Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin
Uploaded: 2025-05-09T17:01:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-05-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2319 - Rick Doblin

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Quick job, what a turn of events.
This is absolutely incredible, Joe, absolutely.
A series of unexpected things have led to this day.
So, you were supposed to do Duncan's podcast, and then Duncan and I got on the
phone,
and he was saying, you know, trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event.
And then Duncan said, you know, hey man, you can have him on your show.
And I said, well, why don't you come on too? It'll be really fun.
Then this morning, Duncan has a root canal, like an unexpected emergency root
canal.
So, it was just a crazy turn of events, and fortunately, you're here.
Yeah, I just came in from Ukraine, actually.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Ooh, what are we doing over there?
Training therapists and psychiatrists.
Wow.
So, Ukraine has enormous amounts of trauma, and so what I'm trying to do is to
go to high trauma areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how
that could be helpful.
What is the legality of it over there?
Well, right now it's illegal.
They have these terrible laws left over from when Russia was in control, and
you cannot even do research with Schedule I drugs.
Wow.
Not with psilocybin, not with MDMA, you can't even do research.
But over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their
military, by other people, to change that because they're aware that they have
so much enormous trauma.
So, a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation
to change the law.
And so, the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from
throughout Ukraine.
We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous
area.
But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens.
But then they look at their phone, and they see the area that the air raid sirens
are supposedly about, and they could be like 100 miles square, something like
that.
So, nobody seemed to care.
Nobody moved to shelters, and we just ignored these air raid sirens and heard
nothing.
But it's just – it was so emotionally moving because we went to the cemetery
in Lviv, and they have these in cities all over Ukraine.
And they have something that I've never seen before, is that they have just
enormous numbers of graves, terrible.
They've lost about 250,000 people.
But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the
person that's dead, the person that's buried there.
And I've never seen that anywhere else.
It has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just
thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures.
Most of them are younger and, you know, tragically interrupted their lives, a
fair number of women.
And so – and they put them in the center of the cities.
They're having to build new grave sites all over.
And this was next to a really large old historic cemetery.
Yeah, and so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where
people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand some of these new
technologies, meaning psychedelic therapies.
Hardly new.
Well, new to them.
Right.
So they've been very much a conservative society.
They don't have legal marijuana.
They don't have marijuana.
How dare you.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So it was very moving to be there for their – just the fact that we were
there, that people felt that we were willing to come to the country and be
there with them,
even though it's in this more safe part of the country.
And so the thought that we would – the next steps would all be philanthropy.
So I should say that I'm here representing myself.
I'm not talking on behalf of MAPS and I'm not talking on behalf of Lycos, the
pharmaceutical company that MAPS helped start a while ago.
So I'm just talking for myself personally.
But what we're trying to do is really respond to where the trauma is.
And next week I'm going to Beirut, which is something I never thought I would
be going to.
But I've been invited to speak at the American University of Beirut and also a
YPO sort of business group.
And there's the possibility of potentially at least starting research with MDMA
therapy in Lebanon as well.
Do you ever get frustrated at the lack of progress with legalization?
Because it seems like so much headway has been made on the therapeutic front.
Like so many people have anecdotal stories of like a lot of soldiers with Ibogaine
in particular, MDMA in particular,
that these people have had incredible experiences, turned their life around.
It just – I'm so baffled by the snail's pace of acceptance of these things.
Well, I first tried MDMA in 1982.
So we're talking about 43 years ago.
And as soon as I experienced it, I thought this has incredible therapeutic
potential.
It should – it was legal at the time.
And –
When did it become illegal?
1985.
And so it had been – MDMA had been a – it had been legal, but it was sort
of quietly used in therapy circles from the – around 1976 to the early 80s.
And then it started leaking out of these therapy circles and started being used
as a party drug ecstasy.
Wasn't a lot of that in Dallas?
Yes.
A lot of it was at the Stark Club in Dallas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is really where MDMA became ecstasy.
Renzo from the Psychedelic Salon.
I learned all about that from him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's – a fellow named Michael Caine is working on a movie about the Stark
Club.
Oh, wow.
There's an incredible story because Larry Hagman, who is the star of Dallas,
frequented this nightclub with a bunch of the people from the cast.
And they had – the police had decided to bust it because they knew that there
was all these experiences.
They busted J.R. Ewing?
No.
No.
They had to – they were all prepared to bust the Stark Club that night and
unexpectedly, J.R. Ewing and Larry Hagman showed up and they canceled the bus
because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him and they busted it
another time.
