedelic through the FDA. Rick estimated that it would be two to three years, which seemed like a reasonable time to spend on a documentary.
And it's 10 years later and it's still not done.
Still two to three years.
Nirvan Mullick: Still [00:36:00] two to three years. So this has sort of been kicking a can every two or three years. Down the road, but at the same time, I think the documentaries that I love the most are ones that really take you into places that an audience wouldn't be able to get into, right?
It's access and over the past 10 years, I think we've really built a lot of trust in the space and gotten to get into some meetings and rooms where really key decisions are being made. And so, I think we're getting to be able to tell a much more intimate story. It's been a fascinating journey and I think that's why we call it, we end up calling it, we're calling it What a Trip.
Jenny Stefanotti: It's such a good title. I so appreciate everything you've just said. I mean, I remember once Rick, you saying, making kind of know exactly what the quote was, but it was something to the tune of cultural change can only happen so quickly. And if you try to move too fast, You might get set back.
Rick Doblin: Yeah. I said the patience is the [00:37:00] fastest way.
Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.
Rick Doblin: And we've done a lot of work to try to build bipartisan support and a lot of work with veterans. And so I've learned that there's a statement that the Navy Seals have, which is slow, is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Mm-hmm .
Rick Doblin: So I think that this idea of the pace of change. You know, how, how can you moderate the pace of change?
Yeah, if you go too fast, people close up and then you could be set back quite a bit. And if you go too slow, you know, you, you miss a lot of opportunities and there's a lot of unnecessary suffering. And so, you know, trying to find that, that right stage. And I think we had that pretty well, 28 years or so.
And now, just for the last couple years, and just more recently, I think there's been a bit of a backlash.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.
Rick Doblin: You know, so, and I think that the reason for that is really about the [00:38:00] abandonment of controlling the narrative. by the pharmaceutical company that we created.
Jenny Stefanotti: That takes us to a really critical part of the puzzle, which, uh, is such an important part of our conversation.
And probably the thing that we've talked about more than anything else is corporate incentives and psychedelics. And so in some ways there was a genius strategy around the clinical path in terms of science and data and political feasibility. There was a double edged sword because you were bringing psychedelics into.
the incentives of the pharmaceutical industry. And for the listeners who are not familiar, I was just very impressed with the way that you started this, which was setting up MAPS, the public benefit corp, the company that was wholly owned by the 501c3 non profit. And so for those of you who are familiar with steward ownership as a gold standard for corporate governance, this is a way to really instantiate the company in service of the purpose because there wasn't [00:39:00] an inability to extract because it was owned by the nonprofit.
What I talk about in the Denizen inquiry is can we envision that future? And then how do we get from here to there? So we can talk about gold standard corporate structures, but then when we're in today's reality, what's the best that we can do and what's the path. So I just want to speak a little bit to what happened with BAPS.
The PBC conversion to Lycos, just the evolution of, of those entities and how that played a role in the FDA response letter, the recent setback in the movement.
Rick Doblin: Well, what began in 1986 when I created MAPS was this understanding that the culture was all against it. There was MDMA has been invented by Merck in 1912, and it was in the public domain so that there was no patent on the molecule.
I learned about MDMA in 82, but it had already been used for about six years as a therapy drug. And so the uses were also in the public [00:40:00] domain through a whole range of uses. And so I thought that given the political obstructions, the blocking of research, all of this, that it would only be. Able to make progress through charitable donations that nobody would really conceive of an opportunity to make money with all the opposition that was facing us.
Now, it took me 28 years to realize that I had made a fundamental mistake. This is even after I had gotten my PhD at Harvard in 2001 and thought I knew everything that I needed to know about drug development. And it turned out that I had missed this crucial factor that Because pharma doesn't use it, but that there was a law created in 84 by Ronald Reagan that he signed into law to create incentives for developing drugs that were off patent.
And these incentives were called data exclusivity. So it's not a patent that blocks anybody else from doing things, but you have exclusive use of your own data for a period of five years. And that means that other companies can generate their [00:41:00] own data, but that if you get there first and you, you've got this data exclusivity, you can have this period of time where there's no competition so that you could end up making larger.
