- Do you remember the day the DEA made MDMA illegal?
- Yeah, it was a tremendous sadness because it was clear
to us that there was an enormous potential
that was being squandered and that we had no idea how long
it would take for us to bring it back.
- Right.
- I did I out of necessity, so I became an entrepreneur
more out of necessity than out of intention.
- [Male] We've got another drug.
It is synthetic, and it makes you love everybody.
- MDMA.
- It was extraordinarily psychedelic.
- The potential for abuse is enormous.
- [Male] Possession of ecstasy now carries
the same penalties as heroin.
- You can dance all night. - Under emergency controls,
it's schedule one. - And at the very least,
deserves further research.
- [Narrator] MDMA is best known as ecstasy or molly,
an illegal club drug that produces waves
of pleasure and empathy, but for the past several decades,
one brazen entrepreneur has been fighting to legalize
the drug for therapeutic use.
- How long have you actually been looking to legalize MDMA?
- 36 years.
- The big question that I have is why?
Did this feel like a calling, a purpose, to go that long?
- It was definitely a calling, and I didn't know how long
it would take but I knew that it didn't matter,
that this was the most important idea that I had,
the most important contribution I could make
to the world was to bring back psychedelics.
- [Narrator] At the time, Rick was learning
to be a psychedelic therapist and experimenting
with the healing power of MDMA.
- That's my Ph.D.
- [Narrator] But when the drug was criminalized,
he founded the nonprofit pharmaceutical company, MAPS,
and began raising money to fund clinical trials.
- This is how the FDA was structured at the time.
- [Narrator] He's been trying to prove that MDMA
is an effective treatment for PTSD.
He believes in his cause so deeply
that he's staked his whole life on it.
- For the first seven years of MAPS,
I was the only employee, and for almost all that,
I never earned any money, and then near the seventh year,
I started getting 10 thousand dollars a year.
- What are some of the other sacrifices you've had
to make along the journey?
- Reputationally.
People think if you're working on psychedelics,
somehow you're a bit off balanced.
There's that prejudice against it.
They compared me to Pablo Escobar, it was pretty hilarious.
Yeah, we've been vilified, demonized,
by all sorts of people.
- [Narrator] In order to get a sense of just how effective
Rick's MDMA treatment was, I met with one of the patients
from his phase two clinical trials.
- I actually bought that rifle within the past year.
Prior to that, I didn't own weapons for eight years.
'cause I kept trying to put them in my mouth,
I got rid of them all.
- [Narrator] John Lubecky was stationed in Iraq
as an army sergeant for 12 months.
He returned home in 2006 with severe PTSD.
- When I realized that I absolutely needed help
was on Christmas Eve of 2006.
My wife had left while I was gone,
didn't want to sit in an empty house on Christmas,
so I went and I sat at the war memorial in Raleigh,
North Carolina on the capitol grounds for about an hour
trying to come up with a really fun and inventive way
to kill myself.
I realized I had been through briefings,
and they said if you start feeling this way,
go to a hospital, so I drove to Womack Army Medical Center
at Fort Bragg, and I said I was gonna kill myself.
They give six xanax, told me not to take 'em all
at the same time because it might kill me.
They asked if I had guns at home, and I said yes, a lot,
and they asked if I had ammo, I said yeah, plenty.
And they said okay when you get home, give all your guns
to a neighbor, this is 4:00 in the morning.
And they said come back after the holidays.
So I went home and I drank a fifth of vodka,
loaded a Beretta nine millimeter, put it to my temple,
and I pulled the trigger.
And the most peace I had felt
was that microsecond as the hammer fell.
But it didn't go off.
It went bang, just the bullet got stuck in the barrel,
squib bullet.
- [Narrator] John lived with PTSD for eight years.
Finally, in 2013, he got wind
of Rick's phase two MDMA trials.
He applied and was accepted.
- They put me through it, the treatment,
and I still have some issues with fireworks, explosions,
loud noises, things like that, but it reduced my PTSD
by 50%, depression by 60%. - Wow.
- Suicide ideation completely vanished.
- Wow. - And I know you met
Mitheofers yesterday. - Oh yeah.
- They're the ones that did the treatment with me,
and I owe them and Rick Doblin my life.
- [Narrator] Though Rick Doblin is the entrepreneur,
psychiatrists Michael Mitheofer and his wife, Ann, a nurse,
have run all of Doblin's clinical trials.
- This is where we store the MDMA.
Some of our pills are red, so we get a lot of jokes about
the red pill or the blue pill.
- Together they've administered the drug to hundreds
of patients and measured their results.
While I was down in Charleston, I got to meet with them
as they were gearing up for the third and final phase
of clinical trials.
Can you explain to me how MDMA actually works in the brain?
- MDMA causes a lot of different effects in the brain.
A good analogy would be is if you've been tobogganing down
a hill, then after a few runs, you have a rut,
and you can't turn, and that's kind of the state
people with PTSD are in, and this MDMA effect
on the neural networks is new fallen snow.
- Wow.
- That moment that I got blown up.
- [Narrator] This is footage from the phase two trials
of a marine undergoing the MDMA treatment.
- So you know you can see the MDMA's helping him face it
without so much anxiety, but he's very clear,
in fact he can remember, he says he's remembering it
even more clearly. - Right.
- And then I tried thinking about that aspect of me
that's just really grateful and I had this image
in a jail cell.
- What a great dude. - Yeah.
All within a couple hours of taking one dose of MDMA.
He told us and his wife told us in person too
the rage attacks stopped the day after that,
and they haven't come back years later.
- [Narrator] If MDMA is legalized,
it would not be a take home medication.
It would be administered under the supervision
of professionals, like Michael and Ann.
- [Male] So when do you expect to get that FDA approval?
- Rick says 2021, I say 2021 or 2022.
- That's constantly changing.
- How will it feel when that day comes for you?
- That'll be an amazing feeling.
- Did you ever think of quitting or did any moment
did you just feel like giving up, 'cause you know
as entrepreneurs, there's always those moments.
- Well I never had a moment of quitting,
but I felt like this was about survival,
my survival, humanity's survival.
The way that I kept going is I had to change my satisfaction
from outcome to struggle so that as long
as I was trying hard and doing my best,
I could be happy at the end of the day,
whether it worked or not, and if I was focused
on the outcome, like I had to succeed at this or that,
against all this massive opposition,
I would have been discouraged, burnt out,
and would have given it up decades ago.
- [Narrator] If Doblin and his team win out,
his 33 year old company will finally be able
to generate revenue, and thanks to an FDA inventive
called data exclusivity, the earning potential
is quite high.
- We're basically gonna have six years of being
the monopoly seller of MDMA.
There's 10 million people in the U.S. that have PTSD.
We're talking about an incredible need for the product.
There's many, many other uses of MDMA other than PTSD,
so we could be worth a billion dollars or who knows what,
but we're not gonna, we don't value it in that way.
- [Narrator] Rick told me that all the profits
his company makes will go back into further research,
and surprisingly, he himself plans on stepping down.
- My reward will not be in money, I'll become
a psychedelic therapist, and so I'll probably leave
for the next generation of leadership to maps to others,
and I'll be, my reward will be able to be a legal
psychedelic therapist, which is what I've wanted to do
since I was 18 with a little tiny clinic
on the beach somewhere and work with people who want to grow
but I will have made this whole,
helped make this whole thing legal.
So there's not big payoff for me at the end in that way.
The payoff is the satisfaction of dying peacefully
and thinking wow, I helped make the world a better place.
(light music)