Joe Rogan Experience #1661 - Rick Doblin

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays) Very good to see you, my friend.

   4. RDRick Doblin0:15

      So, so great to be here again.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:17

      Your tireless work-

   6. RDRick Doblin0:18

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:18

      ... has not gone unnoticed. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm beyond thankful that you and MAPS are out there, and that you've done this incredible job. And we were just describing the genius of, first, doing it with, uh, people that e- no one can deny need help, and n- like, with, with soldiers with PTSD, using psychedelics to help them get over their, their, their horrible, y- you know, issues. That it's one of the best ways to sort of ingratiate or-

   8. RDRick Doblin0:51

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:51

      ... let people know the, the powerful benefits of psychedelics. And do it to people that you wouldn't expect to be connected with psychedelics ordinarily, right?

   10. RDRick Doblin0:59

       Well, the, the most, uh, unusual people are police officers.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:03

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RDRick Doblin1:03

       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.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:17

       Wow.

   14. RDRick Doblin1:17

       And I met, um, his police chief several times, and persuaded the, um, and, 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.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:40

       Wow.

   16. RDRick Doblin1:41

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

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:47

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

   18. RDRick Doblin1:51

       Exactly, and prison guards.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:53

       Yeah.

   20. RDRick Doblin1:53

       I mean, they're also very traumatized. And so-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:55

       Oh, yeah, I can imagine.

   22. RDRick Doblin1:56

       Yeah. There was a 35-year followup study I did to, uh, Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard. He did the Concord Prison Experiment.

   23. JRJoe Rogan2:05

       Mm-hmm.

   24. RDRick Doblin2:05

       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 prosocial, um, experiences that would then help reduce recidivism.

   25. JRJoe Rogan2:18

       Mm-hmm.

   26. RDRick Doblin2:19

       And the study was unfortunately, um, it was promoted as very, very successful. I thought I was gonna do a followup to, um, bring light to one of the most important e- psychedelic studies ever. But as I got more into it, it turned out that, um, Timothy Leary had fudged the data.

   27. JRJoe Rogan2:37

       Oh, no.

   28. RDRick Doblin2:38

       (laughs) Yeah, it was really disappointing.

   29. JRJoe Rogan2:40

       What did he do?

   30. RDRick Doblin2:41

       Well, for example, um, 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 10 months, and he compared it with a group of people that had been out of prison 24 months.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      of hard-line Republican way of thinking. This is like a completely non-empathetic, non-compassionate way of looking at babies, which is what they are. They're just babies that got... Look, you and I are lucky.

   2. RDRick Doblin15:14

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:14

      We're babies-

   4. RDRick Doblin15:14

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:14

      ... but we made it to this point in our lives-

   6. RDRick Doblin15:17

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:17

      ... in a b- pretty good state, you know, without... With some bumps and bruises along the way, but here we are. Those people did not. And the only way that I could think of to really reset who they are is through psychedelics. I th- I don't think there's anything else that's gonna really b- push them into a new realm of understanding of their position in life, and how they got to where they are.

   8. RDRick Doblin15:40

      Mm, well, I think there are other therapies that are effective. There are other ways-

   9. JRJoe Rogan15:44

      Brother is good.

   10. RDRick Doblin15:44

       I don't think so.

   11. JRJoe Rogan15:45

       I don't think so.

   12. RDRick Doblin15:46

       I don't think so. And I think when-

   13. JRJoe Rogan15:47

       They're not as profound.

   14. RDRick Doblin15:47

       ... when we combine them with psychedelics-

   15. JRJoe Rogan15:50

       Yes.

   16. RDRick Doblin15:50

       ... then you get to go really deep. But I also-

   17. JRJoe Rogan15:52

       And social programs.

   18. RDRick Doblin15:53

       Yes.

   19. JRJoe Rogan15:53

       Programs where they're counseled, programs where someone can say, "Hey man, I've done this. I used to be a thief. I used to be w- whatever, and now here I'm not. I can help you. I got out of jail. I, I made better of my life. We can do that with you."

   20. RDRick Doblin16:08

       And we all have that capacity if we're traumatized to do things that are, we're not proud of, that-

   21. JRJoe Rogan16:14

       Yes.