You can sell for higher than generic prices and you can make a bunch of money. And by this point, through this 28 year process, we had raised, uh, you know, over a hundred million dollars, but that. We're just focusing on MDMA for PTSD, but MDMA is good for a whole range of different things, and other psychedelics are good for a whole range of different things.
So, I thought if I can move from asking for charitable donations to getting a financial engine that would create a stream of income that then could be used for public benefit. Purposes owned by a nonprofit that that was a switch that would be worth making. And so that's where we created the maps public benefit corporation to take advantage of this data exclusivity.
And so then [00:42:00] we did have, but I still thought there's no way to patent MDMA. I didn't really. understand patents as well as I should have, but it still looked like this was going to be extraordinarily difficult. It was uncertain that the outcomes would ever be positive. So it still felt like charitable donations would come in to fund the research.
And then once the research, if it did work out, then we would have this engine to create new income. So what happened was that we became the victim of our own success. So in 2016, after 30 years, we had all of the data we needed to, from preclinical phase one, phase two studies to the FDA to go to ask for permission to go to phase three, which is the large scale, double blind placebo controlled study to prove safety and efficacy this last step before getting prescription approval.
So we, we got that FDA said, yes, you can go to phase three. And we spent this Additional 8 months negotiating every aspect of the phase 3 design, because I knew the double blind would be [00:43:00] a methodological challenge that doesn't really work with psychedelics. So we spent this whole time negotiating with FDA and in some ways.
We tried too hard to be scientific. What I had learned and what my dissertation had, um, discussed was that the best way to deal with the double blind with psychedelics is to do therapy with low dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. Everybody knows they're getting MDMA, everybody's expectations are the same, they don't know what dose they're gonna get, and they might be confused between the low dose and the full dose, and the challenge was to get the low dose that's enough.
to cause some confusion. So microdosing wouldn't do, but not so high of a dose that you get such therapeutic benefits that there's no real difference between the two groups. And what we discovered after studying therapy with inactive placebo, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams, 50 milligrams, 75, 100, 125, and 150, is that the lower doses did contribute to blinding, but they [00:44:00] actually made people uncomfortable.
And so these are now severe PTSD people and they've, the worst things that have happened to them and they've not been able to deal with it. And when you activate them, but you don't get enough of the fear reduction makes them uncomfortable. So the main therapies for PTSD, prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy, roughly half the people drop out of the therapy because it's so re traumatizing.
So, What we showed is that they still got better, the therapy with low dose MDMA, but then we discovered, to our surprise, that this transition point, where the dose becomes very therapeutic, was lower than we thought. It was at 75 milligrams. The normal dose that we've used was, at the time, 125. But the 75 milligram was remarkably effective.
So there was no sweet spot that would say, here's the dose that's gonna give blinding, but it won't either compromise or enhance the therapy. So what happened was we went to the FDA and we said, this is what we have found. [00:45:00] We'll give you blinding if you want blinding, but the real challenge should be if we can make a lot of progress with therapy by itself, why should we even add a drug?
So we should test therapy with full dose MDMA versus therapy with no MDMA so that our job is harder. Now, the people at the FDA. agreed with us and they required us, they said we want you to do therapy with inactive placebo and we signed these, we got an agreement letter and that's what I thought was going to be going fine.
Then what happened is now that we showed that there was a way through the regulatory system, all sorts of for profit psychedelic companies started springing up. And now there's hundreds of them when we started moving it into phase three, and we needed to raise more money. Now it became difficult, impossible for us to raise the money we needed because people were looking at all these people investing and at the time was the hype bubble was really going big and the Canadian stock [00:46:00] market.
And there was these people making 100 million dollars on, you know, ridiculous stories that didn't really hold up. So, we kind of created this industry and created this ecosystem that became filled with investor money.
Jenny Stefanotti: It cannibalized your philanthropic capital.
Rick Doblin: Exactly. So, then we had to take in investor money and that, that's really where everything changed.
