The Burning Man Cure

For many, the festival is about getting naked and getting high. For psychedelic legislation activist Rick Doblin, it’s the most important workweek of the year.

- Sarah Mcbride And Kristen V. Brown

One evening last August, Rick Doblin pedaled a borrowed bicycle across the baked earth playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, site of the annual Burning Man festival. Doblin, who’s 65 and has graying, slightly wild, curly hair, was dressed sensibly for the occasion in khaki cargo shorts and green eyeshadow. Ignoring swerving cyclists, stoned pedestrians, and tinny electronic dance music, he rode past a giant wheeled schooner with revelers splayed across its decks. Doblin was on a mission: to track down Sergey Brin and talk about drugs.

This wasn’t quite as quixotic as it might sound. Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), is the world’s leading advocate for the medical use of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA). He first got attention for his activism in the 1980s when he unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to stop it from criminalizing MDMA, and since then he’s helped move the cause closer to the mainstream. Last year a widely cited study that MAPS funded showed doses of MDMA alleviated posttraumatic stress symptoms in a small group of first responders and veterans. Doblin’s pioneering work was also recognized in Michael Pollan’s recent best-seller, How to Change Your Mind.

Doblin is acquainted with Brin, the co-founder of Alphabet Inc. Like so many rich Silicon Valley types, Brin is a regular at Burning Man, the weeklong bacchanal in the Nevada desert that will begin again in late August. Several months before the 2018 Burn, Doblin had cornered Brin at a gathering at Fly Ranch, a nearby property the festival’s organizers own, and talked up the pharmaceutical potential of mushrooms and ketamine. Now, at the festival itself, he had an ideal opportunity to follow up, and he invited two Bloomberg Businessweek reporters along for the ride.