   22. RDRick Doblin16:14

       ... we're ashamed of. We can all be twisted in certain ways. So, I just feel so grateful for my parents, who... I had very loving parents, who supported me to... Even when I broke their, um, hopes for me when I was, um, 17 years old in college and starting to do LSD, and... I'm the oldest of four kids. And in the middle of my, uh, first year of college, I, I called up my parents and said, "I'm gonna drop out of college. I wanna study LSD."

   23. JRJoe Rogan16:41

       (laughs)

   24. RDRick Doblin16:41

       "And I want you to pay for it." (laughs) And-

   25. JRJoe Rogan16:45

       (laughs) What were you in college for?

   26. RDRick Doblin16:47

       Well, this was, uh, 1971 that I started, um, and 1972 is when I had this conversation with my parents. I was studying psychology and Russian. You know, I was very interested in the other, so I'd studied, um, Russian in high school. Uh, actually, I had, um, gone to Russia. My parents sent me to Russia in 1970 for the summer to learn Russian. And that's actually where I first started working in the underground, you could say. My parents gave me some prayer books, because we're Jewish and prayer books were forbidden in Russia. And they gave me these prayer books to give to these guys at the synagogue. And I... When I got there, I was with about 60 high school students, and we could speak passable Russian. And so, a bunch of the young Russian black market kids came up to us. And again, 1970, we had the psychedelic revolution in America, and they just had repression. And so they wanted to buy our shirts, our clothes, blue jeans. Anything that looked like America. They would pay rubles. And rubles were worthless outside of Russia, because they wanted to block anybody from escaping. You'd have to escape with no money.

   27. JRJoe Rogan17:51

       Wow.

   28. RDRick Doblin17:52

       So, we made, um... Me and two other guys, um, gathered all the stuff from all these other high school students, and we made thousands and thousands, thousands of rubles. And we knew that we couldn't...... take it home or anything. And so I went to go, um, meet this guy at the synagogue to give him these books in Moscow, and he said, "We're being watched. Don't do it here, but let me meet you at a subway station at this amount of time at this station." And I said, "I also got all these rubles to give to you." And so we, we had this meeting, and I was just 16, and I was like, "Hey, if they catch me, you know, I'm, I'm a dumb kid. They'll just send me home." I, so I was kind of fearless in that way. And, uh, we made this transfer, and I gave him this, uh, bunch of rubles and the prayer books, and... But it was my parents, kind of, that sent me on this mission. (laughs) And that was my first underground activity, was against the Russians, against the communists.

   29. JRJoe Rogan18:44

       (laughs)

   30. RDRick Doblin18:44

       And it was very enlightening. And, but the, one of the things that was most enlightening for me was I took a walk on the beach with a Russian girl who worked at the, um, school that we were going to. And I just had this conversation with her, you know, primitive, 'cause I wasn't that great in Russian. But I was just like, "You don't wanna kill me. I don't wanna kill you. What does..." you know, 'cause this was the height of the Cold War and all of these, uh, could we destroy the world, not all that long after the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I just thought, th- "You know, you're just a person. I'm, I'm just..." You know, our governments might be in conflict, but I had this image that all the Russians are horrible and hateful and they all wanna kill us. And it, it was extremely eye-opening in terms of who's the other.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah, so maybe- …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      a methamphetamine-based experimental performance enhancer developed by Nazi Germany. Wow, so that's the stuff.

   2. RDRick Doblin30:09

      Yeah, so maybe-

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:09

      Interesting.

   4. RDRick Doblin30:10

      ... we can do the other with, uh, MDMA and certain kinda psychedelics to help people feel that there's other ways than violence to try to achieve their goals.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:20

      Well, I just think he was... I, uh, I don't... You know, I think... What, what does it say here, Jim?

   6. GUGuest30:24

      He could march 90 kilometers a day-

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:26

      Whoa.

   8. GUGuest30:26

      ... without rest.

   9. RDRick Doblin30:28

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan30:28

       What is that?

   11. GUGuest30:28

       Using-

   12. JRJoe Rogan30:29

       How many miles is that?

   13. GUGuest30:30

       Uh...

   14. JRJoe Rogan30:31

       So, 100 miles is 60, 66. No, 100 kilometers is 60 miles? Wow, that's a lot. So, like, a human being is essentially the product of all the chemicals that are running through your veins. It's your neurochemistry, your biochemistry, all of the nutrients you've eaten, food, water. And an imbalance of any of those things can severely change the way you think or behave.