We're now, it's no longer about public benefit. It's now about public benefit and return to shareholders. And many of the investors are saying, well, okay, to show us that our investment is really going to work. Now, we need these. Traditional pharma people, and we just separate the decision making between the nonprofit and the pharma company in order to get further investments.
And then the venture capitalists that the company went to try to get money. We're saying, well, now you need patents and we're not going to invest until you get patents. And then they tried to patent whatever they could, including now particle size. This is something I didn't really realize, but [00:47:00] patenting the manufacturing process.
Something that then you could use to block all generics. So it just became that I've created the opposite of what I wanted to do and all of the safeguards from nonprofit ownership to a public benefit of a public benefit corporation. We still have a public benefit corporation that we don't have that's now more investor controlled, but the public benefit part of it has turned into just words.
There's
Rick Doblin: no real. Impact on decision making. We tried to spend a lot of time developing metrics of how we quantify public benefit and link it to stock options and bonuses. That was just completely rejected by the company and nothing came from that. So what we've done is we have turned this multi 38 plus year effort.
With incredible contributions, both from donors and from people working below market or working for free, donating their time into a company that's focused not on what's best for [00:48:00] patients. And I would say from the tech world, the. The way that I frame things is it was, when it was MAPS and public benefit controlled, it was what's best for patients, maximize therapeutic outcomes.
Now, I think it's minimum viable product.
Nirvan Mullick: I've been watching this happen and a huge theme that's kind of emerged with this film and the story that, as I see it, is sort of the intersection of idealism and capitalism. And Rick is a true idealist. He didn't point this out, but, you know, as part of starting this.
public benefit for profit psychedelic pharmaceutical company, Rick, he took no equity. So he has no upside if there's ever a profit, he's maintained, you know, like a separation of conflict of interest to continue to advocate for what's in the best interest of patients as his, um, his executive director at maps, Chris, who's negotiating a lot of these deals and financing.
So the [00:49:00] nonprofit leadership. You know, really has no financial incentive in the company. And I've seen a lot of people accusing Rick of sort of making a money play here. And I, you know, that's, that's really far from the truth, but it's something that people become skeptical when, when money and idealism capitalism, when these things intersect, right.
So it's been, you know, Rick stood to help start, you know, through this nonprofit, the nonprofit starting a company that could eventually become a multi billion dollar company. And Rick's plan was just to retire, you know, at some point and finally get to become the psychedelic psychotherapist he'd wanted to be when he was 18.
But, you know, having to go change the law and culture in order to be able to do that above ground. And so that was the story we set out to tell, really thinking that the FDA would respond to data. But that's not the story we're now telling, because as we saw, the FDA does also respond to storytelling.
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. [00:50:00] Well, I wanted to turn to that in just a second, but I do, I think there are a couple of details around the, the kind of dissolution of the clean incentive structure of the PBC that I think are worth noting. Because when you did fundraise, you fundraised with 10 to 1 voting rights to retain control.
Right. So investors came in with much less weight in decision making on paper. But I thought what was so fascinating about the evolution of maps and the kind of devolution of the incentive structure is also bringing in executives from pharma who had critical expertise, but also brought in a more capitalist cultural component.
Rick Doblin: Yeah, and one of the best examples of that, and also did not share any of the drug policy reform goals at all. And so one of the clearest examples for that is, in order to get the best outcomes for the patients, you need to train the therapists. And every psychedelic therapist that you will talk to will say that their [00:51:00] own psychedelic experiences have helped them to understand the struggles of their patients.
The pharma company, Lycos, now called Lycos, is dead set against talking about therapist self experience and blocked me from talking about it. We can get into the quiet period idea, but their thing was, Oh my God, you know, this is complicated. There's no real pathway. The FDA has to be innovative and you're giving MDMA to people that don't have a diagnosis.
