Mysterious Bitcoin Millionaire Donates $1M to Psychedelic Research/Legalization

An unidentified person recently donated tens of millions of dollars to several charities, including $1 million to the psychedelic research and legalization non-profit MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). Apparently someone without the usual stinginess of wealthy people became a bitcoin millionaire.

According to Forbes:

“Someone made a ton of money investing in Bitcoin and has decided to become a philanthropic Santa Claus this holiday season, unexpectedly dropping tens of millions of dollars to a number of charities. Among those recipients is a new rising star in the charity world, MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which is spearheading a movement to legalize psychedelics for therapeutic use.

It took a long time to for MAPS to shed the stereotypes of psychedelics as an obscure, hippy medical treatment. Traditional public funding agencies weren’t helpful, so the group needed early backers to fund the research.”

MAPS is a non-profit research organization leading an effort to legalize psychedelics, and it may have played a role in the floodgates opening to cannabis legalization, which really started in California at the beginning of this decade with a little bit of influence from MAPS (based in Northern California).

California may also be the first state to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms in 2018.

No matter how much research you do, not much negative can be found about MAPS. It’s founder, Rick Doblin founded the organization in 1986 with the goal of making MDMA an FDA-approved medicine. He used to run a small construction company, and has no suspicious connections to uncover from what I can tell, unlike 99.9% of people in charge of non-profit institutions.

Psilocybin mushrooms are known to treat cluster headaches, PTSD, the fear of death, and they can even grow new brain cells.

Mycotopia

LSD does similar things, and can even unlock regions of the brain that are rarely if ever active, as shown by these brain scans.

The king of psychedelics DMT, or Ayahuasca in its ceremonial brew form, is in a whole other category of transformative experience. To describe a few experiences with DMT, we published this a few months ago.

Psilocybin (the active chemical in mushrooms, which breaks down into Psilocin) and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) are both tryptamines: very closely related to chemicals naturally produced in the brain, and DMT is also produced in the mammalian brain.

Of course, the power and intensity of psychedelics must be understood and fully respected by anyone willing to try them. For anyone experienced with psychedelics, one thing is common sense: people should have a natural right to consume them.

However, navigating the maze of legal bull*hit necessary to pose a formidable opposition to their illegality is a hard task, fit for an institution like MAPS.

Featured image: Jaruwan Jaiyangyuen/Shutterstock.