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Letter from Rick Doblin, MAPS PresidentSummer 1999 MAPS has come full circle. MAPS' hardworking and adventuresome staffpersons, Sylvia Thyssen and Carla Higdon, recently relocated MAPS to the imaginatively constructed Sarasota, Florida home where, in 1986, I founded MAPS. In 1975, at age 21, I designed and supervised the building of the cedar, granite, and stained glass home after becoming a licensed contractor. I had moved to Sarasota four years earlier to attend New College, an experimental school, but had dropped out after one semester in order to give myself time to integrate my rather overwhelming psychedelic experiences. Getting involved in construction was my attempt to ground psychedelic insights in physical reality, using the building of a home as a symbolic means to create a semblance of order in my internal world. I named the home Arcturus, having been inspired by David Lindsay's Voyage To Arcturus, a spiritual adventure/science fiction novel written in the 1920s. This May, during the annual MAPS Board of Directors meeting, my wife, our three small children and I stayed in the guest bedroom. I marveled watching our children climb to the third-story sundeck, take a bath in the jacuzzi bathtub, and gaze at the treehouse high in an oak tree. Most touching was teaching them to operate the marble roller game built onto the front of a toy closet, with a marble elevator operated by string, pulleys and a counterweight. Arcturus was built as a family house, but I never expected to see my own children there. Watching the marbles roll down the track, launched by my children, made it easier for me to see the circular nature of life.
A full circle of more relevance to MAPS' mission is that MAPS is more comprehensively focusing its energies on catalyzing MDMA psychotherapy research than at any time since its inception. This goal remains elusive, though it seems tantalizingly close as MAPS hosts an August 30 - September 1, 1999 conference in Israel on the clinical use of MDMA. The conference will spotlight MAPS-supported efforts to conduct MDMA psychotherapy research in the United States, Israel and Spain. With your continued support, a new, more formalized cycle of MDMA psychotherapy research may begin soon, and extend previous accomplishments into new territory. - Rick Doblin, MAPS President
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Speaking of circles, here is a photo of my third child, Eliora,
with a Cheerio on her nose. This continues and completes a family series, since
previous editions of the Bulletin have included baby pictures of her brother and
sister with Cheerios on their noses. The first picture of Eden failed to note
that the circle was a Cheerio, which in the inner-focused nature of new
parenthood I had foolishly assumed everyone would figure out. We discovered that
some readers thought it was a birth defect, due perhaps to the thoroughly
discredited yet subliminally scary LSD chromosome damage theory. The picture of
Lilah with Cheerio was included in a later Bulletin in a playful manner, with the
suggestion that perhaps the Cheerio phenomenon was indeed genetic. I've included
the picture of Eliora with Cheerio since my wife pointed out that Eliora would
feel slighted if one day she did a computer search of the MAPS Bulletins and
found that only she had been omitted in this fashion. There will be no more
pictures of new children with Cheerios, since we have concluded that having more
children would provide evidence for the "MDMA brain damage theory."
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