Published: 23 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
WHEN RICK DOBLIN was in his early twenties, he had a dream in which he was escorted back in time to witness a Holocaust survivor’s narrow escape from the Nazis.
In his mind, Doblin travelled to Eastern Europe to witness thousands of Jews lined up alongside a mass grave as the gunners open fire, toppling the bodies into the earth. The man spends three days alive underground before emerging and fleeing to the woods, where he survives the war in hiding.
The man then tells Doblin that he survived this horror only to deliver a message that Doblin should devote his life to promoting psychedelics as a cure for human ills and an insurance policy against another Holocaust. Then he expires.
Doblin took the advice to heart. For much of the next four decades, he waged an often frustrating battle to get public health authorities to recognize the value of psychedelics, the perception-shifting compounds popularised in the 1960s that have been a source of both fear and fascination ever since.
FULL STORY Meet Rick Doblin, the Jewish psychedelics advocate working to turn a club drug into legal medicine (JTA)
Photo: Rick Doblin (Ben Harris/illustration by Grace Yagel)