   15. RDRick Doblin30:58

       Our brain is a drug factory.

   16. JRJoe Rogan30:59

       Yeah.

   17. RDRick Doblin30:59

       People talk about a, a world without drugs. Our brain is a drug factory.

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:04

       Yeah. And the people that talk about no drugs, you know, generally, they en- enjoy some drugs.

   19. RDRick Doblin31:10

       Oh, tobacco, alcohol.

   20. JRJoe Rogan31:11

       Yeah.

   21. RDRick Doblin31:11

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan31:12

       Yeah. Carl Hart is, uh, one of my favorite people to talk to.

   23. RDRick Doblin31:14

       Do you know that, uh, Carl Hart, we've invited him to join the board of directors of MAPS.

   24. JRJoe Rogan31:18

       Amazing.

   25. RDRick Doblin31:19

       He's going through this, uh, six-month process of getting to know us, and we're getting to know him. He's gonna come to our board of directors meeting in a couple weeks. Yeah, Carl Hart is fantastic.

   26. JRJoe Rogan31:28

       He's amazing. He's a perfect example of someone who had a c- a certain perspective before he became a research scientist and thought of drugs as being n- all negative connotations, thought of them as being addictive, terrible for you. But then, through actual rigorous study, like actually understanding and studying the effects of drugs, then became to change his perspective based on data. And then realized, like, "Oh, no, no, no. This is, this is... Most of what we think about drugs is incorrect or is propaganda." And to have the courage to be a professor, right? And to be a legitimate scholar, and have the courage to say that he enjoys heroin, and that he likes to sniff heroin, it helps relationships with his wife, and it helps his friendships. And I was like, that is... 'Cause he's just being honest, you know.

   27. RDRick Doblin32:16

       He's being courageous.

   28. JRJoe Rogan32:17

       And he's-

   29. RDRick Doblin32:18

       Incredibly courageous.

   30. JRJoe Rogan32:18

       Incredibly courageous and honest. And also, he's so fucking smart-
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yeah. Now, if we…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      the space to maybe talk to counselors afterwards and process what that psychedelic experience is like, and then maybe have someone who could help you devise a strategy to optimize your life based on this newfound information that you've gotten from that experience.

   2. RDRick Doblin45:17

      Yeah. Now, if we were to do a podcast 10 years from now, my prediction is, we can see if it comes true, is that there's gonna be about 5 or 6,000 of these centers throughout the United States, and that there's already hundreds and hundreds of ketamine centers, and that's legal for depression. The ketamine therapists are interested in being cross-trained in MDMA, psilocybin. We think by the end of 2023, that we'll have FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. By 2024 or 2025, there should be FDA approval for psilocybin, for depression, potentially for alcohol use disorder, other indications, and they'll be administered in these c- exact kind of centers. And that, that's our long-term goal, is to have these thousands and thousands of psychedelic centers, and they'll be not just an MDMA center or a psilocybin center or a ketamine center, but psychedelic centers. The therapists will be cross-trained in all these modalities. And that, that's the vision that we're trying to establish. But, but I would say about schools, and you talked about your kids, that we overemphasize cognitive education and underemphasize emotional education.

   3. JRJoe Rogan46:23

      Mm.

   4. RDRick Doblin46:24

      And schools don't really prepare people for that. So when kids are hyperactive and stuff, we just give them L- Adderall or something.

   5. JRJoe Rogan46:31

      Mm-hmm.

   6. RDRick Doblin46:31

      We're, we're not really looking at the whole human, and there's been a lot of discussion about different kind of intelligences, emotional intelligence, EQ, is, is super important, but in schools, we just emphasize cognitive, and we leave so much untouched, and that causes so many problems. So we really need to reform how we think of education. What do we ... E- e- we need to educate citizens. Um, one of the, um, quotes that I thought was from Albert Einstein, but then I checked it out and it wasn't really, but I thought for a long time it was, but still, it's a great quote, and it is that, um, "Our technology has exceeded our humanity."

   7. JRJoe Rogan47:09

      Who is that quote? I thought it was Einstein too.