That's like drug legalization. That's going to be a bother to the FDA, the DA, nobody won't like that. So we've got a situation where one of the main techniques for our training therapists that that resulted in us getting outstanding results that even people at the FDA advisory committee said these results are almost too good to believe, and they did doubt them, but I think they're definitely genuine, is that we've just got this unwillingness anymore of the pharma company trying to train the therapists the best possible way that they can, that the therapists say has been very helpful to them.[00:52:00]
Jenny Stefanotti: There was this really critical corruption in your ability to contribute to the story. At a critical time.
Rick Doblin: Yeah, well, one of the things that just I think that the traditional people at the pharma company that we hired were like, you know, these origin stories, it's something that's now a hindrance. You know, now they're talking about giving MDMA to therapists as part of their training, or they're talking about drug policy reform, or, you know, these are now, the people that brought us here are the people that we need to separate from as much as possible, and we need to go forward in a more traditional way, and that's what led to the end of the storytelling, that we had the proactive storytelling.
When you're trying to bring something new into the culture, you need to be ongoing in a constant way explaining what you're doing. MAPS had a policy of transparency. Lycos has ditched the policy of transparency in order to build trust for something that's been demonized and suppressed. You need to do it out in the open so people can see what you're doing.
So transparency was one of the core [00:53:00] values that's just been shunted aside.
Nirvan Mullick: I think Lycos was prioritizing building trust with their investors. Right? So they were trying to hire people with, you know, some kind of track record in the pharmaceutical industry that, that would help them raise all of the money, millions and millions and millions of dollars that they needed to raise.
And so they were trying to be very careful about what they shared and Rick's coming at it from this position of building trust with a much broader community with absolute transparency along the way. And, and so we saw these two things kind of running into each other.
Rick Doblin: Yeah, and then what happened was that the traditional people said, Oh, pharma companies, when they get close to FDA submission for approval, they have what's called a quiet period.
And I think this was one of the key fundamental mistakes that led to this backlash that led to the losing the control over the narrative. You know, when, when you've got a, a drug that's [00:54:00] 22, 22 million Americans have done MDMA or ecstasy. You know, you've got a drug that has this enormous history of underground use and it's one of the most popular illegal drugs all over the world.
You can have a pharma company say, Oh, we're going to have a quiet period, but that doesn't mean the culture is going to be quiet about it. And then we had,
Jenny Stefanotti: how long was the quiet period?
Rick Doblin: Well, the quiet period actually began like a year and a half or more ago where, for example, there was an article in JAMA psychiatry in May, 2023 that was criticizing the therapeutic approach that we were taking.
And I said, we got to respond to this. We got to explain what's going on. And the pharma company said, no, we're not going to respond because it'll just bring more attention to this critique. And we're going to block from responding. We're going to block maps from responding, which the maps board went along with and.
It was because the farmer people also were defensive. They were not confident that in the therapy. They're not really psychedelic people. So they felt that they [00:55:00] didn't have an adequate answer to the critiques. And so if you feel you've got an adequate answer to critiques, then you respond, but they sort of use this idea.
No, we're not going to respond. And so that just built up and built up and built up the sort of negativity in the culture. And this quiet period, I think, was, yeah, the traditional approach to what is a non traditional situation. And as a result, it completely boomeranged and we lost control of the narrative.
And the FDA does respond to culture as well as to the data. I mean, if the FDA only responded to data, they wouldn't have blocked it. They may research for all these years. So it just was this frustrating, just, it was like death with a thousand cuts that I could see the narrative being abandoned and little by little the critics growing and growing and growing and us being unable to respond.
Nirvan Mullick: Even till the end though, don't you feel like there was, [00:56:00] even I'd say on your end, like a, an overestimation or faith in the FDA to follow the science?
Rick Doblin: There was. Yeah, I think the results were worse than we thought. What had happened was the agreements that we made with the FDA people.
Nirvan Mullick: Not the results of the study, the results of the FDA's decision, with the study, right?
Just to
Rick Doblin: clarify. Yeah, yeah. But, but, but yeah, so, so 2017, the people that we negotiated the phase three designs with later left the FDA. And the new people at the division of psychiatry internally are much more conservative as well. But, you know, I thought we had the whole weight of this pharmaceutical industry behind us.
