Welcome to issue #23 of The Ethical Trip!

Huge thanks to everyone supporting this work. Whether it’s feedback, sharing, or contributing a few dollars a month via buy me a coffee cactus, it all makes a big difference to me and I’m deeply grateful.

Except for all the times it was.

This is weeks-old news, and not many people seem to care, but if there was ever a time to nail shut the coffin of MAPS caring about non-clinical access to psychedelics, it’s now.

Why? Look at their subject line of on of their emails last month:

The message then goes on to talk about…, more or less totally ignoring one clear interpretation: that ‘legality,’ as in the end of prohibition, was never an important aim.

Funny thing is, though, is that this is exactly what Rick Doblin and other key MAPS figures have spent decades saying.

What happened to MAPS as the ‘trojan horse’ of the psychedelic renaissance?

Or that psychedelics would be freely available to adults by 2035 (so long as they could show they could use them responsibly to gain their licence.’)

I’m totally willing to own that I was naïve about all of this when I was younger. But I can’t be the only person who felt that Rick, in particular, cultivated support from underground communities by at least implying that one real reason for pursuing medicalisation was to achieve broader legalisation. (I recall him basically saying this many years ago, but haven’t tracked down the exact video.)

If we read this as ‘legality’ equals broader, more than just clinical & medically supervised use, then saying it was never the point is serious revision of MAPS history. That, or just a tacit admission that the whole ‘medicalisation will lead to legalisation line’ was nothing more than a good way to gain street cred and get hippies & libertarians to donate their time and money to the organisation.

Perhaps I’m drawing too long a bow in how I read that subject line. This isn’t the only way to read it, though.

Another interpretation is that MAPS is downplaying the implications of their failure to get MDMA therapy through FDA approval. That even though that aspect of medical legality hasn’t happened yet, MAPS is still committed to healing and is, therefore, still relevant enough to deserve your support.

This is perhaps an even more outrageous revision of MAPS history. What has the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on clinical trials and lobbying been for, if not to enable MDMA therapy to be legally available? Why fight groups like Psymposia so hard during the FDA process if therapeutic approval ‘was never the point’?

Without either FDA approval or broader legal reform, ‘healing’ remains accessible only to those with the wealth, community connections, and risk tolerance to navigate underground, overseas, or grey-market access to psychedelics. This was exactly the situation that MAPS said it sought to change.

Psychedelic healing at scale (because that’s the least insane interpretation of ‘net-zero trauma’) needs affordable medical access or safe & equitable non-clinical access (or, more likely, both) to even have a chance of happening. There is no third option that a legal above-ground organisation can pursue, because these are the only two avenues that broadly stay within the law.

I was going to say I can’t think of a version of ‘healing’ that makes sense under prohibition and without medical approval. But then I realised these support widespread availability. If you jettison that, you can still technically have healing, just only for government-approved groups such as veterans or those aforementioned individuals able to go overseas or outside the law.

It’s a bit less impressive though. If healing no longer implies scale and equity, what are we left with?

Legality was never the point. Healing, which most of you will never be allowed to access, was.

You will excuse me if I’m underwhelmed.

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