Rick Doblin on Treating PTSD with MDMA Therapy

I think one of the problems from the 60s was this idea of one dose miracle cure, that's all you need. And I think what we've come to understand is that it's not that way. Occasionally it can be, but mostly it's not, and you need this support afterwards, and you need to integrate it. And what we've also learned from neuroscience is that you're actually, neuroplasticity, that these psychedelics help you rewire your brain in new ways, but you have to reinforce that. It's just not automatic. It's not about the drug, it's about the therapy that the drug helps make more effective. And people have placed undue confidence, you could say, in the drug itself. You need a new pathway. Once you've gotten off of your old pathway, the psychedelics jolt you into this new realm. But if you don't have a new pathway, then you panic and people fall back into their comfort zone. And if your comfort zone is alcohol abuse and doing the same things you've done before and ruining your life and taking pills, and you're going to go right back to that. Yeah, there's one example of one person where it was like a one dose miracle cure. It's really rare, but I'll just explain a bit. He was a veteran and had PTSD. I talked about Tony Macy during my TED Talk, but he had this sense that he had been disabled with PTSD for years because of friends of his that had been killed, all the violence that he saw when he was in Iraq. And under the influence of MDMA, he had this realization that there was something good about the PTSD. He was getting a benefit from it, which was it was the way that he showed loyalty to his friends who had died, that he was connected to their memory and that he was suffering and it was a way to be bonded still with them. But then he was able to kind of see himself from the eyes of his friends who had died and to realize that they wouldn't want him to squander his life. They didn't have life anymore. They would want him to live as fully as possible. And he realized there's another way to honor his friends, which is to live. And he thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? And in that moment, he cured himself with PTSD. Then he said, I'm taking opiates for pain, but I don't really think I'm taking it for pain. I'm thinking more about it as an escape. I don't need the opiates anymore. And then he said, I don't need this MDMA anymore either. I'm done. I want to drop out of the study. This was his first of what was going to be three MDMA sessions. And he dropped out and we said, sure, it's all voluntary. But if you will just do the outcome measures, that would help us. And he agreed to do that. And at the two month follow up, no PTSD. And then around 11 months when we have the 12 month follow up, he started thinking, well, maybe I'd like another MDMA experience. And I said, well, we can't quite do that. You're out of the protocol. You've dropped out. But at least it's only for PTSD, this study. Let's see what your scores are at the 12 months and no PTSD. And that was about nine, 10 years ago. I've been in touch with him recently. He's doing great. But it was this realization that he was able to make under the influence of one experience of MDMA that enabled him to reinterpret the way he could be loyal to his friends who had died. That's amazing. And it makes sense. It completely makes sense that that would be one of the reasons why a soldier would have PTSD. As you talk to soldiers that experience combat duty, one of the things they say is that there's this insane, profound connection with their fellow soldiers. And when one of them is killed and they survive, they have this survivor syndrome, this survivor's guilt. And it haunts them. And if they could honor the fallen soldiers by living their best life and not being in constant trauma, it'd be better for everybody. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.