When the FDA makes a decision, you're not making it with individuals. You're making it with the agency. You're making it with the organization. And so it just felt like the agreement that we had on how to design the protocol would have been protected in a way, respected by the new people at the FDA and they, they did not do that.
And so, yeah, the outcome was. Shocking. But up to the FDA [00:57:00] Advisory Committee meeting, if that would have been yes, the FDA would have approved it. If the FDA Advisory Committee said yes, it would have approved it. And so now all these rationalizations that they're coming in the two months after the Advisory Committee, you know, they didn't raise them before.
There was never a problem with this idea that MDMA plus therapy. Oh, that's a big problem. Now they're saying, oh, that's, that's a big problem. So I think that, you know, the sort of effort by. FDA to justify the rejection, so one of the things that was so outrageous is there was a Washington Post article before the FDA Advisory Committee, again, challenging the protocol design and this idea of functional and blinding.
And I wanted to respond to that and, you know, the leadership at, at Lycos said, we do not need to convince the Washington Post. We just need to convince the FDA. And when you look at what really influenced the members of the FDA advisory committee, it was not the scientific briefing package that they got from the FDA.
It was the [00:58:00] negative articles in the Washington Post and other media that, and again, this idea of losing control of the narrative. The other part is that the last time that the FDA overturned a rejec or a recommendation of the advisory committee, when the advisory committee recommended not to approve something, And the FDA went ahead and approved it.
It turned out terrible for the FDA because it was an Alzheimer's drug. It was super expensive. It had a lot of risks. That drug has since been taken off the market by the company and nobody wanted to, insurance wouldn't cover it. It was just a big scandal. And the FDA said, Oh, people said, you're FDA, you're just an arm of the pharmaceutical industry.
So the other part is in the several months between FDA. Advisory committee saying no and the FDA decision. There was two months there. The response of Lycos and the PR people that they were hiring made again a key fundamental mistake, which was to think that they just needed to apply political pressure.
And so they got 19 senators and 61 or so members [00:59:00] of the House of Representatives to send a letter to the president and the head of the FDA saying, approve this drug, veterans need it. But they didn't respond to the scientific critiques that were made. So it was a misunderstanding again of how the FDA operates and what kind of support do they need.
And The biggest example of this was that June 4th was the FDA Advisory Committee meeting. June 6th was the results of the Dutch State Committee on MDMA. So, like us, Had shut down research in the beginning of 2023. We had research in Europe as well. And the idea was you create a consensus among regulators.
Oh, these people over there are moving forward over here. This country is moving forward. They all kind of make it easier for each other to go forward and regulators don't like being the only ones doing something. So, like, I was shut down research in Europe for financial reasons. They'll say in order to spend more money on.
Commercialization efforts in the US, but they, they really put at risk the approval. [01:00:00] And so what the Dutch government did is we've seen in the phase two studies that we had funded in the Netherlands. Great results. So they said, we need our own committee to look at what they did. This Dutch state committee had real subject matter experts.
Unlike the FDA advisor committee, they had a year to study that same data. The FDA advisory committee spent a couple of weeks studying and they had to buy whatever they said by. Okay. Putting out a book length report about what their findings were, whereas all the FDA Advisory Committee people need to do is just say, oh, I vote no, or I vote this way.
So, two days after the FDA Advisory Committee, the Dutch State Committee issued its report and came to the exact opposite conclusion, saying efficacy was proven, safety was proven, we need to move forward with basically real world evidence, compassionate use in the Netherlands. And so that would have been a.
response to the critiques of the advisory committee and Likos chose not to tell anybody about it.
Nirvan Mullick: The advisory committee of June 4th, [01:01:00] the FDA advisory committee, was such a shockingly, I don't even know how to put it into words, but it was, it was off the rails. It was kind of unbelievable to see kind of how that conversation went and how a small group of organized I would say anti capitalist anarchists who were opposed to MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.
They're opposed to any for profit, even a B Corp, commercializing psychedelics. So they've been organizing different strategies behind the scenes to, you know, tie up companies like Compass and Lycos and try to derail them from doing that. And they basically teamed up and leveraged this other group that maybe leveraged them called ICER, which publishes a report.
