Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a nonprofit membership organization founded by Rick Doblin in 1986 to support scientific research into the therapeutic applications of psychedelics and increase public understanding of them. Based in Santa Cruz, California, it became a central institution in the revival of psychedelic research, concentrating especially on MDMA as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and bringing researchers, clinicians, underground guides, and the psychedelic-interested public into shared forums.

Identity and Mission

MAPS began with an ambitious aim: to return psychedelics to scientific and cultural respectability. Its work addresses both sides of that project. It supports clinical research into therapeutic applications while also sponsoring public gatherings that make the research visible to a broader community. The organization’s role in the revival therefore extends beyond funding or advocacy alone: it has helped create connections between scientific inquiry and the people and practices that persisted outside formal institutions.

The organization’s work has focused particularly on MDMA, also known as Ecstasy, as an intervention for people with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2016, MAPS won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct Phase 3 trials of MDMA for PTSD. In 2017, the agency designated MDMA a breakthrough therapy, clearing the way for expedited review. These regulatory steps marked important progress toward clinical acceptance, although they did not themselves establish that the treatment had been approved for general prescription.

Research and the Return to Clinical Legitimacy

MAPS’s research agenda grew within a broader change in the standing of psychedelic science. The book contrasts the organization’s progress with the recent past, when psychedelic gatherings brought together a comparatively small number of psychonauts and researchers regarded as renegade. By 2016, Doblin could see the prospect of renewed institutional recognition drawing close: Phase 3 trials for MDMA had been approved, while psilocybin research also appeared to be advancing. The latter remained a prospect, not an equivalent regulatory milestone.

The organization’s therapeutic focus also placed it within a changing debate over what psychedelics are for: experimental drugs, treatments, or experiences with wider spiritual and personal significance. MAPS’s institutional route toward legitimacy has been through public education and clinical research, with MDMA-assisted treatment for PTSD as its principal focus. Its work thus connects the formal language of trials and regulation to a larger effort to make psychedelic research publicly intelligible and culturally discussable again.

Conferences and Research Networks

MAPS organizes Psychedelic Science, an international conference held in Northern California every few years. The 2010 Bay Area conference offered an early measure of the community gathering around the renewed field. More than a thousand people came to a San Jose Holiday Inn: scientists presented research, guides from university trials and underground practice attended, and psychonauts gathered for spiritual, therapeutic, or recreational reasons. James Fadiman, speaking about guided entheogenic journeys, invited any underground guides in the audience to meet the following morning. About a hundred came. MAPS did not thereby turn this dispersed group into a formal organization, but the conference made an encounter between established research and underground practitioners possible.

That cross-current mattered beyond the meeting itself. Some underground therapists were later recruited to help train guides for university trials, and the Johns Hopkins team consulted underground guides when studying musical practice in guided psilocybin sessions. The conference functioned as a meeting ground where knowledge and professional relationships could move between communities that otherwise tended to remain distinct. MAPS’s role in organizing the gathering gave this wider network a recurring public setting, without erasing the differences between clinical research and underground work.

Growth and Significance

By April 2017, MAPS’s conference had expanded into a six-day event at the Oakland Convention Center, drawing more than three thousand people from around the world. Researchers from twenty-five countries presented findings, while attendees also encountered a large marketplace of psychedelic books, artwork, and music. The scale and range of the gathering offered a striking contrast with the smaller 2010 meeting: psychedelic science now occupied a visible international forum, alongside the broader culture that had formed around psychedelic use.

The organization’s significance lies in this combination of clinical ambition and institution-building. MAPS helped support a pathway toward regulated research on MDMA therapy, while its conferences brought together scientists, guides, and the psychedelically curious. By 2017, Doblin described the movement not as a counterculture but as part of the culture. The change in scale did not mean that every therapeutic promise had been settled; it showed how far the effort to restore public and scientific standing had traveled.