HAD A NICE TRIP. WISH YOU COULD, TOO

SARASOTA - Unlike graying peers who refuse to acknowledge youthful
drug use, Rick Doblin celebrates his. He will tell crowds of strangers
about the dizzy days of tripping on acid and getting arrested for
swimming naked at his alma mater, New College, in the 1970s.

He 'fesses up to dropping out his freshman year in pursuit of truth
through psychedelics. He will tell them that the cedar-and-granite
Sarasota home he built three decades ago -- described by Rolling Stone
magazine as a "Frank Lloyd Wright on acid design" -- was conceived to
enhance the experience. He endorses the aboriginal bonding traditions
of parents sharing psychedelic drugs with their children.

To be sure, at 55, the controversial drug reform activist has
graduated into the sobering realities of middle age. But with the
first wave of baby boomers edging closer to the shadow of America's
average lifespan of 78 years, Doblin is racing the clock to drag a
great taboo out of the closet and into the light of mainstream science.

Working within the system, in a shift that would have been unthinkable
during the Just Say No era 20 years ago, Doblin and the benefactors to
his nonprofit initiative have persuaded the Food and Drug
Administration to revoke its ban on testing psychotropic agents for
medicinal purposes.

Today, no less than four clinical studies involving Ecstasy, or MDMA,
and psilocybin, the mindbending ingredient of "magic mushrooms," are
being monitored by the FDA. Among their potential remedies: helping
war veterans cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and easing
end-of-life anxieties for the terminally ill.

Girded by a doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government, Doblin directs his revolution at home in Boston through
a nonprofit group -- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic
Studies, or MAPS.

Over the past 10 years, MAPS has received nearly $7 million in private
donations from the likes of billionaire and former Progressive
Insurance Corp. chairman Peter Lewis to bankroll psychedelic research.
Beneficiaries include therapists working with trauma disorders in
Israel, Switzerland and the United States. Perhaps MAPS' most
impressive symbolic feat is facilitating Harvard Medical School's
first psychotropic medicinal experiments since LSD guru Timothy Leary
was fired for slipping acid to students in the 1960s.

To critics who charge that his hidden agenda is recreational
legalization, Doblin counters that psychedelics should be regulated
like alcohol.

"You are going to college in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance,"
Doblin told a crowded New College auditorium this spring. "You are
going to college in the midst of a cultural renaissance."

Rite Of Passage

Growing up in a Jewish household in Skokie, Ill., Doblin had a number
of relatives who survived the Holocaust. He was disappointed that his
first rite of passage -- the bar mitzvah -- left him feeling
untransformed. Progressing through school, Doblin felt his life was
out of balance.

"Intellectually, I was overdeveloped, and emotionally, I was
underdeveloped," he says. "For me, individually, I was very much in my
head."

But that all changed during Doblin's immersion into a "spiritual,
existential search" at New College.

He sampled the vogue alternatives of the '70s, from sensory
deprivation tanks to primal scream therapy. But nothing increased his
empathy for people, or his environment, the way psychotropic drugs
did.

Doblin became convinced that "the antidote to Hitler is the study of
the deep psyche" through all available means. But federal funding on
research into psychedelics was shut down in 1971 after President Nixon
declared a "war on drugs." Yet, in the face of those long odds, Ed
Barker knew better than to underestimate the ambitions of one of his
most unusual students.

When Barker arrived at New College in 1978 from Harvard's Department
of Clinical Psychology, Doblin's profile as a crusading party animal
was legendary. But after becoming Doblin's faculty advisor, Barker
recognized something else. He eventually served as board chairman for
MAPS, which Doblin founded in 1986, a year after Ecstasy was outlawed.

"Rick is one of the most motivated students I ever had," Barker says.
"And his life's goal, very clearly, is to get psychedelics approved
for therapeutic medication."

"He has a good feel for dealing with people; he was more militant when
he was younger," he says. "Now he knows how government works, and his
organizational skills are better. And he knows how to make friends
with his opponents."

Doblin's bridges run from street-level counterculture to the halls of
power.

For instance, his emergency-services network for party hounds
staggered by intense hallucinogenic trips is a staple of the annual
Burning Man Festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

He has been called by government committees as an expert witness on
psychedelic therapy, and has loudly defended a Brazilian-American
church's right to employ a psychoactive tea, ayahuasca, as a religious
sacrament. The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the church in a unanimous
vote in 2006.

But it was MAPS' consultations with an FDA advisory panel in 1992 that
paved the way for the psychedelic studies unfolding today with private
funds.

"The idea of going to the FDA and getting psychedelic drugs approved
was never seriously pursued by the drug reform movement," says Dale
Gerringer, director of the California/National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws. "But Rick's been very savvy about this."

Doblin's candor can also put enthusiastic supporters at a
distance.

