Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS

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Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

September 26, 2023

Rick Doblin conceived of MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) as an end run around stubborn drug law. Since the DEA was so intent on keeping drugs illegal, Rick figured he would work WITH them in order to eventually achieve his legalization goal for psychedelics. Although the goal was worthy and Rick brave (if not downright mad, given the Herculean and time-consuming labor involved in such a task), there are downsides to his approach to drug re-legalization , at least one of which has never been mentioned before (see item number 2 in the following list).

1) By working with the government to legalize psychedelic medicine (and conceptually related meds like MDMA ), Rick has contributed to the creation of what Julian Buchanan calls a Drug War apartheid. The good guys, according to the current Drug War apartheid, are caffeine, nicotine, Big Pharma pills, and alcohol. The bad guys, what we deride as "drugs" today, are psychedelics, coca, opium , iboga, ayahuasca. Rick's approach does not seek to change this political and ideological framework, but merely to shove psychedelics from the bad guy to the good guy side of the equation.

This ignores the real problem of the Drug War and prohibition: namely, its anti-scientific (and indeed anti-Christian) propensity to blame evil on inanimate substances (naturally occurring ones at that) rather than on people and the laws and societies that they create. The MAPS organization is therefore, however unintentionally, collaborating with the DEA to take America's eyes off the prize and to continue referring all social problems to the big bad evil American boogieman called "drugs." (And so when the wildly overfunded DEA says "BOO!", Americans leap to attention and ask: "What shall we outlaw NEXT?!")

No schools need to be fixed, no health care reform is needed, despite the overwhelming popular support for all such social goals. No, we need to crack down ever harder on the scapegoat of drugs. Such counsel seems highly convenient coming from a right-wing Congress full of hypocritical skinflints, whose motto seems to be: "Billions for law enforcement, not one cent for social problems." Have Americans never stopped to ask if the goal here might be the militarization of local police forces, not the protection of our white suburban teens whom we have refused to educate about "drugs"?

But there's an additional problem that literally nobody has mentioned but myself (well, credit where credit's due, I suppose, right?).

2) If America is going to launch a sort of Manhattan Project to promote the use of therapeutic psychedelic drugs, the first beneficiary of that project should be the tens of millions of depressed Americans who have become dependent on mind-numbing big pharma meds for life. It is prohibition, after all, that shunted 1 in 4 Stateside women off onto those meds in the first place. Surely they should be the first candidates to benefit from the liberating power of psychedelics. *

To the contrary. The MAPS organization still touts the party line, namely that we pill users should keep "taking our meds," that the psychedelic breakthrough is only for those with no SSRIs in their body chemistry (for fear of a poorly studied and - as far as I can tell - overhyped fear of the so-called Serotonin Toxicity Syndrome). In other words, they will never let poor Rudolphs like myself join in any psychedelic reindeer games. The vast majority of the depressed in America, therefore, have nothing to gain from the MAPS organization, except perhaps the privilege of seeing their own children grow up with options that their parents never had.

Sadly, Dr. Carl Hart believes in this exclusionary setup as well. In "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," he makes it clear to his readers that the depressed should keep taking their meds, that his problem-free use of other drugs is only to be emulated by emotionally healthy individuals. I found this very disappointing, since I have been waiting all my life to be allowed to use the medicines that grow at my feet, and now even a proponent of legalization ¹ is telling me that such medicines are not for me: that materialist science has the answer instead, in the form of pills that I have to take every day of my life, thus turning me into an eternal patient.

But if 40-plus years of pill popping means anything, then these pills do not work.** But they have turned me into a modern Ancient Mariner, who has to hove into HealthCare Port every three months to share his innermost thoughts with a stranger half (or even one-third) his own age. That's not exactly empowerment, Carl and Rick. Besides, do we really believe that 1 in 4 women are so badly depressed that they need to take Big Pharma ² ³ pills every single day of their life? If that is the case, then I would suggest that there is something wrong with America, not with American women.

In an uncharitable mood, one might say that the MAPS program is really designed to let well-to-do ex-hippies use psychedelics legally and even take up a lucrative practice to help others use - meanwhile ignoring the human roadkill that prohibition has left behind by shunting the depressed off onto substances whose long-term use of SSRIs and SNRIs disqualifies them even for psychedelic trials, let alone psychedelic therapy.

