Dr. Rick Doblin on MAPS and the War on Drugs
2016-07-16 · Guest: Dr. Rick Doblin (Founder of MAPS) · 52:18
History of the War on Drugs and MAPS
Bob Zadek interviews Dr. Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), about the history of the War on Drugs and the mission of his organization. They discuss the political and racist motivations behind drug prohibition in the 20th century and the current progress of FDA clinical trials for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
Topics: War on Drugs, Psychedelics, MAPS, MDMA, FDA, Drug Prohibition, Medical Marijuana, Criminal Justice Reform, PTSD
Speakers:
- Bob Zadek: Host
- Dr. Rick Doblin: Founder and Executive Director of MAPS
- Caller (Even): Listener from Fairfax
Introduction to the War on Drugs [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. I am your eponymous host, Bob Zadek. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639—I know you have it on speed dial. I thought I’d mention it for any newcomers who are out there. That is the number to call in and join my conversation at any time. 800-345-5639. We are today and always the show of ideas, not attitude. Thanks so much for listening.
Well, with a dearth of positive libertarian information in the news these days, it’s pretty depressing to follow what’s going on in our country. I thought as a pick-me-up in more ways than one, I would devote today’s show to an area where the libertarian point of view is actually carrying the day. And I should add, against overwhelming odds. In this issue, it is truly a triumph of David over Goliath. The subject, as you may have guessed, is America’s alleged, alleged War on Drugs.
We all know that anytime we declare war on any point of view, that is a war that is unwinnable and makes no sense. War on poverty, war on drugs, war on whatever. Any war on—war on terrorism, I should of course add—any war on against a point of view is doomed to fail. And so it is with the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has a fascinating, not understood history in America. It is not known by most people. If more people understood the ugly history of our declared War on Drugs, I suspect that more people would oppose that war.
To give us an interesting perspective on our War on Drugs and why drugs is the wrong target for any war on, I’m happy to welcome this morning to my show Dr. Rick Doblin. Rick is a PhD. He has a PhD from the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. And most importantly to today’s show, he has spent most of his grown-up life trying to encourage a drug policy that is more enlightened. Rick heads the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, aka MAPS. Rick, welcome to the show this morning. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Yes, thank you for having me today, all the way from Ephemeral.
Bob Zadek: I’m sorry?
Dr. Rick Doblin: I said I’m all the way from Ephemeral.
Bob Zadek: Oh, you’re way up there in the Delta, I understand. This morning, thanks for giving us a little time, tearing yourself away from what I hope is very pleasant weather. Far more pleasant than the Bay Area where it’s probably below freezing this morning. So welcome, thanks for joining us this morning.
Now Rick, I’m going to throughout the hour—and maybe we’ll start with this—I would like to set the stage for MAPS and what you are doing and why you are doing it. But to set the stage, because the story is almost bizarre and little understood, with your help, I would like to have our listeners understand how we got to a War on Drugs. The incredibly racist, uninformed, ugly political history of this so-called War on Drugs. So I’d like to do that for a few minutes just to set the stage and then devote the rest of the hour to the work you are doing at MAPS.
Now Rick, as you know, for most of this country’s history, almost all narcotic-type drugs, psychedelic drugs, cocaine, opium, heroin, were basically legal and they were not banned at all. Now, they certainly were legal at the federal level because for most of our history, the federal government understood it simply lacked the enumerated power to regulate drugs. It was not a constitutionally granted power to Congress and therefore the feds ignored it. And the first regulation of drugs was not done under any health statute, but rather it was done by an expansion of the Commerce Clause—an abuse of the Commerce Clause. And then thereafter, marijuana and cocaine was regulated under the taxing statutes, not under any health statute. And we lived that way for a while until somebody who was important to your early life, then-President Nixon, declared a War on Drugs. Now, that was your first exposure to the issue, wasn’t it? The Nixon administration?
The Political Origins of Prohibition [06:10]
Dr. Rick Doblin: Yes, it was. And it was in the context of the protests against the Vietnam War and the emerging counterculture. So marijuana had become criminalized in ‘37 through the Tax Act, as you say, and then taken out of the pharmacopoeia in ‘42. And that was in part Harry Anslinger and all these prohibition agents. It was shortly a few years after the end of alcohol prohibition, and the bureaucracy of enforcement and prohibition was looking around for something else to criminalize. And it was mostly Mexicans who were using marijuana and black jazz musicians and all, and so it became a convenient target to go after these minorities and criminalize their use of marijuana.
