One of the biggest social and cultural movements currently sweeping the civilized world is what’s being called the “Psychedelic Renaissance.” That is the name for the reemergence, in mainstream culture, science, and medicine, of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA, which were outlawed in the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s, respectively.
Less than a decade ago, these substances — listed by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as Schedule I drugs — were almost completely prohibited for all recreational, research, and medical uses. Possession of them was as strictly punished as possession of heroin.
Today, they enjoy positive coverage in major news outlets, literature, and digital media, such as Michael Pollan’s bestselling book How to Change Your Mind (and later his Netflix series of the same name). The FDA has granted “breakthrough therapy status” to psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) and MDMA (otherwise known by its street name “ecstasy”) for the medical treatment of Treatment-Resistant Depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Clinical and neuroscience research into the effects of these substances has become an established area of science, and departments for psychedelic research are springing up like … well, mushrooms, in top universities and hospitals. The Psychedelic Science 2023 conference in Colorado attracted more than 13,000 people. And the states of Colorado and Oregon have already decriminalized the possession of naturally occurring psychedelics.
At the center of this renaissance stands one man: Rick Doblin, whom many consider “the modern godfather of the psychedelic movement and industry.” Rick is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), the organization responsible for the development, wide-scale clinical research, and FDA priority status of the incredibly promising MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, as well as for hosting the biannual Psychedelic Science conference in Colorado.
The Personality of Rick Doblin
When I first met Rick and heard his story, I was instantly struck by his similarity to some of Ayn Rand’s heroes. He’s the Howard Roark of legalizing psychedelics!
The philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand, creator of the philosophy of Objectivism and the main inspiration behind the birth of the Libertarian Party of the United States, described Howard Roark, the architect hero of her blockbuster novel The Fountainhead, as follows: Roark is a man with what is, to him, a sacred purpose in life; who pursues that purpose in the face of the most vehement opposition from mainstream society, which places “every conceivable hardship and obstacle” in his way and condemns him to decades of near total professional oblivion; until, at the end of the book [SPOILER ALERT] he, at last, achieves the success he always thought possible.
So too for Rick Doblin. In 1972, when Rick was eighteen, he had, in his words, “an experience with LSD that brought me a life’s mission,” to “devote myself to psychedelic research and psychedelic therapy,” the immense potential of which he had experienced firsthand.
This was, however, in the wake of the federal government declaring all the classic psychedelics illegal just a year earlier, which cast Rick in the role, as he described it, of “counterculture, drug-using criminal.” A decade later, Rick learned about MDMA, a synthesized psychedelic that was still legal, but then on the verge of becoming criminalized. Rick spearheaded what turned into a two-year legal battle against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), legally challenging the drug’s prohibition.
And he won — only to have the judge’s verdict overturned a month later. MDMA was placed on the Schedule 1 list of prohibited substances in 1986.
After Rick founded MAPS later that year — with the mission statement of creating “a world where psychedelics . . . are safely and legally available for beneficial uses, and where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of their risks and benefits” — for seven years, until he hired his first employee in 1993.
By 2000, MAPS had three staff members, Doblin included. It took four more years before MAPS could finally launch the first of its rigorous scientific studies into the risks and benefits of MDMA-assisted therapy, and thirteen years more before the results of those studies led to its receiving “breakthrough therapy status” in 2017.
Working within the Regulatory System
This development launched Rick on his meteoric rise and opened the floodgates of the Psychedelic Renaissance, of which he remains the leading figure. Yet, he achieved his success in a very un-Roark-like, un-libertarian, un-Objectivist way.
Howard Roark went outside the mainstream culture that rejected him, refusing to compromise or subordinate himself to any irrationality, and dealing only with what he called “my kind of people,” private individuals on the free market who are willing to hire him on his own terms.
Rick Doblin, instead, chose to go straight to the heart of mainstream culture and government; he worked with and within a regulatory system that nearly all libertarians and Objectivists would consider an immoral corruption of the political principles of a proper and free society.
I was grateful to have the opportunity to interview Rick, who has read The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, about these remarkable parallels. I believe his life contains a lesson for the Objectivist and libertarian subcultures, of which I’ve been a part for nearly a decade.
Learn more about Ayn Rand:
Like John Galt, the inventor hero of Atlas Shrugged, who revolutionizes theoretical physics as a means to the end of building a new kind of motor; or like Ayn Rand herself, who formulated a full philosophical system as a means to the end of depicting an ideal man in her novels (“to define what kind of convictions would result in the character of an ideal man,” as she put it), Doblin has shifted the whole legal landscape around psychedelics, as a means to his end of doing psychedelic therapy and research
In 1987, shortly after MDMA had been criminalized, and he was rejected from every clinical psychology program he applied to, for his stated intention of doing his dissertation on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, Doblin had what he called “one of the best ideas of my whole life,” as he told me. Elsewhere, he recognized that he has a “pattern in [his] life of wanting too much too soon,” and that he wants “to do this psychedelic psychotherapy research, but the world is not ready for it … I want to do the science, but the politics is in the way. So maybe,” he concluded, “I should study the politics.”