He was on CNN once and he was talking about how he's not afraid of death
because he had an incredible LSD experience.
Yeah.
Did you ever see that?
I did, yeah.
And the reason –
They were like, what?
Well, he did LSD therapy in the 60s.
The reason that I even knew that is my mother-in-law read his autobiography and
he talks about doing LSD therapy in the 60s.
And so my mother-in-law said, you might want to try to contact this guy because
maybe he's got overlapping interests and he'll half out.
And it took me a couple of years to get to him, but eventually I did.
I'll tell you one funny story is that I got to know him pretty well and I would
stay over at his house a bunch of times in Santa Monica.
But he was also in I Dream of Jeannie.
Oh, yeah.
So I Dream of Jeannie is about this genie that comes out of this bottle.
He's an astronaut.
And a friend of his had made a bong out of the genie bottle.
They wanted to market it and Larry said, no way.
So there was only two versions of this genie bong.
And I had one of my more humorous moments was smoking pot with Larry Hagman on
the genie bong.
That's hilarious.
It's so funny when a guy plays this straight-laced, greedy kind of psycho on a
television show, a soap opera show, and then in real life he's a stoner.
Oh, he's incredible.
Isn't that interesting, though?
It's like, because you would never guess that from the J.R. Ewing character.
Oh, right.
No, he was very much pro-psychedelic and had multiple experiences during the 60s.
And the CNN interview was wild, though, because I remember watching it going,
oh, you guys weren't ready for this.
That's what he said that.
They were like, what?
You're saying acid's good?
It's like literally the opposite of the Bill Hicks joke.
You know, the Bill Hicks joke, like you never hear like a good drug story.
Yeah.
It's always young man on acid, thinks he can fly, like dies.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, but that was the one time.
A positive drug story from like a beloved star of a beloved show.
Yeah, it was the most popular TV show in the world at some points.
Yeah.
But about your question about frustration.
Yes, the answer is yes.
But it's important not to be overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration, is just to
continue plodding along.
We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th.
I had 1986 is when I started MAPS.
And when I started MAPS, I didn't really know that it would ever succeed, that
we would ever make MDMA into medicine.
It was the height of Nancy Reagan and just saying no and the escalation of the
drug war.
And I realized that it was worth doing, working towards bringing psychedelics
forward, whether it worked or not.
And that's what really gave me the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the
frustration, by how many obstacles there's been.
Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing.
We need this access to these experiences.
And it's been tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides, for
example, that are happening every year.
And if the Drug Enforcement Administration, when they made MDMA illegal in 1985,
they did that on an emergency basis.
We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an
administrative law judge lawsuit.
And we were challenging this arguments for making it into a Schedule I drug.
And we actually won the case.
Wow.
The judge said it should be Schedule III, which means it should be available as
a medicine.
But it should be illegal otherwise for recreational use.
But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're
working in.
They don't compel.
You have to get out of that into the civil courts.
So the judge said Schedule III.
And the Drug Enforcement Administration said, no way, we're not going to do
that.
And their rationale was so wrong.
So we sued them in the appeals court.
What they said initially was that only the FDA could make a drug into a
medicine, not the DEA.
But the law was clear that it could be the attorney general could do that.
So the appeals court, when they review agencies' decisions, they don't tell
them what to do.
They say, you did something wrong.
Now rethink it.
So then the DEA said, OK, we're going to rethink it.
And then they came up with a new reason why they were against it.
And this was this eight-part standard that was essentially the same as the FDA.
So then we sued them again the second time.
And we won again in the appeals courts.
And so they went back to the DEA and said, you have to come up with another
rationale.
This one doesn't work either.
Oh, my God.
And then they came up with a five-part standard that was sufficiently different
but still had
phase three studies.
So it's essentially the same as FDA approval.
And finally, the courts upheld that.
And that's during this process.
It was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as
a medicine,
that we would have to go through the FDA.
And that's where MAPS began as a non-profit psychedelic pharmaceutical company
focused entirely
on donations.
And the intention was to turn it into a generic drug because MDMA had been
invented by Merck
in 1912.
It was in the public domain.
It was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it.
And then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was
itself illegal.
It turned out that the Congress had given the Attorney General the power to
emergency scheduled
drugs.
But the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA.
So they didn't have the authority to do that.
So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their
lawyers figured
this out.
So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say.
Wow.
But we're stuck.
And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many people's
lives would
have been saved?
How many people would have been able to benefit from psychedelics?
That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic
Science
2025 conference, the 