Rick Doblin

Rick Doblin is an American activist who founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in 1986, after MDMA was made illegal, with the explicit long-term goal of turning psychedelics into legal, FDA-approved medicines.

Trained partly in Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork and holding a Harvard doctorate in public policy, Doblin spent decades patiently funding and shepherding clinical trials, most notably the Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

His strategy deliberately routed the psychedelic project through rigorous science and regulatory channels rather than countercultural confrontation. Doblin’s role in the mind-power lineage is the institutional culmination of the psychedelic stream: he took the consciousness-expansion project begun by Huxley, Leary, and Grof and worked to make its therapeutic claims medically and legally legitimate.

By insisting on randomized controlled trials and regulatory approval, he represents the field’s most disciplined turn toward evidence. His advocacy also reflects a broader cultural belief in the healing and transformative power of non-ordinary states—now being tested against clinical standards.

Doblin marks where the mind-power tradition’s altered-states wing meets, and submits to, mainstream science.