Bob Zadek: And what’s important in what you just explained is that it wasn’t any attempt to improve public health. It was a purely, purely political calculation, not a health-related calculation.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, in Congress, actually, the American Medical Association was the major organization that argued against the criminalization of marijuana. And they said that it had a lot of medical uses, there was no evidence of the abuse that it was massively exaggerated, the risks of it, and that their testimony was completely ignored in Congress. And so it was over the objections of the health people that it was criminalized.
And it remained a war against minorities that people really didn’t notice or didn’t care much about until the youth generation in the ’60s started adopting marijuana. And then started also adopting LSD, other psychedelics, and then getting very involved in challenging the status quo, particularly along civil rights and along the Vietnam War. And that’s what really attracted the attention of Nixon and others. And I don’t know if you have that quote from Ehrlichman?
Bob Zadek: I don’t.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Oh my god, it’s incredible. So what Ehrlichman basically said—this is years later in an interview that’s gotten a lot of PR just the last few months, but Ehrlichman’s been dead for a while—but the quote basically said is that Nixon was really upset about the black civil rights people and about the hippies. And that since he couldn’t really criminalize their ideas, their opposition to the war and their opposition to the civil rights abuses, that he could criminalize selectively the drugs that they did, meaning opiates, cocaine, and marijuana, and then exaggerate the risks of them to scare people, and then develop criminal penalties that they could use to break up these groups and arrest their leaders and harass people.
Bob Zadek: That’s exactly correct. Nixon hated the then-called hippies, a word that seems almost quaint today. But Nixon hated the hippies and he really wasn’t very fond of the blacks, especially inner-city blacks. And he devised a strategy that he could bump off two groups that he despised at the same time, and do so with nationwide help. And that was to declare a War on Drugs. Nixon had no information, was not driven by any health concerns, he really didn’t care that much. He just wanted to make life pretty miserable and to lock up hippies and blacks. And this was the stroke of, dare I say, genius as a way to lock up hippies and blacks by declaring war on drugs in general and marijuana in particular.
And that’s where it all started. Reagan was not much help. Reagan, famously with Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No,” Reagan furthered that War on Drugs, as did—Carter was kind of opposed to it, but Carter had a cocaine scandal and he therefore was denied the political movement to slow down the War on Drugs. So there we have it. And the War on Drugs has not a medical history, but only a political history.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Yeah, it’s not only that Nixon didn’t have information. He commissioned the Shafer Commission to look at marijuana and come up with recommendations. He thought he’d rig the whole system. But the commission ended up saying that marijuana wasn’t nearly as dangerous as people was saying, and what they talked about was that the penalties against the drugs shouldn’t be worse than the drugs themselves. And Nixon ignored that recommendation in order to pursue his strategy to break apart these political groups.
Malum in Se v. Malum Prohibitum [11:58]
Bob Zadek: And so from that, we have about half of our expenditure on law enforcement and incarceration today. Half of it is being spent on the “War on Drugs.” From that mean-spirited political calculation, we have millions of lives being destroyed, incarceration, and criminalization of behavior that most Americans would find to be non-criminal.
There is a criminal law concept called malum per se and malum prohibitum. Malum per se is a crime which everybody agrees is wrong: murder, rape, robbery, things like that. Malum prohibitum is a Latin concept which says it’s wrong only because somebody declared it to be wrong by statute, not because it violates any group of people’s moral code. And a criminal statute should reflect the morality of society, should not be criminalizing otherwise non-criminal acts. And the possession and use of marijuana is a perfect example of what is known as malum prohibitum.
Disenfranchisement and the New Jim Crow [13:00]
Dr. Rick Doblin: Right. And what’s really even worse is that the use of the drug war has been to disenfranchise enormous numbers of voters. So we have felony disenfranchisement, and when you selectively go after minority groups and then arrest them from the drug war, in many states—and this is why Bush won Florida back against Bush against Gore—that they then prohibit felons from voting even after they’ve served their time and have come back to society.
