Just when I thought Cold War diplomacy couldn’t get weirder, Rick Doblin enters stage left with a proposal straight out of a psychedelic utopia: dose Soviet officials with MDMA to ease nuclear paranoia. Not theoretically. Literally.

Apparently, nothing screams trust-building like slipping empathy enhancers into international diplomacy. It’s hard to tell whether Doblin fancied himself a shamanic envoy or just the guy who brings Ecstasy to a hostage negotiation. The plan drips with coercive undertones—so well-intentioned it circles back to deeply unethical, veering disturbingly close to chemically induced Kabuki theater. Doblin’s vision drips with the same troubling logic as date rape dressed in idealism—earnest enough to overlook consent, poetic enough to almost distract from it. It’s international manipulation in dreamcatcher drag.

This wasn’t diplomacy. It was emotional manipulation in kaleidoscope packaging. The idealism is almost charming—if you squint past the implied consent violation and the geopolitical implications of chemically induced vulnerability. It’s one thing to promote understanding; it’s another to engineer it with serotonin and soft lighting.

The dreamcatcher aesthetic couldn’t quite mask the dose of delusion: believing MDMA could dissolve decades of doctrine like it was a trauma bond at Burning Man.

Psychedelics: The newest tool in nuclear negotiations?

The plan was simple: Give the psychedelic drug MDMA (popularly known as 5Ecstasy) to Soviet scientists and military personnel set to negotiate with US President Ronald Reagan in 1985, thereby injecting empathy and cross-cultural understanding into the nuclear peace process.

So, that’s just what Rick Doblin and Carol Rosin say they did—and they still believe introducing psychedelics into nuclear negotiations can produce positive results.

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In 1986, the year after Doblin provided Rosin with 1,000 doses of MDMA for her trip to Moscow, he founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)—a nonprofit that has since become a powerhouse behind pioneering studies on the use of psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD, alcoholism, and mental health issues.

But Doblin credits Rosin as the architect of the plan. Rosin, now 77, worked as a corporate manager for Fairchild Industries, an aerospace manufacturing company. In 1983, Rosin founded the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, which advocates for a comprehensive space weapons treaty.

In 1985, she was working as a consultant on space and missile defense issues in Washington D.C. but was also meeting with like-minded people at the Esalen Institute, the California-based nonprofit and coastal retreat that has been a countercultural hub for bringing together academics, scientists, policymakers, and advocates for the use of psychedelics. That’s where she met Doblin. 

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Through her work in the defense and aerospace industry, Rosin had both the international connections and—through her friendship with controversial LSD advocate Timothy Leary—the drive to bring psychedelics to world leaders.

MDMA, scientifically known as methylenedioxymethamphetamine and more popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, is a “drug famous for its ability to break down barriers between people and kindle empathy,” wrote Pollan in How to Change Your Mind.

A few days before the drug became illegal in the US in 1985, Rosin says, she took a suitcase full of MDMA to a friend’s apartment in Moscow. In walked mutual friends with empty medicine bottles, which she proceeded to fill with tablets of Ecstasy.

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But Rosin delivered the MDMA personally, she says, subverting officials and sharing the drug with her friends, which included scientists and defense figures.

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The ultimate objectives, Doblin says, are mass mental health and cooperation among nations.

He says: “The overall goal is to have a more spiritualized humanity that can, instead of fighting each other, address our common challenges, such as climate change and the rise of authoritarianism.”