How to Change Your Mind

Doblin is disarmingly, perhaps helplessly, candid, happy to talk openly
to a reporter about his formative psychedelic experiences as well as
political strategy and tactics. Like Timothy Leary, Doblin is the happiest
of warriors, never not smiling and exhibiting a degree of enthusiasm for
the work you wouldn’t expect from a man who has been knocking his
head against the same wall for his entire adult life. Doblin works out of a
somewhat Dickensian office tucked into the attic of his rambling colonial
in Belmont, Massachusetts, at a desk stacked to the ceiling with
precarious piles of manuscripts, journal articles, photographs, and
memorabilia reaching back more than forty years. Some of the
memorabilia commemorates the time early in his career when Doblin
decided the best way to end sectarian strife would be to mail a group of
the world’s spiritual leaders tablets of MDMA, a drug famous for its
ability to break down barriers between people and kindle empathy.
Around the same time, he arranged to have a thousand doses of MDMA
sent to people in the Soviet military who were working on arms control
negotiations with President Reagan.
For Doblin, winning FDA approval for the medical use of psychedelics
—which he believes is now in view, for both MDMA and psilocybin—is a
means to a more ambitious and still more controversial end: the
incorporation of psychedelics into American society and culture, not just
medicine. This of course is the same winning strategy followed by the
campaign to decriminalize marijuana, in which promoting the medical
uses of cannabis changed the drug’s image, leading to a more general
public acceptance.
Not surprisingly, this sort of talk rankles more cautious heads in the
community (Bob Jesse among them), but Rick Doblin is not one to soft-
pedal his agenda or to even think about taking an interview off the record.
This gets him a lot of press; how much it helps the cause is debatable. But
there is no question that especially in the last several years Doblin has
succeeded in getting important research approved and funded, especially
in the case of MDMA, which has long been MAPS’s main focus. MAPS has
sponsored several small clinical trials that have demonstrated MDMA’s
value in treating post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. (Doblin defines
psychedelics generously, so as to include MDMA and even cannabis, even
though their mechanisms of action in the brain are very different from
that of the classical psychedelics.) But beyond helping those suffering