Psychedelic Outlaws by Joanna Kempner

Author:Joanna Kempner [KEMPNER, JOANNA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Doblin still remembers the first email exchange he had with Bob Wold back in 2003, shortly after Wold started to take Weil’s emailed offer seriously. “Wold was like we’re doing psychedelic research, and we don’t want to be criminals. Can you help us try to study this?”

Doblin had set up MAPS to do exactly what Wold was requesting—to organize clinical research on the health benefits of psychedelics. In addition to sharing this goal, Doblin also liked the fact that funding already existed. He hit reply.

“I’m glad to hear of the progress you have made in obtaining funding for research. MAPS would definitely be interested in being involved. MAPS could help you organize the research and could advise on how best to work with FDA.”30 MAPS offered consultants who could help connect an organization like Clusterbusters with academic researchers, assist with developing protocols for clinical trials, offer advice about handling the university’s regulatory affairs, and provide expertise in handling the FDA and the DEA; it could also offer a much broader platform for communication about the study. They’d have a lot to discuss. “This is a complicated issue. Please call me to talk this over.”31

That was Wednesday, November 12, 2003. They spent that Friday afternoon on the phone discussing, at length, how their two organizations might collaborate. Wold posted a detailed description of the conversation to the Clusterbusters message board just two days later.32

Doblin began by asking questions aimed at learning more about Bob Wold and the organization he represented.

Were they a legitimate nonprofit? “Not just yet, but in process.”

Was cluster headache rare enough to qualify for “orphan drug status,” which the US federal government offered to diseases affecting fewer than two hundred thousand people in the country? If it was, that could mean millions in federal funding. “Possibly. It’s pretty unusual.”

Doblin also had questions that seemed more specific to his interests. For example, as a man who’d always prioritized issues related to consciousness, he wanted to know if the psychedelic experience mattered in treatment. Wold explained people didn’t need that big of a dose to treat themselves, but he speculated that the psychedelic effect of a larger dose might help with the trauma associated with cluster headache. It had certainly helped him.

Doblin also floated the idea of testing LSD, instead of, or in addition to, psilocybin in the clinical trial, which struck Wold as an odd choice, motivated more by Doblin’s personal predilections than practicality. In principle, Wold agreed that LSD might be a better treatment than psilocybin based on reports from the few people in their survey who had tried it. But people were already frightened to try magic mushrooms. It would be even harder to convince people to take a drug as stigmatized as LSD. Plus, how would anyone source LSD? (Wold, I think, always envisioned academic research as a helpful resource for people to treat themselves.) Still, Wold said he’d consider the possibility.

Doblin later told me that he’d liked the idea of working with Clusterbusters from the get-go.

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