Psychedelics group wrestles with new pharma identity

DENVER — He could have been a rock star, a religious icon, the way ecstatic applause from thousands of attendees greeted the man dressed in a crisp, all-white suit as he strode onto a backlit stage. He was neither. This was Rick Doblin, the founder and evangelist of a movement to legalize psychedelic MDMA and bring the drug into mainstream medicine.

The scene in a Denver conference hall last week was a world away from the first conference Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) held in 1990, when Doblin spoke alongside Timothy Leary — the ex-Harvard professor who popularized the phrase “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” That was just a few years after MDMA, also known as ecstasy, was criminalized, deemed a Schedule 1 drug “of no medical use.”

Now, as MAPS nears its goal of winning Food and Drug Administration approval for MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the perpetually smiling and energetic Doblin is basking in the adoration from both legions of “psychonauts” and unlikely yet powerful allies. “I literally love Rick Doblin,” the conservative Republican and former Texas governor Rick Perry told the audience in Denver.

It was a seemingly triumphant occasion. But even as Doblin is in sniffing distance of his lifelong quest, his once counter-cultural organization is grappling with the pressures of having to operate in the capitalist pharmaceutical sphere. MAPS was founded in 1986 as a nonprofit with deep-seated ideals. Doblin developed an “anti-patent” strategy, putting discoveries in the public domain so they couldn’t be claimed as intellectual property. He raised money to fund clinical trials of MDMA from like-minded wealthy donors.