He changed his academic focus from psychology to law, eventually receiving his PhD from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “When I got the final rejection from a clinical psych PhD program,” Rick told me, he recognized this was “the end of the road” he had traveled for sixteen years, the road to becoming a psychedelic therapist and researcher. “And the turning point was to think,” he continued, that “this road has ended because of these obstacles. Now I can try to remove those obstacles. That now becomes my mission.”
A Libertarian’s Worst Nightmare
Throughout his upward climb, Doblin has taken a battering from legal and regulatory agencies that libertarians and Objectivists almost unanimously regard as brazen government overreach and believe shouldn’t exist in the first place. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) overrode the results of the court decision he fought for for two years. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected all his proposals for MDMA research for the next seven years and would reject his proposals for Phase II research for six more years after that. Once he won that fight, in 2001, Rick spent two more years having his research refuted by six different Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) at six possible research locations.
What Rick Doblin went through was nothing less than a libertarian’s worst nightmare! And it is exactly the reason most of us give for refusing to work in a regulated industry: We rebel in outrage against wasting years and decades of our precious lives to comply with irrational bureaucratic requirements. Instead, most Objectivists and libertarians take a cue from Howard Roark and the heroes of Atlas Shrugged: simply withdrawing from such lines of work and flocking to parts of the private sector into which the government hasn’t yet sunk its teeth.
For Doblin, however, that was never an option. “I think that’s one of the shortcomings of Atlas Shrugged,” Doblin said, in which the heroes refuse to work under a political system that treats their life and work as its property, and retreat instead to a free utopia in a secluded valley in Colorado. Because “in a world of nuclear weapons,” in which a nuclear war can destroy the whole earth, “there are no private utopias … There is no escape on the planet” from a corrupt political system “that couldn’t be overwhelmed by the flaws of the system. … You have to undo that. You cannot run away.”
No Matter How Hard the Battle
It is psychedelics that Doblin believes can help prevent that nuclear war. “Since wars begin in the minds of men,” he frequently quotes the UNESCO charter, “it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” And “psychedelics,” he says in the video below, “can help us build those defenses of peace.”
From the time he conceived it, Doblin saw that his life’s sacred mission also included saving the world. “I think why I kept at,” he said to me, “was growing up in the 1950s and 60s with a molten center of fear, a massive fear of [a second] Holocaust, of blowing up the world, with the Russians, of Vietnam, of just human cruelty” in general. So “when I first started doing LSD . . . I guess personally, I saw the great benefit. But I also had this idea that the world is at stake. . . . And if I don’t do this, there is no other thing as powerful to prevent humanity from self-destructing.”
“So that’s why I felt that I had to deal with these bureaucrats, there was nothing [else] I could do that would really accomplish what I needed to accomplish. . . . I could have thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be an underground psychedelic therapist my whole life, let’s just say screw these bureaucrats, screw the FDA, screw the DEA, you know, just have a career.’”
But, he went on, “No hardship that I faced was more intimidating than the fear that was inside me.”
“So,” he says in the video below, “whatever the DEA did, or whatever the FDA did, or whatever obstacles were put in the way, . . . it was nothing compared to giving up and maybe one day ending up in a concentration camp,” or to the Russians and the Americans “blowing up the world.”
The Beginning of MAPS | With MAPS founder Rick Doblin
“I think at the very beginning,” Doblin concluded to me, “what I realized is that [this] might never work. But it was still worth doing.” And it was “also clear to me that . . . noble projects like this [often] take multiple generations to achieve.” So “even if I couldn’t do it,” he reasoned, “then the next generations could do it.” And now “to be able, in my own lifetime, to see things turn around, is especially fortunate and sweet.”
Breaking Through
Though many libertarians and classical liberals think it abhorrent to place their work at the mercy of bureaucratic fetters, Ayn Rand herself might have approved of Doblin’s path. “The political conditions presented in Atlas Shrugged,” she wrote, “are those of an almost total dictatorship. Only when a society reaches that stage is it proper for men to think of quitting.” But until then, “as long as a society is semi-free,” you must “understand [that] no matter how hard the battle, it can be won, [and] you can break through.”
Editor’s note: This submission to Learn Liberty was recently published here, by the Libertarian Institute. Please check out more of their excellent, timely content, including The State is Nothing But Appetite.
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