Rick Doblin, Ph.D.: MDMA— the creation, scheduling, toxicity, therapeutic use, and changing public opinion of what is possibly the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I wanna thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. My guest this week is Dr. Rick Doblin. Rick is the founder and the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS. Now, if you listen to the podcast that I did with Tim Ferriss, that name may sound familiar. We spoke quite a bit about Rick, well, more so about MAPS and really the work that they've been doing to legalize specifically MDMA, but other molecules as well, for medical use. Rick is, he's a force of nature and there's just no other way I can describe this interview, how much I learned about a guy that I already sort of knew in terms of his background, his passion, what motivated him. He's really a unique individual and at the very end of the interview, I even sort of comment to that effect that there's just not that many people that can really bend the arc of history the way I believe Rick is doing that. We spent about the first hour and 20 minutes or so putting some background together, both Rick's background, where his drive for this came from, and also the background of how these molecules, and we talk mostly about LSD as an example, but how these molecules were synthesized, basically made broadly available and utilized quite liberally, and then ultimately how they were scheduled with the drug act of the early 70s. At that point in the podcast, we then turn our attention specifically to MDMA, because what I really wanted to focus on here was MDMA for several reasons. One, as I think I stated in the podcast, whether right or wrong, my personal opinion is MDMA is the single most important synthetic molecule ever created by our species. Also, it's the closest one to being de-scheduled, meaning taken from being an illegal drug that is a schedule one, to something that will have a medical application, and you'll see through this discussion how long it has taken to do that and what the implications of that are. And of course, more importantly, you'll probably appreciate why we would think that that's an important thing to do. So when it comes to MDMA, we talk about a lot. We talk about how it was created back in 1912, how it was rediscovered and re-synthesized, where it's used, where it found its use, and how the parallel use of ecstasy as the party version of this drug, in some ways kind of, well not in some ways, I mean in many ways, really hurt the clinical application of MDMA, which was really where it started. How it was of course scheduled and made illegal in 1985, which is relatively late compared to all of the other psychedelics and you can see that through this discussion that MDMA is sort of not your typical psychedelic. And then how a year later Rick created maps and did everything from going off to the Harvard Kennedy School to get a PhD to help him understand the regulatory morass he was gonna have to navigate his way through and right to where we are today, which is truly being on the cusp of legalizing this incredibly powerful molecule that is going to help, in my opinion, literally millions of people. So I'll just give you one example of something that we dive into pretty deep that I think people are gonna find very interesting, which is the toxicity of MDMA. So there are lots of rumors about the toxicity of this drug and of course every drug has toxicity. So point here isn't that it doesn't have it, but the point is what is the toxicity and is it really what we were led to believe with everything from depression, Parkinsonian syndromes, neuronal destruction versus what's actually happening. So a very nuanced discussion on that. And I think we end with a message of hope, which is one, there are gonna be many people I think who listen to this who are going to wonder what can they do to receive this therapy? And we're gonna talk about what those clinical trials look like, what the enrollment looks like, and perhaps more importantly, what a compassionate use license would look like such that if there are patients who are in need of this therapy prior to its approval, what are the legal paths to do that? I have to state something very important that I feel strongly about, of course.