   8. RDRick Doblin47:11

      I- I don't ... I never could actually track it down to Einstein, but, but-

   9. JRJoe Rogan47:15

      Jamie'll track it down. (laughs)

   10. RDRick Doblin47:16

       Okay. Th- there's another quote fr- from Einstein (laughs) that is from Einstein, that is, um, "The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe. What shall be required if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking."

   11. JRJoe Rogan47:36

       Mm.

   12. RDRick Doblin47:36

       And what is that new mode of thinking that Einstein was talking about? And, and I think it's a more universal, spiritual, we're all in this together, we're not primarily defined by how we're different from people, but we're primarily defined by how we're the same from other people, and also the same as animals, and the same as the environment, that we're all part of this planet Earth, life on Earth, and that if we can have that sense of connection like that, we're not likely to bomb people into oblivion or to commit genocide or to be racist or, you know, throw masses of people in prison for mass incarceration. So-I think that that kind of spiritual and emotional education, along with cognitive, is what we need. We, we have technology that's miraculous. I mean, just think how many people can be watching this podcast, or how many people survived on Zoom during the pandemic.

   13. JRJoe Rogan48:27

       Yeah.

   14. RDRick Doblin48:28

       I mean, it's miraculous.

   15. JRJoe Rogan48:29

       Well, also, let's look at it this way. Uh, we're, we're talking about, uh, an education outside of traditional education when you're talking about these psychedelic centers that you plan on having open in 10 years. Look at physical education. Look at the physical education you get from high school, and look at how many people leave school and take yoga, and start going to CrossFit gyms, and take martial arts. And there is a mass movement of incredibly physically healthy, super aware people that are taking care of their body through n- d- no... There's, there was no education about this in high school.

   16. RDRick Doblin49:12

       Right.

   17. JRJoe Rogan49:12

       There's n- They, they didn't get this from college. They got this from pursuing it. So many people who have degrees and careers in completely non-related fields are very physically active and very tuned into their bodies, because they've recognized the benefits of that through external sources outside of the traditional education system. We could have that same type of movement with mental health and psychedelics, and with learning, outside of these traditional, w- m- radically underfunded places. Like, when you look at how much a high school teacher makes-

   18. RDRick Doblin49:50

       Yes.

   19. JRJoe Rogan49:50

       ... it's embarrassing. And it's, it's no wonder why they're under-motivated, no wonder why they're, they're, they're, they're, you know, depressed and not enthusiastic about this job. And also, how the fuck do you connect one on one with 50 people when you have them for 45 minutes, or whatever it is, uh, classes, an hour, whatever? It's not possible. It's y- you can't do it. And that, that is one of the reasons why so much emphasis is paid to forcing these children to sit still-

   20. RDRick Doblin50:20

       Yes.

   21. JRJoe Rogan50:20

       ... and pay attention. I, I don't know if I have ADHD, uh, but I know that if I was in school today, and if I think about how I was when I was a child, and if I had parents that were so inclined, I would 100% be medicated, 100%. But it wasn't because... I th- always thought there was something wrong with me.

   22. RDRick Doblin50:40

       Hm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan50:40

       But it wasn't that there was something wrong with me. It's that I was bored.

   24. RDRick Doblin50:44

       Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan50:45

       I was not interested at all in what they were teaching. I was interested in comic books, and I was interested in, you know, uh, martial arts, and I was interested in space travel, and I was interested in... W- if you, if you talked to me about something that was interesting to me, then I was locked in and tuned in. But if you were talking to me about some boring shit, I was just staring at the sky and looking at my fingernails and I just couldn't pay attention. But it wasn't because my mind was incapable or my mind needed medication. It's because I wasn't interested in what they were talking about. And that turns out to be very valuable in life if you're a person who finds what you're interested in and ignores the things you're not interested in, because you can really get far just paying attention to what you're interested in and focusing on that obsessively. The, some of the most successful people in this world are that type of person. And as a child, they're taking those people and stifling them-

   26. RDRick Doblin51:46

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan51:46

       ... and forcing them to be a square peg. They're taking their roundness of whoever they are and they're compressing it and shoving them into this square hole with medication. And it's a tragedy. It really is.

   28. RDRick Doblin51:58

       Yeah. I was so lucky. I went to a college in, uh, when I was 17, in 1971, and it was an experimental college. It should be kind of the way all colleges are. But what it said was, the principals of this college, called New College, it's in Sarasota, Florida, it's the honors college of the state of Florida, but when I went to it, it was private. But it said, "The student's curiosity is the most important thing."