So that you’re able then to use the drug war to selectively disenfranchise groups that are poor minorities and more likely to vote for Democrats. And you’ve got an incredible system like the New Jim Crow. There’s a tremendous book called The New Jim Crow about the drug war, about how it’s being used to suppress voters. And in the election right before Gore and Bush, what you had was the Secretary of State of Florida sent these notices to about 80,000 people to say they couldn’t vote, it would be a crime if they tried to vote. And these were mostly blacks who were going to vote Democrat. They didn’t do this against Hispanics who are more likely to vote Republican in Florida.
So we’ve got this system that’s still at its heart a political system, has nothing really to do with stopping drug abuse. And at the same time, you look at our police systems, you look at our jails, we have a pretty poor clearance rate for murder, for rape, for other things because we have massive amounts of police resources are being focused on the drug war, which is really about politics. Nixon talked about Timothy Leary as the most dangerous man in America and was able to mobilize sort of Middle America parents worried about their kids. But what he was able to do was to generate enormous amount of hysteria and at the same time what they did was block medical research into any potential medical benefits of marijuana and of psychedelics. So the story that was told to the American public was able to be extremely biased without any contradictory information about the medical benefits because they wouldn’t even permit the research to take place.
The Racist Roots of Early Drug Laws [15:53]
Bob Zadek: We’re going to spend most of our show talking about your work on the medical benefits and the work of MAPS. One more bit of history. Just like the minimum wage law, which had its roots in racism and trying to prevent mostly blacks from what was described as taking a white person’s job by working for a lower rate—so minimum wage laws have an ugly racist history—well, so does the drug wars.
For most of our country, drugs were legal. And indeed, and cocaine was totally unregulated. Indeed, interesting bit of Americana that I dug up: in the Sears and Roebuck—remember them?—catalog—remember that?—they offered in their catalog—talk about mainstream America—they offered for sale a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50 in the catalog. Interesting bit of Americana. Americans did not consider cocaine and related substances to be anything bad.
And what happened was in the early 20th century, when racism was really pretty ugly, all of the mainstream institutions found a relationship between what was then called—offensive word today but was then called—Negroes, between Negro behavior and drug use. I found there was an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, pretty mainstream publication I would say. Here is a quote from the Journal of the American Medical Association just to show you what the times were like: “Negroes in the South are reported as being addicted to a new form of vice, that of cocaine sniffing, and some newspapers including mainstream claimed that cocaine use caused Negroes to rape white women more.” And it also claimed that if Negroes used cocaine, their accuracy with a pistol was enhanced.
And then of course we have the Chinese and opium. And a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Washington found, and I quote, “If the Chinaman cannot get along without his dope, we can get along without him.” This is in mainstream publications. And then I close with a New York Times article that said, quote, “Negro cocaine fiends are new Southern menace. Murder and insanity increasing among lower-class blacks,” close quote.
So that was the environment in the beginning of the 20th century. So drugs have this ugly history regulation, none of which, none of which is related to drugs as drugs and none of it is related to whether drugs are inherently dangerous. Now, with that really shameful history, Rick, tell us about the work of MAPS. Why was it founded and what are you hoping to accomplish?
Rick Doblin’s Path to MAPS [18:53]
Dr. Rick Doblin: Thank you. Well, for me it began in 1972 when I was 18 years old. And that’s when I first tried LSD and realized that the propaganda that I had been raised with—that it was a drug that would make you crazy, that if you took it more than about five times you were certifiably insane, that it caused terrible chromosome damage and would have birth defects—when I tried it, and I tried it because of a book. I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. And a friend of mine said that this book was written partially under the influence of LSD. And I was like, “This is not possible. This is a tremendous book.” It’s, you know, for those of your listeners who have not read it, I’d encourage it. But it was about the system, the combine, and how it would oppress people. So it was about individual liberty against…
Bob Zadek: Nurse Ratched was pretty scary.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Very scary. And so this book really opened my eyes to the fact that I’d been led, educated really incorrectly, told a lot of propaganda. And there’s something about this connection between beyond your ego, between other people and yourself and the universe. It’s where the environmental movement began out of the ’60s youth psychedelic use as well. That there was something fundamentally political about identifying not just as your ego, your culture, your race, your religion, your country, but having a deeper sense of connection to life as a whole, to the whole history of the universe.
