This is the Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it,

and I hope you do too. And if you can write a review of this show, rate us at Apple or wherever

you listen. Send me comments at reason. You know, my email is gillespie at reason.com. We have, you know, various

places you can drop comments, but the feedback is helpful. So today's episode stems from a little

adventure I had in June when I traveled to Denver with my reason colleague Zach Wise-Miller

to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, which was organized by

the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or Maps. That's a group that's

been working to gain approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and related ailments since the

late 1980s. Zach and I produced a 30-minute documentary about what is rightly being called a psychedelic

renaissance or a new flourishing of substances and subcultures that mostly went underground at the

end of the 1960s.

You know, this is why you hear about people like Aaron Rogers, you know, the football player, the quarterback,

talking about using ayahuasca and things like that. People are microdosing all over the place.

Psychedelics are just busting out in a way that they really haven't been for basically 50 years.

Our documentary tells the history of psychedelics and how today's proponents of better living through chemistry are doing things in a radically different way than Timothy Leary and others did back in the 1960s.

And that's not a knock really on Timothy Leary, who's a character who's very interesting and important, who did a lot of bad things and a lot of good things.

But, you know, it's kind of uncontroversial to note that he helped create a backlash to drugs and to psychedelics and to social change that were still, in many ways, digging a way out of.

I wanted to share my full conversation that I had in Denver

with MAPS founder Rick Doblin. He's the man or the, you know, really the mench behind the moment

for psychedelics. Reason has been writing about him in MAPS since the late 1980s, and his goal of

getting FDA approval for MDMA assisted therapy is really

in the near horizon now. He predicts in the interview that it'll finally happen within a year.

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