   29. JRJoe Rogan52:22

       Mm.

   30. RDRick Doblin52:22

       And that they weren't gonna put anything in the way of that curiosity. So, there was no distribution requirements. You could just do general studies. Y- if you wanted to major, you had to do a certain number of classes. But you could... You didn't have to major. A lot of schools say you gotta do a language, you gotta do this, you gotta do that. This was, "The student's curiosity is the most important thing, and we will do everything to foster that." There was no grades, all written evaluations. Everybody had to do a senior thesis, a big project. And so, this school, when I started... Now, this was sort of, people say the '60s really continued into the early '70s, and so it was very much like that. But the school had this tradition of, um, all-night dance parties with psychedelics till the sunrise. They didn't put that in the brochure. Um, but they also had this unusual situation where, uh, there was a woman who had actually, a professor who had studied with Carl Jung. And, um, her husband was wealthy. They donated this big Olympic-sized swimming pool to the college, and it had turned into a nudist colony for the students and the faculty. And so here I was, a shy guy, I come to this school with this tradition of psychedelics, with this tradition of sort of bringing sex and drugs into the open from being suppressed, this nudist colony at the pool, and I started doing a lot of psychedelics, but I wasn't prepared. My education up to that point had been so cognitive. I was really emotionally stunted. My bar mitzvah s- didn't turn me into a man. (laughs)
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Mm. …

   1. RDRick Doblin1:00:00

      and I'll build this handball court. I'll, I'll get into the physical world, and that's how I'll get integrated. I was super confused, and my parents were willing to buy 3,000 concrete blocks (laughs) and let me, and support me while I built this building, and the school needed facilities, and they let me have some land to build on it.And, um, it was right next to John Ringling's house and, uh ... which is now, um, a state museum. And Charles Ringling gave the building for the library. And this other people, the Caples, who built the New York Railroad and sold the land to the Ringlings, they gave this mansion to, uh, New College when Mrs. Caples died. And, um, I was asked to be the security guard at this mansion on the beach, um, on the, on the Sarasota Bay while I was building this handball court. And that led to a career of 10 years in construction. And it was during that time that as I got more fluid with the real, with the outer world, I would trip every now and again, and I would get a little bit better at letting out the emotions and seeing what was happening. So I had this 10-year period of, um, not doing psychedelics directly, but occasionally and, and being in the construction business. And that was what it took. It took a whole decade of dropping out of college to get balanced. And then in 1982, I went back to school. And the very first semester, I went to the same school, to New College, and the very first semester, um, I went to Esalen in Big Sur and, and did a month-long workshop with Stan Grof again. And it was on the mystical quest, and that's when I learned about MDMA. And that's what changed things, because I learned about LSD after the backlash. But now I learned about MDMA before the backlash.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:01:40

      Mm.

   3. RDRick Doblin1:01:41

      But it was called Adam as an underground ... uh, it was legal, but it was kept quiet as an underground therapy drug. And it was gentler than the classic psychedelics. It had incredible therapeutic potential. But it had escaped from those circles, and it was being used as ecstasy as well. So it was very clear that it was doomed. This was during Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan and escalation of the drug war, and so that's where I said, "I gotta get political." And I could start introducing MDMA to various people who would take it, like Lester Grinspoon. Um, he and his wife had had a tragedy of a son die of cancer when I think he was about 13 years old.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:02:21

      Mm.

   5. RDRick Doblin1:02:21

      And they, um, they took MDMA together and said that they're ... Lester said that they were able to talk about the loss of their child in ways that they had never been able to talk about with each other before.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:02:34

      Yeah.

   7. RDRick Doblin1:02:34

      And then he later became one of the witnesses when the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, finally moved to criminalize MDMA in '84. A- actually, I'll just say Terence McKenna was a big part of this effort, because Terence had this mistaken idea that if it's from the ... if it's a plant, it's good. If it's from the lab, it's bad. We, we had this meeting at Esalen, and, and he was going on and on about this. And I said, "That's so ridiculous." You know, we need a safety study with MDMA. And it was because Terence going on and on about how plants were good and stuff from the lab is bad that we did the first safety study with MDMA to prepare for this DEA crackdown, which happened later that summer in '84, and, and that sort of led to where I'm at now.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:03:18

      Why do you think Terence had that rigid perspective?

