#1661 - Rick Doblin

Very good to see you, my friend.

So great to be here again.

Your tireless work has not gone unnoticed. I mean, I'm beyond thankful that you and maps are out there there and that you've done this incredible job. And we were just describing the genius of first doing it with people that no one can deny need help. And with soldiers with PTSD using psychedelics to help them get over their horrible issues, that it's one of the best ways to sort of ingratiate or let people know the powerful benefits of psychedelics and do it to people that you wouldn't expect to be connected with psychedelics ordinarily. Right.

Well, the most unusual people are police officers. And so we've actually had police officers in our studies, and we even have a police officer full time who's also a psychotherapist, and he's going through our program to learn how to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.

Wow.

And I met his police chief several times and persuaded and told him about our full training program. And one of the steps is where we have a protocol from the FDA where therapists can volunteer to receive MDMA themselves as part of the training. And so the police chief gave his police officer permission to volunteer to take MDMA.

Wow.

So we're actually helping give MDMA to police officers to give it to other police officers with trauma.

That would be amazing. You know what we really need to do? Get it to prisoners.

Exactly. And prison guards, they're also very traumatized.

Oh, yeah, I could imagine.

Yeah. There was a 35 year follow up study I did to Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard. He did the conquered prison experiment, and that was to give psilocybin to prisoners who were getting ready to be released. And the goal was to see if they could produce pro social experiences that would then help reduce recidivism. And the study was, unfortunately, it was promoted as very, very successful. I thought I was going to do a follow up to bring light to one of the most important psychedelic studies ever. But as I got more into it, it turned out that Timothy Leary had fudged the data.

Oh, no.

Yeah, it was really disappointing.

What did he do?

Well, for example, the longer you're out of prison, the more likely you are to go back. So his group, on average, had been out of prison ten months, and he compared it with a group of people that had been out of prison 24 months. And that was published in this obscure british criminology journal. And nobody had bothered to check to see if he was doing a fair comparison. And so when I started doing this follow up, I was just like, how could he have done that? And the data that was from the prior prisoners from Concord prison up to two years, it also showed how they were at different time points, including at the ten month time point, and the results were the same at the ten month point. So it's obvious if you compare people who've been out of prison longer with people who've been out of prison shorter, it's just not a fair comparison. The other thing he did, not to rag on Timothy Leary, but I think he did a lot of great things. But the other thing he did was he said that a lot of these people were gone back to prison because they had minor parole violations and that they were supervised more carefully because they had done psilocybin in prison and that they were just recidivism because of minor things. And so when I got into the prison system records, it turns out that they did have their parole violated, but that's because they had committed new crimes for which they were later convicted. Timothy but what he realized is that you can't just help people have these experiences and then let them out of prison and assume that they'll just be fine. You need aftercare, you need support groups. And so he had started to create that, and that's when he got kicked out of Harvard, and then they fell apart. So my conclusion of the follow up study was that he had basically committed scientific fraud, and it wasn't really true what he had said, but it didn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that you can't rely over much on just the psychedelic experience. You have to have supportive aftercare and group support. And if you do that, I think it could potentially work. So we have been talking to various people who want to do work with prisoners or recently released. It's hard to get permission to do work inside prisons because of the question whether prisoners can give informed consent, whether there's pressure on them to do it or if they do it, they think they'll get out sooner or something. But it would be perfect when you're in prison to be doing this inner work, to explore how you ended up in prison and the traumas that maybe made you commit certain kind of crimes.

Yeah, I think that same argument about prisoners and psilocybin and aftercare, you could apply that maybe to a lesser extent, to just the general public. One of the arguments that I've had not the arguments I've had, but the conversations I've had with people, the argument about psychedelics not being life changing, people will say, well, I know a lot of people have done psychedelics, and they're basically the same person. They have one experience and they get back to it. And the way I've described it is that I think that a real profound breakthrough psychedelic experience is like pressing Ctrl alt delete for your brain. And when you reboot, you have a fresh desktop. It's clean, but you have one folder on the desktop that says, my old bullshit. And most people open up that folder and just get comfortable with their old bullshit. So after the experience, this thing where you sort of have to rethink how you view everything and you have this renewed perspective, you have this completely different view of the world, but it's confusing. You don't have scaffolding to travel on. You don't have a clear pathway, but it's real easy to slip into your own thing and start doing all the same dumb shit that you were doing before. And I think for prisoners, it's probably profoundly more difficult because not only are you outside, not only have you been incarcerated, which has got to be incredibly traumatic, you've been locked into a cage. They take away all your freedom. They tell you what to do, but then you become accustomed to that way of life. And there is comfort in the fact that you are told what to do. And you know, what every day holds for you. Then you go out in the world. You're out in the free world, and you don't know how to get by. And it's really hard to get an apartment because you're a felon. It's really hard to get a job because you're a felon. And then someone who you know from the old life is doing something illegal, and they invite you to join in, and you say, well, this is my chance to score. I can get a little bit money. Maybe then I can get an apartment. Maybe then I can get back on track. The next thing you know, you're living a life of crime again.

Yeah. We make it so hard for people to reintegrate into society. And I think one of the problems from the 60s was this idea of one dose miracle cure. That's all you need.

Yeah.

And I think what we've come to understand is that it's not that way. Occasionally it can be, but mostly it's not. And you need this support afterwards, and you need to integrate it. And what we've also learned from neuroscience is that you're actually neuroplasticity, that these psychedelics help you rewire your brain in new ways, but you have to reinforce that it's just not automatic. It's not about the drug, it's about the therapy, that the drug helps make more effective. And people have placed undue confidence, you could say, in the drug itself.

Yeah, you need a new pathway. Once you've gotten off of your old pathway, the psychedelics jolt you into this new realm. But if you don't have a new pathway, then you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone. And if your comfort zone is alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your life and taking pills, and you're going to go right back to that.

Yeah. There's one example of one person where it was like a one dose miracle cure. It's really rare, but I'll just explain a bit. He was a veteran and had PTSD. I talked about Tony Macy during my TEd talk, but he had this sense that he had been disabled with PTSD for years because of friends of his that had been killed. All the violence that he saw when he was in Iraq and under the influence of MDMA, he had this realization that there was something good about the PTSD. He was getting a benefit from it, which was it was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died, that he was connected to their memory and that he was suffering, and it was a way to be bonded still with them. But then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his friends who had died, and to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life. They didn't have life anymore. They would want him to live as fully as possible. And he realized there's another way to honor his friends, which is to live. And he thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And in that moment, he cured himself of PTSD.

Wow.

Then he said, I'm taking opiates for pain, but I don't really think I'm taking it for pain. I'm thinking more about it as an escape. I don't need the opiates