This is similar to what the astronauts were reporting when they were going to the moon and looking back on the earth and seeing it as a unified globe without the borders. That people then would have a hard time saying, “How can we repress the blacks? How can we go off and fight this war in Vietnam against these supposed enemies when really we’re more similar than different?” And how do we then readjust our politics when we have a deeper sense of who we are and what we’re connected to? And that led to, you know, the Beatles really getting involved through their use of LSD against protesting the Vietnam War and working with Timothy Leary.
And so I really recognized both the value of psychedelics for personal growth and for the larger political implications at the same time that Nixon was going on about escalating the War on Drugs and Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. And so I was a draft resister for Vietnam. I was listening a lot in reading Martin Luther King and Thoreau and others on civil disobedience and was prepared to go to jail. I’m not a pacifist because of Hitler and because I believe that we do need a national defense. But I’m not against all wars, so I couldn’t be a conscientious objector. I was just against certain specific wars. And so I felt the best thing to do was just not cooperate with the system at all, not even register, not take the first step of cooperation, and then be prepared to go to jail.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that the system was under so much stress. 60,000 people never registered for the draft and nothing ever happened. There were not enough computers then, it was early days. And it was—I didn’t have to run to Canada, I didn’t have to shoot myself in the foot, ended up not even going to jail. But it helped me identify as a counterculture drug-using criminal. And then when I thought, “What can I do as a profession?” I thought, “Well, I can really focus on psychedelic psychotherapy. I need it, I’m benefiting from it, I want to offer it to others, and that’s something I wouldn’t need a license to.” So I prepared basically for an underground life.
And that changed in 1977 as soon as Jimmy Carter was inaugurated. The first thing that he did in office, the very first day, was pardon all the draft resisters. And that started making me think, “Okay, maybe I can have the arc of my life and the arc of what I’m trying to do with psychedelics over these last 45 years and marijuana be one of growing integration with the society and overcoming this repression.” And so I started studying LSD therapy, and of course the research had all been shut down. And so I was able to do this work mostly through books, mostly through my own experiences. And I went back to college—I dropped out of college for 10 years to work on myself in ‘72. In ‘82, I went back to college. And the first thing I did is I came out here to California to Esalen in Big Sur and I took a month-long workshop with Dr. Stan Grof and Christina Grof, who was the world’s leading LSD researcher and theorist. And while I was there, a young woman, Debbie Harlow, came by with MDMA. And she was talking to people about this new drug that was legal…
Bob Zadek: Rick, I’m going to have to interrupt only for 60 short seconds from this really interesting story. I’m sorry to do that, but we have to go to break only for 60 seconds. This is Bob Zadek. I’m talking with Dr. Rick Doblin. We are talking about the legalization of drugs, specifically psychedelic drugs. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation.
Welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air for the whole entire weekend. Thanks so much for listening. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Dr. Rick Doblin. Rick is the founder, the executive director and founder of MAPS, M-A-P-S, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. We are talking about the legalization of drugs, particularly this morning psychedelic drugs. Not because Rick wants everybody to burn their version of Reefer Madness, an old 1930s movie which is mandatory watching by the way—a great movie if you want to see what the country thought of drugs in the 1930s, Reefer Madness is the movie to watch—but rather Rick has learned about the important medical and psychological benefits of these drugs and therefore banning their use is contrary to the best interests of the country. 800-345-5639.
Now Rick, you were telling us the story when we went to break. You found yourself in California. Now, at that time, and your motivation was not that of a political motivation, was not libertarian. It wasn’t simply that you were disappointed that the government was intruding on what you believed to be the rights of all citizens, although that may have been a subtext, but rather you were disappointed that there was a collective societal benefit to these drugs that was being denied for wrongheaded reasons. Is that not correct?
Psychedelics and Human Connection [27:05]
Dr. Rick Doblin: That’s true. I did though have at core a political orientation, which was that these drugs, psychedelics in particular, also to some extent marijuana, break down these us-and-them barriers and help people have a broader sense of who they are. And then that will be an antidote to dehumanization, to projection, to scapegoating. This actually was confirmed to me a few years later by Robert Muller, who was the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations. And he wrote a book called New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality. And he was talking about how at the United Nations, where they’re supposed to be mediating disputes between countries, that actually a lot of those disputes are religious in nature. And we need to help people move away from fundamentalist religious perspectives to a more tolerant, open-minded, more mystical approach.