   9. RDRick Doblin1:03:22

      It's a really good question, 'cause you think about psychedelics as supposedly to break down rigidity.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:03:26

       Yeah.

   11. RDRick Doblin1:03:27

       I mean, I think there's some good things to say, which is plants have been used for thousands of years. We have all this historical evidence about it. We know that in, um, the, the Western culture, when we think about the origins of the Western culture, we think about the Greeks, and that's for the origins of democracy. And the longest running mystery ceremony in the history of the world was the Eleusinian Mysteries, and it ran from like 1600 BC to 396 AD, and it involved the plants that were psychedelic.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:03:59

       Yeah, we had Brian Muraresku on the podcast.

   13. RDRick Doblin1:04:01

       Yeah. Yeah.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:04:01

       And his book, The Immortality Key, is amazing, and now they're doing studies because of that book-

   15. RDRick Doblin1:04:06

       Yeah.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:04:06

       ... in Harvard-

   17. RDRick Doblin1:04:08

       Yeah. Yeah.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:04:08

       ... about the Eleusinian Mysteries.

   19. RDRick Doblin1:04:10

       Yeah, at the Harvard Divinity School.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:04:12

       Yeah.

   21. RDRick Doblin1:04:12

       They're really interested in this.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:04:13

       Which is incredible. Incredible. And, you know, he proved in that book, in the research for that book, that there were l- like ergot-like compounds that were in these wine vessels. So for sure, these people were taking some kind of psychedelic mixed in with the wine. And, um, what, what is, what do we know about, uh, about ergot and about, uh, the use of ergot in terms of, uh, its psychedelic properties?

   23. RDRick Doblin1:04:41

       Well, LSD is, um ... it's not exactly an ergot, but ergot is, ergot is the starter material that Albert Hofmann used, ergotamine-

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:04:50

       Mm.

   25. RDRick Doblin1:04:50

       ... in order to modify it to develop LSD.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:04:54

       Oh, okay.

   27. RDRick Doblin1:04:54

       And so we, we talk about different, um, times in, uh, the Middle Ages when whole villages would sort of go crazy, and it, it's from a mold on wheat and barley.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:05:04

       The Salem witch trials. That's ... it came from that. It came from ergot poisoning, right?

   29. RDRick Doblin1:05:08

       It cou- it could have been.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:05:09

       I believe that's what they think happened. They think-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:21:55

   What, what, how do…

   1. RDRick Doblin1:15:00

      experiences, many of them afterwards, that they said helped them consider that the one that they had with the psilocybin was legitimate. It was similar to the non-drug. They, they generally preferred the non-drug mystical experiences.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:15:12

      What, what, how do you define a non-drug mystical experience?

   3. RDRick Doblin1:15:14

      Oh, you're, you're walking in nature or you, you're making love or you just have this, uh, they call it gratuitous grace. This feeling just comes over you like something is, um... It, it's the same as basically as, as this drug experience. And they described how this was, um, not only considered valid, but also it had motivated them to work on the environmental movement, the women's rights movement, the anti-war movement. So for me, I found in some ways the keys to the '60s in this follow-up study, because the sad part is I discovered that Reverend Howard Thurman was this incredible orator, and part of his Good Friday's service was you have to tell people there's a man on the cross. You have to tell people of this story. And one of the students said, "Oh, okay, I, I should do that right now under the influence of psilocybin." And so he, he went... They thought he was gonna go to the bathroom, and he burst out the door and he started running down the road. And i- in his mind he s- had thought, um, "I'll tell the president. If I'm gonna tell anybody, I should tell the president." Then he's like, "Oh, the president is somewhere else, but I'll tell the president of the university." And so Timothy Leary and Huston-Smith went after him to help him not get killed by a car or something, and they, they finally caught up to him to bring him back and he didn't wanna come back inside. And so they gave him a shot of Thorazine to calm him down. That's what they thought at the time is somebody's having a difficult LSD experience, you know, bring them down with Thorazine, which is a major tranquilizer for psychotics. Um, but they never mentioned that. So I discovered during this follow-up study that there was a really important part of the experiment that they had hidden, which was this sort of difficult reaction this person had in his refusal to come in. So what I saw from Leary is that they had, um, underestimated the risks, that they hadn't reported this. I- it, you know, if we do research now under FDA regulations, you have to report adverse events. You can't just brush them under the rug like they didn't really happen. So the core thesis that psychedelics, psilocybin in this case, could produce a mystical experience, that was confirmed. The fact that it had long term benefits, that was confirmed. But Leary and others had, over time, said everybody that had the psilocybin had the mystical experience. That was not true. So they exaggerated the benefits and they had minimized the risks by hiding this story of this person that had the Thorazine.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:17:40

      Now, how many people had the psilocybin experience and didn't have a mystical experience?

