The Man who’s been fighting for medicinal psychedelics for 45 years
The clinical trial that saved Rachel Hope’s life was the result of a half-century of work by Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS. Since he was 18, Doblin has hoped to open a psychedelic clinic, and estimates it’ll still take about another decade before he gets there. “Maybe by the time I’m 70 I’ll be able to start my career,” he jokes.
“My LSD trips were very difficult,” he says. He was experimenting not just for fun, but with focused intent to do the deep internal work to make himself a “sharper instrument” for the kind of change he wanted to see in the world. He manufactured sensory-deprivation settings for his trips, like lying in a dark room with gloves on, or floating in a bathtub, to try to get further into his subconscious mind. “The LSD brought a sense of the power of emotions, but it was a challenge, because I wasn’t good with emotions; I was insecure and shy,” he says. He tripped several times, but always reached a point where he couldn’t delve any deeper, where a part of him was holding back. He says this made him feel like a failure. During one trip he started to believe these mental blocks were causing his brain to overheat and melt. (He thought the post-nasal drip he experienced was bits of melted brain.) Eventually, he went to the school counselor for guidance navigating his trips – because that’s the kind of place the New College of Florida was – and the counselor presented him with an unpublished manuscript copy of Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof, still one of the seminal texts on LSD research.
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The Man who’s been fighting for medicinal psychedelics for 45 years
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