And so psychedelics felt that they were really key to human survival. Einstein talked about how our technology exceeds our humanity. We have the capability of blowing up the world, but we don’t have the spiritual, emotional maturity to handle the technology that we have: global warming, resource depletion, pollution. And so I did have at core a political motivation, and what was really what’s sustained me over all these decades to keep going because I felt the other path was so disastrous.
So what I learned about MDMA, it had been a secret underground therapy drug since the middle ’70s.
Bob Zadek: Tell us about—you used the phrase MDMA twice. The audience may not be familiar with that phrase. When you use MDMA, what are you referring to?
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, people might have more heard the word ecstasy or the word Molly. So MDMA, methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Actually, it was a drug that was invented in 1912 by Merck pharmaceutical company. And they abandoned it. They tested it in animals, didn’t see anything of interest. Later it was picked up by the CIA MKUltra mind control early on in 1952. There was a bunch of studies done on different drugs, toxicology studies in animals. Those were classified though until the early ’70s.
And there was a drug that was popular during the ’60s called MDA, methylenedioxyamphetamine, that was kind of a softer version of LSD that also had heart-opening qualities. It was quite popular. And then Nixon under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 criminalized these drugs. But chemists figured out that if you tinker with the molecule, then you can develop a drug that wasn’t specifically outlawed and it would be legal. And so MDMA was independently developed by underground chemists who had no knowledge that it had been already developed and patented by Merck. And which is now of course off-patent, in the public domain, and that’s in part why pharmaceutical industry is not interested in developing it.
So when I learned about it, it was both an underground therapy drug, but several people who had experienced it in that context realized that this was something that a lot of people would be interested in doing, not just in therapeutic settings but also recreational settings. And it became known as ecstasy. It was used in Dallas a lot in a bar called the Starck Club. And it became more publicly known. And so it was clear that under Reagan and the “Just Say No,” that there was going to be a crackdown against MDMA.
But I learned about LSD and the value of it in ‘72 after the crackdown. And now I learned about the value of MDMA before what was going to be a crackdown. So that inspired me to get mobilized and to work with these underground networks and try to become above ground. So we formed a nonprofit organization that was actually connected to Buckminster Fuller for alternative energy, which we interpreted as mental energy as well. And we prepared and through…
Bob Zadek: Rick, that sounds like something a government agency would do. They would take language that one would think pretty clear and means one thing, and you said—I’m just saying this as with a big smile on my face as an aside—you said, “We interpreted it as.” You’re speaking like some administrative law judge for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, it’s true. And that there was this nonprofit organization at the time, this was before I started MAPS. So I was still coming into sort of the power that we have as citizens to develop and create organizations that are authorized by the government to give tax deductions to help fight the government in certain ways. And I was still coming from this almost repressed, underground counterculture person to becoming more and more somebody who could use the tools of the system to advantage, to promote freedom. And we do have some of those techniques and opportunities built into our system more so than in many other countries.
Bob Zadek: So you’ve become a suit.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, I went to the Kennedy School of Government, but I’ve become a suit who is still committed to psychedelics. And I’ve tried to blend that. And actually, that was the evolution. I believe that these drugs should be mainstreamed. They should be legal. There should be psychedelic clinics where people go to have these experiences. And beyond that, they should be legal for adults for any purpose whatsoever.
One of our big funders is the Pritzker family, the family that owned the Hyatt hotels. And they have a foundation in Chicago, Nick and Susan Pritzker, and mainly their son Joby. It’s called the Libra Foundation. And they’re focused on human rights. And they spent quite a few years, about 10 years ago, trying to decide: does ending the War on Drugs and supporting psychedelic research fit within their human rights mission? And they decided that it did. That one of the main abuses of human rights is the freedom to think. We have the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of speech, but behind all of that is the freedom to think. And if any tools help you think—it’s drugs can help you think with different perspectives and new ways—and those should not be criminalized. And when they are, it’s a fundamental abridgment of our core human rights and it should be clearly seen as against the Constitution. But because of the fear that has been built up and the misinformation…
Caller: Even from Fairfax [34:07]
Bob Zadek: Rick, I want to just interrupt. We have a caller, and I’m smiling because our caller this morning, Even from Fairfax. Fairfax is a community north of San Francisco which is—and I use the term most respectfully—which sort of has as its reputation, its folk reputation, somewhat of the vestiges of hippiedom in the ’60s. So it’s quite interesting that our caller this morning, our first caller, is from Fairfax. So I’d like to just interrupt if I may, Rick, and welcome Even to the show from Fairfax. Good morning, Even.