   5. RDRick Doblin1:17:45

      Two, and one of them was, um ... some of them, you know, a- again, you, it's, it's not like it's automatic that you take this drug and this kind of experience-

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:17:56

      Right.

   7. RDRick Doblin1:17:56

      ... is what you had. So-

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:17:57

      What, what, w- were there any similarities in their experiences and were they on any kind of medication?

   9. RDRick Doblin1:18:02

      Um, no, they weren't. They, they just, um, it, uh, they didn't let themselves open or it just, it didn't have the same effect for them.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:18:09

       What was the dosage?

   11. RDRick Doblin1:18:10

       The doses was pretty big. It was like, um ... well, it was synthetic psilocybin, so I think it was 25, uh, milligrams, which is a major trip. I'd say it's the equivalent to, like, um, five or six grams of mushrooms. So it was a major experience.And-

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:18:26

       It's crazy that they-

   13. RDRick Doblin1:18:27

       ... it was-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:18:27

       ... didn't have an experience.

   15. RDRick Doblin1:18:29

       Well, they had experiences, but they didn't score on this questionnaire to, uh, be above the threshold. And the, the beautiful thing about what Walter Pahnke did was that this questionnaire about a mystical experience, even though it was with Christian ministry students in Good Friday service, it didn't have a word about Jesus. It... he surveyed the literature of mysticism throughout the world and all these different religions, and he kind of made what is the sort of common themes, you know, a deeply felt positive mood, a sense of sacredness, a transcendence of time and space, a sense of, uh, ineffability that you can't put it into words, a sense of transcendence of time and space, and a, a sense of unity. Those are the elements. And so it's something from... people from every different kind of religion could respond to this. So it took out all the cultural symbols, every reference to Jesus, and it, it was... and that's why it's being used today at Johns Hopkins and all the research that's being done, a lot of it with LSD, with psilocybin, even with MDMA, we use this same questionnaire-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:19:35

       Hmm.

   17. RDRick Doblin1:19:36

       That's only tiny bit modified. And so it was, um, a sense that, um, this experiment really validated for me my theory of change. You know, that, that if we can have... help people, more people have these psychedelic experiences and support them and help them integrate it, it may build compassion, it may reduce prejudice, it, it may help people wanna protect the environment. And, and so that, that's what really motivated me when I was 18 to devote my life to psychedelics, that this potential... this political potential. It was only when I, 10 years later, learned about MDMA and I learned about its effect on trauma that I thought, "Wow, this can also be used to help people move through the pain of their lives and to really see the world more clearly, to see people that they might have been scared of, to see that more of their humanity." And so I think this kind of mystical experience and the therapeutic going together is where I think there's a lot of hope for the future. And what I was able to, um, sort of recognize is that there's value in these things, and that... we talked about the Eleusinian Mysteries, what we're talking about now is mainstreaming psychedelics. And a lot of people have this idea that it's never been done before, but it's actually been done thousands of years ago in the heart of Western culture, and it was wiped out by the Catholic Church because they wanted to be the intermediary between people and spirituality. It was a power play. It wasn't a religious, spiritual... it was a power play by the Church to be this intermediary. And so then throughout the Middle Ages, all of this was suppressed, you know, with the witches, with all of this. And then when the, um, conquistadors and others come to the Western world and they see these traditions of mushrooms that are used in Mexico and peyote that's used by the Native American Church and by the Indians in Mexico, and they came to South America where we have ayahuasca, their main thing was kill these people, kill the leaders, kill the shamans, you know, because they're a source of power for their cultures. And so that was suppressed. And it was only around nine... in the late 1950s when Western people discovered the mushrooms. That's-

Episode duration: 3:15:32