At the Washington office of NORML, where he serves as executive
director, Alan St. Pierre describes Doblin as "a true visionary" and
"one of the most fascinating people I've ever met." But as a NORML
board member, Doblin is often completely alone in his motions to
"inflate the scope" of an organization dedicated to the legalization
of pot, says St. Pierre.

"I can't take the visions he proposes and walk over to a congressional
office with them," he says. "I will be laid to waste in those places."

Noting that NORML advocates an adults-only policy on marijuana use,
St. Pierre says, "Rick stands alone with his children's access
positions. There's almost no real support for that anywhere."

Doblin, who has children aged 13, 12 and 9, counters with an Alcohol
Beverage Control report indicating that 33 states outside of Florida
allow minors to consume alcohol with the approval of parents or guardians.

"The hysteria about kids and drugs is what drives the drug war today,"
Doblin says. "In the 1960s, it was all about a cultural rebellion, but
today it's all about fear.

"It's amazing to me, the number of people who smoke marijuana and hide
it from their kids because it's illegal. Education is the real key,
it's essential. This should be a decision of the parents, not the
government. Prohibition denies parents the opportunity to have an
honest conversation with their kids about making responsible choices."

Pilot Study

For now, all eyes are on MAPS-sponsored testing of Ecstasy as a
potential cure for post-traumatic stress disorder.

MDMA, a molecule that fuses the introspective properties of mescaline
to the stimulant effects of methamphetamine, was originally
investigated by the U.S. military in the 1950s as a mind-control
weapon. It was outlawed in the 1980s following its role in rave-club
deaths, which often involved a combination of dehydration, alcohol and
other drugs.

Ecstasy was approved for study by the FDA in 2000, but a series of
ultimately unfounded concerns postponed the trials for four years.
Obtaining a license from the Drug Enforcement Agency was also a
cumbersome exercise that cost nearly $1 million.

Today, Dr. Michael Mithoefer, a Charleston, S.C., psychiatrist, is
completing an Ecstasy pilot study involving 21 patients, including
two Iraq war veterans. Doblin says the subjects are responding
"several hundred times better" than with popular antidepressants
Zoloft and Paxil. Mithoefer's early assessments, published in a book
of essays called "Psychedelic Medicine: Social, Clinical, and Legal
Perspectives," appear to bear him out.

Mithoefer noted "decreased fear and anxiety, increased openness, trust
and interpersonal closeness," and "improved therapeutic alliance"
among his patients, along with an ability to revisit past traumas
"with new insight, calm objectivity and compassionate
self-acceptance."

The ramifications could be broad. According to the National Institute
of Mental Health, nearly 8 million Americans suffer from some form of
acute stress. Additionally, a recent RAND study indicates as many as
300,000 veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are coping with
major depression or stress disorders.

Those numbers pale, however, against the tidal wave of 76 million baby
boomers about to crash into their mortal years. MAPS has developed
protocols for that demographic as well.

Terminal patients on rigorous pain-management schedules, Doblin says,
require increased dosages of numbing opiates as they develop higher
tolerance levels.

"These people become very sleepy, they're almost not present, and it
doesn't completely eliminate the pain," he says. "But the combination
of MDMA and opiates brings people back to alertness and then opens up
their access to their emotions, and reduces pain."

Virtually Impossible Hurdles

The FDA has a no-comment policy on ongoing trials, and the National
Institute of Drug Abuse declined to discuss psychedelic medicine.

Former NIDA acting director Glen Hanson acknowledges the "therapeutic
potential" of Ecstasy. "But will it present a clinical value that
significantly exceeds what we already have out there? I don't think
MDMA is unique or that it will produce a magic bullet."

A pharmacologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Hanson
says Ecstasy will have to clear virtually impossible hurdles to make
it to the market. Even if studies continue to produce positive
results, Hanson says it will take a major sales job to persuade
litigation-wary pharmaceutical companies to invest in a product
stigmatized by a history of abuse.

"His pockets aren't deep enough," Hanson says. "Ten million dollars
ain't gonna do it. He'll need hundreds of millions of dollars, even if
he's allowed to keep going."

Doblin disputes those figures, saying reams of pre-existing MDMA data
will shorten the approval process. But even converts to his message,
such as New College students Alexa Anderson and David Banks, have a
fatalistic outlook on the bureaucracy response.

"I think people are ready for a new conversation about the therapeutic
value of psychedelics," says Anderson, 22. "I'm not sure our
government is."

Banks, 21, thinks Doblin's celebrated drug exploits, coupled with his
roots at what is regarded as a "hippie school," may create potentially
insurmountable "cultural baggage."

"To go from here to there, really, requires a politically powerful
medical professional and the mass media to get on top of it and stay
on top of it," Banks says. "I don't think that's going to happen
anytime soon."

But NORML's St. Pierre says the exuberant Doblin has already begun to
move the bar.

"Rick is Pan," St. Pierre says. "He's Pan with the fife. And I've got
to admit, I'm not immune to that at all."