Caller (Even): Hello. Yes, I would say that Fairfax does have somewhat of that reputation, although it’s under pressure because a lot of the population is moving north and upping the rents. But I had a shop in Mill Valley for 48 and a half years and I expressed myself in much the same way you’re doing now. But it was—I would say to get away from some of the entrapment of classification. Rather than call it drugs, we might call it advanced or alternative herbals.
And basically, there’s a lot to cover here, but basically there was a philosopher from circa 600 AD whose name was Lao Tzu and he says, “Try to make people moral and you lay the groundwork for vice.”
Bob Zadek: Wow, that’s heavy stuff. I have to play with that one a little bit. But go ahead, Even.
Caller (Even): Yeah. And so there was that and several other things that tied in. I think six months to a year from now I might be a candidate for your show. But in the meantime, there’s—I think this War on Drugs thing is probably the most horrendous thing that has ever torn our society apart. And I think it’s time for it to end. But in order to do that, you have to have more people becoming more aware, much as they are in other things now.
One book that I would recommend is one by Paul L. Williams, used to be an advisor for the CIA. He wrote a book called Operation Gladio. And what’s revealed in the subtitle is “The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.” And that particular book is amazing because almost one-quarter of it is research and documented material that backs it up. And also it’s probably one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. And I would say the most amazing thing is the fact that the author is still alive.
Bob Zadek: Wow. Well, you know, when you talk about that unholy alliance, libertarians particularly and those people who have observed politics in general often use a phrase, “the bootleggers and the Baptists,” which is where there is often an alliance between people whose motivation is selfish and people whose motivation is sort of religious and selfless, and they join together to influence policy. The best example being prohibition, where you had people who just felt drinking was wrong and then you had those people who wanted to sell illegal liquor. They loved prohibition. We have that today in California in Humboldt County, where in Humboldt County there is a huge underground marijuana industry. And when California votes to legalize marijuana, Humboldt County always votes strongly against it because they want to keep the profits from the illegal drug use. So that unholy alliance, while certainly unholy, is also quite understandable and happens quite a bit in society.
Caller (Even): Yeah, it does. And I grew up in Humboldt County and that was before it became famous for being Humboldt County. And I think I saw my first flying saucer there in 1946.
Bob Zadek: Well, keep that aluminum foil under your hat. You gotta be careful, Even.
Caller (Even): Absolutely.
Bob Zadek: Even, thanks very much for being a listener and thanks for your comments this morning.
Caller (Even): And thanks for your show. And also, do your best if you could to get a connection with the presidential candidate. There was a judge—I can’t think of his name right off the top…
Bob Zadek: Napolitano?
Caller (Even): He was a great spokesperson for Gary Johnson.
Bob Zadek: Judge Napolitano. He’s a commentator on Fox. He was a judge, a state court judge in New Jersey, and a very outspoken and articulate libertarian. I follow his writings all the time.
Caller (Even): Yeah, that’s great. Okay, well…
Bob Zadek: Thanks very much for the call. Thank you so much, Even. All right, Rick, thanks a lot for your comments.
The FDA Clinical Trial Process [39:15]
Bob Zadek: So Rick, you were telling us about the medical benefits of psychedelic drugs. So your commitment to this cause is because you believe society, indeed the world, would be simply a better place if these drugs were not criminalized. And further, as you have explained, as we’ve both explained, the criminalization is wrongheaded and is driven by simply not the public good, but rather political ends. So tell us about if these drugs were to become legalized, what would the regime look like and how would it all work? How would the legalization—because you have given this so much thought, I want the audience to get the benefit of that—how would it all work and what would be the societal benefits?
