The Psychedelic Renaissance: Mission with MAPS
Dr. Rick Doblin: Metabolizing Fear into Appreciation
1 min read · 23.7.2025
What is Dr. Rick Doblin’s Mission with MAPS, The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies?
Dr. Rick Doblin shares, “I would say it’s metabolizing fear into appreciation.
“By that, I mean the mission is to avoid another Holocaust and to avoid another Cuban Missile Crisis, the destruction of the world through nuclear weapons, and to avoid what I experienced when I was a young man facing the lottery for Vietnam: the dehumanization of the other, a lot of what we see today, the rise of fundamentalism.
“The mission is to balance out the… not over-exaggerated, but we are way more advanced as human species intellectually than we are emotionally and spiritually, and therefore, we’re destroying the world, and we have the weaponry to destroy humanity, and also, we’re destroying the environment.
“So what we need to do is accelerate our emotional and spiritual development to cope with the products of our intellect, and that’s what I recognized when I was an 18-year-old boy in 1971 and ’72, that I was way more developed intellectually and way underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually, and I felt that psychedelics could play a major role in helping me to grow.
“And when I looked out at the world, I thought that it could play a major role in helping in many, many different ways, and the fact that they were suppressed was a clue to me of their value, ironically.
“So at age 18, in 1972, I decided to focus my life on psychedelics and trying to bring them back as therapeutic tools, spiritual tools, and also I looked upon the war on drugs as a massive, massive violation of human rights, as a tool to suppress minorities, and as one of the worst policies with the most destructive consequences that we as a species have adopted.”
Reference:
Dr. Rick Doblin. The Psychedelic Renaissance. Insights at the Edge. Sounds True.