And they're a nonprofit that's funded by kind of the insurance industry, and they publish, you know, an analysis and a recommendation of what they think drug prices should be, [01:02:00] you know, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, Rick, but they tend to advocate for lower drug prices so that it costs less for the insurance industry to pay for these things.
And, and, you know, the phase three clinical trials that maps. And then Blakos did, showed that about two thirds of the participants no longer had PTSD after about three treatments of MDMA assisted therapy. These are dramatic results. They're way more powerful by a fact, you know, multiple factors of anything else, SSRIs that are available.
And there hasn't been a new treatment for PTSD in over 25 years that's made it this far through the FDA. Incredible need and the data showed that this was very effective, but, you know, this would be an expensive treatment and it would potentially be covered by insurance. So it's arguable that this industry, uh, the insurance industry was incentivized to, you know, try to figure out a way not to have to [01:03:00] pay for this.
So, you know, they, ICER then published, you know, unverified accusations by this small group of. Called a symposia and symposia organized to speak and extend the public commentary period at the FD advisory committee, where they made all kinds of unverified accusations. And the way the meeting was structured, there was no chance for LAICOS to respond to those before these, you know, advisory panelists then weigh this and make a decision.
And you can see if you watch this 9 hour thing, which I have watched multiple times, I've edited it down so people can see on Instagram, you know, some of the examples of them patently saying things that influence their votes, which are demonstrably false. But it's still part of their decision, you know, in which they voted no.
Now, these are non binding decisions, but as Rick said, had they all voted yes, MDMA would now be approved and be something, [01:04:00] MDMA assisted therapy would probably be something, you know, that would now be getting figured out how to, how to have insurance cover this. That did not happen. In my opinion, it was a travesty for public benefit and for people, millions of people who, who've been holding out hope for this therapy to help their loved ones.
Rick Doblin: Yeah. And I think this is the example of the quiet period and the way in which it was completely counterproductive because Lycos and its leadership decided that this ice year. Review doesn't really matter and they shouldn't really talk to them and in the reports that you get from eyes here They're complaining that the pharma company is not talking to them and that is not explaining and not responding to their questions So it was this loss of control of the narrative.
It was by Traditional people who really didn't I think understand or appreciate the healing technology that they were now in charge of trying to move forward Felt defensive about it and they just got totally Overwhelmed by [01:05:00] these, uh, stories that were extremely evocative, but, but false in many ways. It was a vacuum,
Nirvan Mullick: yeah.
Rick Doblin: You know, just enormous amount of money has been lost, time has been lost. The big losers are, of course, the PTSD patients that need it. You may commit suicide, some of them. And then the whole field is getting this message that Oh, the FDA doesn't regulate psychotherapy. That's the problem. And therefore, the whole field is now moving away from combining psychedelics with psychotherapy to minimizing and providing psychological support by people who are not necessarily therapists.
And so again, it's not about what's best for patients. And I think it's the wrong message too, because the FDA Didn't really say anything for 24 years about how the therapy is a problem. And so it's just been heartbreaking to see because, you know, it's fine for critics to criticize. That's the, you know, so I don't blame the critics at all.
You know, I [01:06:00] really blame the traditional form of people for not really permitting maps and myself and themselves from responding as the narrative got challenged.
Nirvan Mullick: But I also feel like there's a fundamental, like. The story that the critics were throwing at Maps through this advisory committee was so salacious and sensational and really leveraging a lot of emotional touch points and, and, and trying to question, you know, how can these results be so, so powerful because people don't really understand how psychedelics really work.
They're starting to understand these critical periods and the mechanism of action, but, but they're just able to tell that they do work. In any case, the, the, the story that was being told. Kind of fill this gap and it was really hard, given the format that LAICOS had, to kind of counter it, to counter that story in a way that could be successful for the FDA.
Jenny Stefanotti: I really appreciate the in depth [01:07:00] story about the way that the story was. Lost the inability to respond and the ability to really have a, an inquiry that was a discourse that was civil and brought up different perspectives, which is how we deliberate as a society. So, where do we go from here?