Dr. Rick Doblin: Great. Well, okay, so MAPS is basically a nonprofit pharmaceutical company trying to develop psychedelics and marijuana through the FDA into prescription medicines. And then we would create various regulatory systems around the medical use for therapeutic purposes. Initially, we’re working with post-traumatic stress disorder with veterans, with survivors of childhood sexual abuse and adult rape and assault. All sorts of people have post-traumatic stress disorder, and MDMA or ecstasy, Molly, when it’s used to assist psychotherapy has incredible ability to help people repattern their brains and to reprocess traumatic experiences so that they can not be tormented by them but can learn from them.
And so MDMA helps people have a very peaceful experience, a very connected, loving, peaceful experience. And then in therapeutic settings, if you look at trauma and pain from that peaceful perspective, you can come to terms with it. There’s even a measure we use called post-traumatic growth inventory about how you can grow from trauma to reorient your priorities. We’re also doing work with people with anxiety related to life-threatening illnesses, with people with autistic adults with social anxiety. So these drugs then would become medicines. We’re anticipating $25 million on Phase 3. We’ve spent about $7 million so far on Phase 2 for MDMA for PTSD. We’re about to…
Bob Zadek: Explain—you use terms like Phase 3 and Phase 2, which to you are household concepts, but believe it or not, there may be people in my audience, including me, who don’t understand what Phase 2 and Phase 3 is all about. So just explain it so they can follow your explanation.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Yeah, thank you for that. So in order to make a drug into a medicine, the first thing is called pre-clinical studies. Clinical meaning human. And so you just have to do some basic safety studies in animals. Then you do Phase 1. And Phase 1 is healthy volunteers receive the drug and they just report on what does it do at different doses. And that’s where pharmaceutical industry usually is just trying to figure out what this drug might be good for and they monitor safety.
And then once they have an idea of what this drug could be used for, Phase 2 is small pilot studies in patient populations. And you try to refine your treatment method, you try to gain more information on side effects, on doses, on who is the people that are most likely to respond. And once you have this Phase 2 data figured out, then you negotiate with FDA about Phase 3. And Phase 3 are the large-scale multi-site studies that are used to prove safety and efficacy. And then if you can do that to the satisfaction of the FDA, then you get approval to market the drugs. And then sometimes they’ll say, “Well, we didn’t learn everything. We’re going to give you approval to market, but we want you to study the pediatric populations or some other risk factors,” and you do that in what’s called Phase 4.
So we’re at this fundamental transition with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder of having completed studies in the United States, Israel, Switzerland, and Canada starting in 2000. It took—I started MAPS in ‘86, it took 14 years before we could get approval for the first study in patients. And then we’re now appealing to FDA and also we’re going to work with the European Medicines Agency about the move to Phase 3, these pivotal studies.
The Future of Psychedelic Clinics [43:31]
Bob Zadek: And then once you succeed, once you go through all of this, what will be the end result, assuming you are successful and assuming what you believe to be the case is the case medically? What will be the result of that success?
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, I’m going to talk about a 20-year period from this point forward. And, you know, look at medical marijuana. The first initiatives to legalize medical marijuana were 1996 in California and Arizona. And we’re not quite there yet at legalization of marijuana or even medical marijuana approved through the FDA. It’s been 20 years.
So what we anticipate is that MDMA will become—and there’s another group working on psilocybin—that these drugs will move through Phase 3 and will be approved around 2021. This is what we currently predict will happen as medicines. And then we will be able to set up clinics where people can go to have these experiences referred by their doctors and their therapists. And then eventually, maybe over a 5 to 10-year period, these clinics will start to expand and they can work with family members who have a member that’s dying and it affects the whole family, or PTSD affects the whole family. And people can then grow to come to these centers for personal growth, not necessarily because they’re a patient.
And out of that, I think will develop a licensed system where people will be able to get licenses to purchase these drugs and then use them on their own. The model is the hospice centers. In 1974 was the first hospice center. 30 years later, there was 3,500 hospices all over America where people could go to have death without all the interventions in a much more humane situation out of the hospital. So we’re eventually going to see psychedelic clinics throughout the culture and we will have a lot of examples of people saying these drugs benefited them, and that’s going to change people’s attitudes and will eventually lead towards a system of legalization for any kind of purposes. And that’s where I think we really need to get to, where people have this freedom.
