Commanding the stage in an all-white suit and looking like a Graham Greene character or a televangelist, Rick Doblin, an unlikely guru months shy of his 70th birthday, welcomed a roaring crowd to “the psychedelic twenties”.
Doblin is the founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), which sponsored last summer’s Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, Colorado, where more than 12,000 people gathered for the event.
Since first experimenting with LSD as a college student in Sarasota, Florida, Doblin has been convinced that psychedelics are an antidote to the world’s greatest threat: the capacity for evil, greed and plunder that lies in the heart of man. He created Maps in 1986 as a way to advance “mass mental health” and “spiritualized humanity”.