Rick Doblin: Well, MDMA is an incredible tool for helping people and so.
There needs to be a continued effort to try to address the concerns that the FDA has expressed. And Lycos is in negotiations with the FDA. They will raise the money. They will do whatever FDA says they need to do. Whether they'll tear down the therapy and provide psychological support, whether they'll blend it with a Existing evidence based therapy, like prolonged exposure, whether they'll study the therapy that we use to get these great results in the phase three studies.
All of that is unclear. But I think 1 of the things that has taken this tragedy and this [01:08:00] heartbreak and. Softened it a little bit is just to realize that like those could completely disappear and this movement is gonna move forward this cultural shift has really happened and you know one of the best examples of this is how many of the people that we develop bipartisan support with.
There's a bunch of people in the trump administration that are sympathetic with psychedelics. I think there's this hunger for healing and connection and connection in a broader way. So like us will eventually succeed at something. Whether they'll do it with full insurance coverage for both therapy to get the best results as possible is dubious, but maybe, and I think we've just had Compass, the other main study company that was doing psilocybin for treatment resistant to depression.
They've just announced that they've had a very difficult time. Recruiting subjects. So their timelines are pushed way back and they're, they let go 30 percent of their, their staff. And so compass [01:09:00] has got challenges. I think now you Sona, which is the sort of nonprofit funded by a very, very wealthy person who did not need to take in investors is going psilocybin for major depressive disorder.
That may be the first one through the FDA system, or depending on what the negotiations are that Lycos has with FDA, or depending on what the new people that are taking over the government, what they think about the FDA, rejection of MDMA, whether that gets overturned, so there's just enormous amount of evidence about the healing potential of psychedelics, the way that they work to get the root causes.
They're different than SSRIs or the traditional drugs you take every day that are more about symptom control. So I think, you know, we just saw a defeat in Massachusetts, the Natural plant medicine initiative that was on the ballot failed. It got 43%. Yes. [01:10:00] 57%. No, this is after Colorado passed the natural plant initiative a couple of years ago, Oregon psilocybin initiative.
So there's been a loss of the narrative, a loss of public support, a loss of political support. So I described it as if this is the story of the mythological phoenix, we are at the stage where burnt to a crisp. We're lying in ashes on the ground. And where do we go from here? Everywhere I go, I hear people telling me about how important healings that they had or insights that they had with psychedelics.
And it really is just Inspiring to continue to keep going. And so we just have to keep going. And I think where we go from here is to really for Lycos. I'm not involved anymore in the negotiations between Lycos and the FDA, although, you know, maps just 1, 2. formal disputes with FDA, both with the FDA division of psychiatry and the lawyer that we've used.
I finally got the [01:11:00] Lycos people to hire that lawyer. So that good advice, but where we're going to go is just to however long it takes. From my point of view, it's been 38 years. If it's 40 years, if it's 41 years, you know, people need it, the world needs it. And. There's just, I think, overwhelming momentum to continue moving forward.
Jenny Stefanotti: I deeply appreciate and resonate with that. Systemic change is the thing that I decided to dedicate my life to. Things happen, like Trump wins the election, or I walk into Target. It feels so hopeless sometimes, but I definitely carry a sentiment of What else would I do with myself? I can't, I kind of can't do anything else, but continue to address this thing that I believe so deeply in.
So, I really appreciate that, Rick.
Rick Doblin: Well, I think that what you're talking about is, um, I wouldn't say the key to happiness, but as long as you keep working to make something better, you don't get overwhelmed with depression or anxiety. There are [01:12:00] simple kindnesses. There are things we can do. It's not, even if it's hopeless, We can still try our best, and that will at least give us a certain amount of
Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah, and actually, Johan Hari, I don't know if you're familiar with his book, Lost Connections, but talks about the real drivers of the depression and anxiety academic, and why SSRIs don't work, and his lost connections to many things, one of them being purposeful work.