Bob Zadek: Which includes, Rick, the “for any other purposes” is sort of recreational use. It’s just for the sheer fun of it with no medical need or benefit.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Well, I think there’s a little danger here in that, you know, you use the terms of the oppressor and you kind of are building in certain assumptions. So when you say recreational use, it sounds reckless, hedonistic, frivolous, dangerous, you know, you don’t really need it, it’s just like a party drug. But actually, there’s a lot more going on than just treating illness. If you want to talk about recreational or non-medical, a lot of it is for communities to come together, for groups, for people to grow in different ways and to explore their own consciousness. So I think that a better term is non-medical. There’s a whole range of reasons.
The Federal Monopoly on Marijuana Research [47:30]
Dr. Rick Doblin: And because of the call you had from nearby Fairfax, I wanted to say about marijuana is that your listeners will probably be astonished to learn that it’s easier from a regulatory point of view right now to do work with psychedelics than it is with marijuana. And the reason is because there are a lot of people with DEA licenses to manufacture Schedule I drugs, psychedelics, so we have our own independent sources of supply. But ever since 1968, there’s only been one source of federally legal marijuana and it’s monopolized by the government. It’s grown at the University of Mississippi under contract to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is…
Bob Zadek: I guess Trent Lott was still in power then and he got that money into Mississippi.
Dr. Rick Doblin: It’s incredible. And so we have a government monopoly that can only provide marijuana for academic research but not as a prescription medicine. So the fix has been in ever since 1968. There is no way to make marijuana into a medicine federally, which is why we’ve had all of these states—now we have 25 states that have passed medical marijuana laws and even more have passed laws just about CBD, one of the main components.
And so MAPS has been involved with since 2000 trying to break the federal monopoly on the production of marijuana. And we just are working with Professor Lyle Craker at UMass Amherst and we’re working with a big DC law firm, Covington & Burling. Attorney General Holder—a mainstream law firm I should add and politically powerful law firm—and Attorney General Holder, after he left Attorney General, he works for that firm now. One of my dissertation advisors at the Kennedy School, Peter Barton Hutt, used to be the lawyer for the FDA, he’s the premier food and drug lawyer in America, and he’s a senior partner at Covington & Burling. And so he’s agreed for them to take the case pro bono to help us sue the DEA to try to break this monopoly.
And I think that is really the key factor in the medical marijuana issue is we have to make it so that there can be private production. The idea of a government monopoly on marijuana federally legal blocking research and making it impossible to make the drug into a medicine—I’m hopeful that before Obama leaves office that he will order the Attorney General to order the DEA to license Professor Craker and others who want to grow marijuana domestically. And I think if any of your listeners have connections to Republicans in particular in Congress…
Closing and How to Support MAPS [50:48]
Bob Zadek: We don’t have many, we don’t have many connections with Republicans. It is incidental. And Rick, I have to just—we’re running out of time regrettably, as I feared we would. So I’ll ask—we have about two minutes left. I’ll give you two minutes, one minute each on two questions. How would you feel about the global issue, the political issue, policy issue of legalization of all drugs, sort of pre-1913 world? And devote the last minute to tell our listeners how they can follow your work.
Dr. Rick Doblin: Great. Well, I believe that drugs should be legalized and that instead of a policy that we have, which is to maximize the harms of these drugs in order to scare people away from doing them through impure drugs, through criminalizing even harm reduction methods—Biden when he was in the Senate passed the RAVE Act, which was Reducing America’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy, and it made it—they used the crack house statutes. If you have an event at which illegal drugs are being used and you’re aware of that, then you are yourself now committing a crime and your assets can be seized. That’s a one big part of the drug war is seizing people’s assets. So if you put in harm reduction methods at an event to try to reduce the harms of drugs, that means you know drugs are being used and so people don’t do that. So we do need full legalization of all drugs and we need harm reduction.
Bob Zadek: How do people—we’re going to run out of time—how do people follow your work? What’s the website they can check you out at?
Dr. Rick Doblin: The website is maps.org, M-A-P-S dot org. Maps.org. We’re entirely funded by donations. We encourage people to look at the website, support our work. We have an enormous amount of information on the website. It’s a 30-year-old organization.
Bob Zadek: We’re running out of time. We have to say goodbye to everybody and please rent and watch Reefer Madness. You’ll get a kick out of it. Bob Zadek, I’ll see you next week.