#1661 - Rick Doblin

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Very good to see you, my friend.

Rick Doblin (0:15)

So, it's so great to be here again.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

Your tireless work has not gone unnoticed. I mean, 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 people that no one can deny need help, and like 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?

Rick Doblin (0:59)

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. 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.

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

Joe Rogan (1:47)

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

Rick Doblin (1:51)

Exactly, and prison guards. I mean, they're also very traumatized.

Joe Rogan (1:54)

Oh, yeah, I can imagine.

Rick Doblin (1:56)

Yeah, there was a 35-year follow-up study I did to Timothy Leary when he was at Harvard. He did the Concord 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.

Joe Rogan (2:37)

Oh, no.

Rick Doblin (2:37)

Yeah, it was really disappointing.

Joe Rogan (2:40)

What did he do?

Rick Doblin (2:41)

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 10 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 10 month time point, and the results were the same at the time point. So it's obvious if you compare people who have been out of prison longer with people who have 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.

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.