Well, I want to close with just a final question about the film. So what happens with the film? Yeah, what happens with the film?
Nirvan Mullick: You know When the FDA basically rejected the clinical trials that in the phase three, I was watching, you know, heartbreak with everybody who, you know, the teams that have been working on this for decades.
And then suddenly I, I kind of felt my own like, Oh, I'm not going to be able to finish this film for another three to five years. Like I'm kind of, my fate is tied. Rick and I, after the dust settled, you know, we checked in and Rick basically told [01:13:00] me that he no longer felt that our deal that we had made.
It needed to be kept like the idea that the film shouldn't come out until after MDMA is rescheduled Rick feels that Lycos has separated so far and he's not involved anymore that his personal story will not impact the decision of the FDA and that all the personal attacks that were made during the advisory committee hearing, you know, had already been sort of levied.
And so that was sort of. That card's already been played in a way. And so Rick gave us, you know, basically the green light to go ahead and finish the film, you know, originally the intention of this film from my point of view is to follow somebody who's, you know, been working on a lifelong dream for 50 years and overcome incredible obstacles and odds to do something.
And pull it off and then, you know, retire and go become a psychedelic psychotherapist without any, taking any equity and just sort of like, what a mensch, you know, and sort of the realization of this lifelong [01:14:00] dream. And now it's really, it seems more of the story of a lifelong dream that has grown into something beyond Rick's control.
And when we talk about losing control of the narrative, I'm experiencing that as a filmmaker as well, right? Like this isn't a story we can control, it's just sort of a story we can be part of. And we can tell, and we can choose how to tell it, and we can work towards the story we want to tell, but basically, you know, we're now working to finish this film, and also I'm seeing an opportunity for the film that I didn't really see before, because the film wasn't really supposed to play a part in the movement, it was just sort of to tell how this was actually done and inspire other people.
Who might be looking to change the world to think about it on a different time scale
as
Nirvan Mullick: well in terms of the types of change they might want to take on now, you know, we're working to raise the funds and finish the rough cut with the idea that the film could come out in a year and a half or two years, you know, potentially [01:15:00] before.
the FDA reviews another phase three trial. And I think we have an opportunity to really tell the story of what happened and shine some light on this process and how things at the FDA really went off the rails and were derailed by, by different forces. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith. in the FDA's bureaucratic process to follow the science.
I really believed that the science would be followed, and to see how that wasn't the case, again, after 40 years of that not being the case 40 years ago, uh, was really disheartening, but I think it's really important to shine some light on that and tell that story. Well, I think the
Jenny Stefanotti: Dutch counterfactual also really punctuates that point.
Nirvan Mullick: Yeah, and it's really nuanced, and so our goal is to figure out ways to kind of Tell that story in a way that that can be understood. And for people to also feel the emotions, the lives that are at stake, how much the people have been working on this really care. And [01:16:00] it's kind of an epic adventure story, you know, so we're working to finish the film now.
We're not waiting for the FDA anymore. And hopefully the film will keep what just happened from happening again.
Jenny Stefanotti: And you do need support with that, your fundraising. We want to make sure that our listeners are aware.
Nirvan Mullick: Yeah, we are fundraising. This film has been supported. Philanthropically over the last 10 years, we're really excited that Darren Aronofsky came on board as an executive producer.
Blake Mykoski is a great supporter, really generous supporter, others, Lynn Lear, different folks in the, in the space have been chipping in and donations can be made tax deductible.
Jenny Stefanotti: Great. I will put a link to that in the show notes in the newsletter too, of course. Thanks so much you two for all that you do.
Rick, you're really such an inspiration, such an inspiration. I'm glad that I waited this long to put out a conversation about psychedelics because feels like I should lead with this one. It really tells the story in such a beautiful way. I know it's a [01:17:00] tough moment. I'm just really inspired by both of you and the work that you're doing and it's just really an honor to have you on the podcast and to support your work in any way through this conversation.
Rick Doblin: Well, Jenny, thank you so much for letting us tell our story in our own words. Yeah. Thank you.
Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tycho for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www. becomingdenizen.
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