3) Finally, there is something wrong with any right-thinking agency collaborating with the DEA. This lends legitimacy to an organization that has lied about psychoactive medicines for 40-plus years now and knowingly poisoned Americans with paraquat and other chemicals, in the same way that past governments poisoned drinkers with liver-destroying "rotgut" during prohibition ⁴. The DEA, as Rick well knows, also went against the advice of its own counsel when it outlawed MDMA ⁵ in 1985, thus throwing hundreds of thousands of PTSD victims, many of them soldiers, under the bus, in order to protect DEA jobs.

Finally, if I want to use the kind of drugs that have inspired entire religions, fight depression, or follow up on the research of William James into altered states, I should not have to live in fear of the DEA crashing down my door and shouting: "GO! GO! GO!"

And until the DEA renounces that mindset entirely, the MAPS collaboration with the DEA will indeed seem to me like collaboration in the sinister sense of that term.

*The more so given that the meds in question have not cured depression as promised, but have led instead to the greatest mass drug dependency in American history. That habituation level is many times greater than the 1 in 10 Americans who smoked opium ⁶ regularly (according to Jim Hogshire) prior to 1914. In other words, the Drug War is not about ending drug use: it's about making sure that Americans are using what the politicians considered to be the RIGHT drugs.

**For more on this topic, see Why SSRIs are Crap.

Note that I do not say that such antidepressants ⁷ are completely useless. They may even keep someone from committing suicide. But then any pill that sufficiently addles or fogs the brain might do that. They purportedly work according to materialist criteria that turned out to be false: they do not fix a chemical imbalance, they cause one instead (Robert Whitaker). Whatever good they do is therefore gratuitous. And they muck around with serotonin in such a way that makes the use of many other substances problematic. This has the look of a puritan conspiracy almost: You give me a drug that will not make me TOO happy but will make it impossible for me to use drugs that TRULY make me happy. These drugs bring with them a lot of materialist and puritanical baggage and capitalist baggage. These are drugs that one has to take every day of their lives, after all -- which is obviously in the interests of big pharma, who handsomely pay off politicians to keep the Drug War status quo. (See Billionaire Democracy by George R. Tyler)

Notes for essay entitled Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS:

1: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
2: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
3: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
4: Prohibition's Death Toll: Alcohol's Deadly Legacy (up)
5: How the Drug War killed Leah Betts DWP (up)
6: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
7: Antidepressants and the War on Drugs DWP (up)

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The term "drugs" is no more objective than the term "scabs." Both are meant to defame the things that they denote.

Drug prohibition is the perfect racist crime. It brought gunfire to inner cities, yet those who seek to end the gunfire pretend that drug prohibition has nothing to do with it.

I knew democracy was in trouble when most Americans in the '80s saw no problem with allowing drug testers to go on a fishing expedition in their bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove.

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death." -Jean Cocteau

Almost every mainstream article about psychology and consciousness is nonsense these days because it ignores the way that drug prohibition has stymied our investigation of such subjects.

Clearly a millennia's worth of positive use of coca by the Peruvian Indians means nothing to the FDA. Proof must show up under a microscope.

The drug war is is a multi-billion-dollar campaign to enforce the attitude of the Francisco Pizarro's of the world when it comes to non-western medicine. It is the apotheosis of the colonialism that most Americans claim to hate.

I, for one, am actually TRYING to recommend drugs like MDMA and psilocybin as substitutes for shock therapy. In fact, I would recommend almost ANY pick-me-up drug as an alternative to knowingly damaging the human brain. That's more than the hateful DEA can say.

My approach to withdrawal: incrementally reduce daily doses over 6 months, or even a year, meanwhile using all the legal entheogens and psychedelics that you can find in a way likely to boost your endurance and "sense of purpose" to make withdrawal successful.

That's another problem with "following the science." Science downplays personal testimony as subjective. But psychoactive experiences are all ABOUT subjectivity. With such drugs, users are not widgets susceptible to the one-size-fits-all pills of reductionism.

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Three Problems With Rick Doblin's MAPS

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