MAPS, Massachusetts & deep meditation

This week's round-up of psychedelic and ecstatic experience stories

The house that Rick built - Arcturus in Florida

Welcome to another Tuesday brunch round-up of stories about psychedelic and other forms of ecstatic experience from around the web. This weekly round-up is just for paid subscribers but the first part is free.

The big psychedelic story of the week was Anna Silman’s deep dive into MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science, in Business Insider. Silman is a great journalist - she was one of the first to warn about fall-out from the ketamine boom - and this is a typically thorough piece based on interviews with over 50 MAPS employees or former employees.

Silman recounted how MAPS grew from a sort of hippy commune in the 1980s and 1990s, with staffers living together in a house called Arcturus, built by Doblin in Florida (you can see him do a tour of it here). (NB Doblin tells me he has never lived with staffers, and that two staffers moved into Arcturus after he and his wife had moved out).

Then in the 2000s MAPS took a step up, with Doblin courting wealthy donors like David Bronner, Elizabeth Koch and Joe Green to get the millions of dollars necessary for an FDA application. Sometimes, according to various accounts, Doblin would give donors MDMA (Doblin admits this in the Business Insider piece). I heard a year ago, from a senior MAPS source, it was his strategy to call donors the day after MAPS’ psychedelic parties to ask them to donate, while they were in the afterglow state. We wrote about this issue a year ago in this piece exploring the ethics of psychedelic fund-raising, and if / when psychedelic organisations should ask potential donors for money after psychedelic experiences.

Doblin tells me:

I am not the person this “senior MAPS source” makes me out to be.  I know to wait to speak to people about donations well after any non-ordinary state of consciousness.  Furthermore, I have never heard in any way, or been told by donors that they felt being taken advantage of by being asked to make a donation at any time.

Another former MAPS employee told Silman that Zendo Project, MAPS’ flagship ‘harm reduction’ project, was mainly intended as a way to give donors ‘transformational experiences’ at Burning Man.

Doblin tells me:

The purpose behind MAPS trying to do psychedelic harm reduction at Burning Man and Boom Festival and elsewhere was political, to demonstrate that in environments with lots of psychedelic users,  harm reduction methods could reduce negative outcomes and build support for moving to a post-prohibition world.  The fundraising came after. The first psychedelic harm reduction that MAPS organized was in 2001 at a US festival called Hookahville. The second was at Boom Festival in 2002. MAPS started helping at Burning Man with psychedelic harm reduction in 2003.  Zendo was not a plan  “to give donors ‘transformational experiences’ at Burning Man”.  No donors have been administered psychedelics in the Zendo space.

Doblin argues that ‘everyone deserves healing’, so why shouldn’t potential donors be given MDMA? And one could also say: ‘don’t big charities invite people to gala dinners, ply them with booze, and then get them to write cheques while they’re drunk?’ Maybe so (and in fact charities have discussed the ethics of this) but I’ve never heard of a biotech get funding by giving investors free samples of its drugs which they then take themselves!

Silman’s article also suggests that MAPS tried to minimize or inadequately reported adverse events in its MDMA trials (something also claimed by two trial participants in the Power Trip podcast in 2022). Doblin tells me: ‘There was no attempt by me or MAPS or Lykos to minimize adverse events.’

This meta-study did find some lack of final reporting on adverse events in MAPS studies, but that’s not uncommon in psychedelic trials or in clinical trials more generally.

In a way, that’s what Big Pharma does - it’s quite common for pharmaceutical companies to dismiss adverse events and say they had nothing to do with the drug. Roche denied Valium was addictive, just as Purdue denied Oxycontin was addictive. It took SSRI manufacturers decades to admit their product might cause withdrawal symptoms. In the psychedelic space, Johnson and Johnson exaggerated the benefits of Spravato while failing to report 40% of adverse events, according to this study. Compass claimed that one person who became more suicidal during its psilocybin trial was a ‘non-responder’. Braxia didn’t properly report on extended difficulties experienced by participants in its psilocybin trial. So if its true that MAPS sometimes minimized adverse events, and tried to suggest they were not connected to the drug-therapy, it’s not no surprising.

It is, however, controversial, as we’re at a sensitive moment where the FDA is considering whether to approve MAPS’ application for MDMA therapy or not. As NPR reports, the FDA has called a public hearing on June 4 to consider testimonies from various sides. Nese Devenot of Harvard is leading the critical voices. She writes about why she is doing that here - and at the bottom of that piece there’s a link for others if they want to give testimony to the FDA. I admire Nese for her courage, and I also have friends who worked on the MAPS trials who are proud of their work, scrupulous in their reporting of adverse events, and worried that their years of hard work will be derailed by a few vocal critics. My take is that it’s still overwhelmingly likely that the FDA approves MDMA therapy in August, because of pressure from the Veteran Affairs agency and veteran politicians (read this) for new treatments for PTSD. But I think a public hearing is not a bad idea either - no one wants to cause unintentional harm.

After the paywall, what’s happening in Massachusetts to the psychedelic legalization bill, and the Boston Psychedelic Research Group?